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Hi, this is Larry Mantle. Our 23rd Annual Film Week Academy Awards preview is back on Saturday, February 22nd at the

Alex Theater in Glendale. Get your tickets now, LAIS.com slash events.

LAA.A.O.A.R.A.R.A.R.A. When I was about nine years old, my family went on summer vacation.

It was 1965 or six.

In those days, I could spend all day reading. To be honest, I can still spend whole days reading. But this was special. This was the summer I discovered Robert A. Heinlein.

Heinlein was a science fiction writer, one of the grades, and one of the first to aim for scientific accuracy

in his work. Heinlein was also one of the first to write three-dimensional female characters.

A lot of early science fiction, like early aerospace, was extremely male-oriented and sexist.

In Heinlein stories, however, women were smart and educated.

They were sexy. One story, Let There Be Light, had a character named M. L. Martin.

She had enough academic degrees, Heinlein wrote, for six men.

And the ML in her name stood for Mary Lou.

Well, by the end of that summer, when I went back to school, I ditched Mary Grace, the

name my parents had given me, and became M.G.

And I've been M.G. ever since. In our last episode, we talked a lot about

Frank Molina and Jack Parsons, two key members of the suicide squad, and in certain ways, polar opposites,

despite their common interest in rocketry. But what also bound them together

was a love for science fiction. From a young age, Parsons and his buddy Ed Foreman were deeply

interested in speculative fiction. As adults, they attended sci-fi literary societies in Los Angeles.

...