I know, he's always been one of those conservative old men writing for teenage boys. That's been true since the 80s. But his themes on a number of subjects got just enough more progressive as time went on, and I was able to stomach his writing. I always pegged him as a centerist who moved VERY GRADUALLY leftward over the decades and mostly wasn't interested in making political points in his books. Though he clearly had regressive opinions about women in the military for a long time, especially when that was a big part of the cultural zeitgeist in the 90s, those even eased in recent decades.
On the subject of abortion, he wrote an impressively nuanced short story back in the 90s about abortion and telepathy. Specifically, about a telepathic scientist caught between pro life and pro choice political blocks trying to use telepathy in an objective way to answer the question of how human fetuses were at different stages of development. While the results initially seemed to favor the pro life crowd, at the end it's revealed that the story is more about the observer effect and that rather than reading the minds of unborn children, he was reading his own mind reflected back to him by developing brains unable to process the telepathic contact.
So I was surprised by just how moralistic and aggressively pro life Judgement at Proteus (the latest installment of the Quadrail series) was.
A major plot point in the book is that a teenage girl, pregnant through SA, turns out to have a
warning! spoiler!
gene modded fetus implanted in her by would be alien conquerors who arranged her assault as part of a program to make human beings susceptible to their mind control abilities.
At multiple points in the story, the health of the fetus comes up and multiple characters go out of their way to say things like "all sentient life is sacred." The main characters express agreement with this sentiment, even while bringing up that on some parts of Earth, it would be legal to abort the fetus. The aliens running the hospital space habitat they're on shut that down quite aggressively.
The girl herself, who is shitty and antisocial to everyone to the point that she loses believably as a character, is shown to want her rape baby to live (at least until the truth about it's conception is revealed) in a way that makes her even MORE unbelievable as a real person (I've done a lot of professional work in my life with teenagers and I just don't buy it).
But then when she DOES change her mind about wanting to keep the baby she risks her life
warning! spoiler!
trying to abort by getting drunk to the point of life threatening alcohol poisoning.
This is the most believable part of the story (and where I threw the book down due to the toxic bullshit) because:
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A teen girl nearly kills herself doing something dangerous because she doesn't think (with good reason) that the adults around her will support her in getting an abortion? 100% believable.
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The main character initially thinks she's trying to kill herself and calls it "murder." When he figured out what she was actually trying to do, he puts it that "she wasn't the intended victim."
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A female character, shown to be in a supportive role toward the girl, expresses she can't understand why. The male character mansplains to her "put yourself in her shoes, you might feel the same way!" And she passionately rejects that she would not. Yeah, a woman thinks about being a teen girl, pregnant through assault, discovering she's carrying an alien cuckoo baby, "doesn't understand why the girl would want to kill her child??" In fact, she needs a man to explain this to her? Bullshit! Also, r/menwritingwomen. Pro tip: Would have been MUCH more believable if you'd written the same dialog the other way around.
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The male character then councils the woman that their job is to "be the girl's friend and help her understand how it's the fault of the people who did it to her and not the fault of her unborn child."
And that's the point where I threw the book down. And realized I'm probably done with yet another author teen me loved who adult me just sees more clearly.
But I worry for the teen boys who ARE still totally reading this author (and other military adventure scifi by conservative old men sneaking their political agenda into it). Given his association with Star Wars, he's STILL a pretty big draw for the teen boy demographic and his latest books are clearly still aimed straight at them, where these ideas can go percolate with all the toxic shit they absorb from the Man-o-Sphere on Tik Tok and Youtube.
Damn! Just had to get all that off my chest.
How do reavers clean their harpoons?