A space-mission with a few women would have been a good premise for a story (see the cover-story for that first issue of 'Universe' I mentioned in a post a while back) but akin to something like a woman accompanying Shackleton to the Pole. The humans are there as a backdrop for the Mesklinites and have to be as schematic as they are to fit the word-count. If it had been the point of the book, a space-mission with fewer than 40% female crew would have been a different story and, concomitantly, much longer if added to the voyage to Mesklin. and (spoiler alert) given that the aliens are just amorphous blobs that live inside the body of a human host, it wouldn't be that expensive to make. I think 'Needle' would be an interesting book to make a film from. There are female characters in “Iceworld”, and also in “Needle”, but those are set on Earth (with the aliens visiting us), where a complete absence of female characters would be a bit glaring. Show More writing, "group of scientists" largely meant "group of male scientists".
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