CAUTION: PLOT COULD BE SPOILED

Feminist critics have pointed to this story to explain that the constraints you put on a fictional future are determined by the way you think about the world you live in. If you think females are stupid and expendable, then your future is likely to contain dumb, expendable females. If you think females are smart and valuable, then you build things into the future world to make that clear, as Don Saker's did in his reply to this story "Cold Solutions."

Still, when you get outside the fictional realm there are natural limits imposed on our behavior, and there are times when no amount of smarts is going to be able to find a way around those constraints. While this isn't the perfect story to illustrate that point, it's one of the earliest. Under the misogyny is a real lesson that humans need to remember. ( )