I got a good laugh out of the Queen Bee; it was so over the top. It was quite obviously yet another result of John W. Campbell's provocative question about "are there instances when sacrifing a girl is for the greater good?", which also produced "The Cold Equations" and Robert Silverberg's "Eve and the Twenty-Three Adams". But it's a much weaker story than Cold Equations since the premise is just too silly.

Anyway I got an even better laugh about the reactions to the story - "oh no, a fictional character is mean to a female, that must mean the writer and editor hates women". How overly sensitive can one get? Women have been slapped around for most of humanity's history, and are still treated as second class citizens many places, so why shouldn't fiction reflect that? Is diversity about a character's skin colour or sex only, or should it also be about their _character_?

Knut Jørgen