Mistaken notions of origins
I got too little sleep again last night, decided to work at home today, did a little bit here and there, went out and got a haircut, came home and realized that I was too exhausted and headachey and generally out of it to get anything done, took a long nap. Feeling some better, but not enough to drive up to see Foucault WHO? in SF tonight, sadly. Oh, well, I've got plenty to do here, and I'll try and get to bed relatively early. Gotta rest up for the big weekend to come.
But that's not what I'm here to tell you about. I was poking around on the Web looking for information about Alexei Panshin's Anthony Villiers books, and came across Panshin's Web site. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find a wealth of other information, including a long essay on the genesis of Panshin's best-known novel, Rite of Passage. (Actually, the first half of the essay is mostly about Panshin's exposure to Heinlein and complicated reactions to him; Panshin doesn't talk much about Rite 'til halfway through.)
And it turns out that I've been telling the story of that genesis wrong for years.
I always thought (and have said on numerous occasions) that Rite was an explicit reaction to Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars—a sort of "that's not a plausible teenage heroine; this is a plausible teenage heroine" kind of commentary. It turns out that Rite was indeed a reaction to Heinlein, but not to Podkayne; in fact, Panshin wrote the original story that Rite was based on in 1961, a couple years before Podkayne was published, and he was dismayed to learn that Heinlein had written a first-person girl-protagonist story, especially when Podkayne was moved to the top of the publishing schedule at Fred Pohl's If and was published (in serial form) just before Panshin's story (written earlier, but obviously not by as big a name, since Panshin was just out of college) appeared in the same magazine.
The novel version of Rite of Passage was completed not long afterward, but took quite a while to find a publisher, which is why I always thought it was written four years after Podkayne.
Moral: research is hard!
No, wait, that can't be right. How about this:
Moral: don't believe everything you read in bibliographies.
Or:
Moral: don't repeat stories 'til you've verified that they're true.
Oh, I give up. Why does everything need to have a moral, anyway?