Born of Czech immigrants, Malina split his childhood between a small Texas town called Brenham, and the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. As adults, they attended sci-fi literary societies in Los Angeles. From a young age, Parsons and his buddy Ed Forman were deeply interested in speculative fiction.

But what also bound them together was a love for science fiction. In our last episode, we talked a lot about Frank Malina and Jack Parsons, two key members of the Suicide Squad, and in certain ways, polar opposites, despite their common interest in rocketry. 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. She had enough academic degrees, Heinlein wrote, for six men, and the 'M. One story, 'Let There Be Light,' had a character named M. In Heinlein's stories, however, women were smart and educated. A lot of early science fiction, like early aerospace, was extremely male-oriented and sexist. Heinlein was also one of the first to write three dimensional female characters. Heinlein was a science fiction writer, one of the greats, and one of the first to aim for scientific accuracy in his work. This was the summer I discovered Robert A. To be honest, I can still spend whole days reading. In those days, I could spend all day reading. When I was about nine years old, my family went on summer vacation.

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