The secret history of science fiction's women writers: The Future is Female!

Eminent science fiction scholar Lisa Yaszek (Georgia Tech Professor of Science Fiction in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication) has edited 'The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin,' a forthcoming anthology of science fiction (and scientifiction!) by woman writers from the 1920s published last month by Library of America.

In a wide-ranging interview about the book, Yaszek discusses the historical research she did on the influence women writers had on the field and the ways that their contributions were viewed, and her discovery that the received narrative (women were viewed with suspicion and wrote under androgynous or masculine pen-names to avoid stigma) is at best incomplete and often dead wrong.

Instead, women who wrote under pen-names did so for a variety of reasons -- often because they were prolific and wanted to avoid 'saturating the market' by publishing too much under one name; because their employers would frown on employing a writer; or, in the case of Alice 'James Tiptree, Jr' Sheldon, because she was an ex-CIA agent and budding psychologist who didn't want to be associated with pulp literature.

Moreover, editors and fans were at great pains to correct readers who mistook women writers for men, and while there was discrimination, it was complicated: John W Campbell publicly said women couldn't write good sf until Judith Merrill sold him her classic 'Only a Mother' and then Campbell started to seek out and demand 'domestic sf' from women writers (and rejected subsequent Merrill stories because they weren't about traditionally feminine subjects!).

The period Yaszek describes was long before my time, but of course many of these woman pioneers of the field survived and I was lucky enough to know several of them. My first-ever science fiction convention panel (after I sold my first story at 17!) was with Phyllis Gottleib (who later became a good friend); I was mentored by Judith Merrill, who read and critiqued my stories from the age of about 14 on in her capacity as writer-in-residence at the Toronto library she founded, the Spaced Out Library (now the Merrill Collection); I was taught by Kate Willhelm at the Clarion Workshop in 1992 (Kate also became a friend and mentor) and the late, great Kit Reed was a longtime friend and inspiration.

Despite these close associations, I learned plenty from Yaszek's interview, and I've just ordered a copy of her book.