The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

by Lisa Yaszek

  Not surprisingly, women revised science fictional representations of male-female relations as well. “Readers are tired of the yarn based on the super-hero and the ravishing babe,” Leigh Brackett warned would-be SF writers in 1944. For her, stereotypical Pulp Era romance narratives, full of stalwart space jocks with their requisite ray-guns saving hysterical damsels in distress from monstrous aliens, were simply “old stuff.” Fortunately, Brackett and many other contributors to this anthology felt that “you can get away with practically anything [in SF] as long as it’s well and subtly done.”13 Well before their explicitly feminist successors (or in a few cases their explicitly feminist future selves), many of the women included here were rethinking the gender roles that their male counterparts and the broader culture usually took as given—sometimes to an extent that might have been difficult to express without the imaginative freedom or allegorical cover of SF.

  Instead of wish-fulfilling fantasies of masculine heroism, Doris Pitkin Buck, Kate Wilhelm, and James Tiptree, Jr., offer stories in which male protagonists not only fail to save the women they love but turn out themselves to be responsible for the scientific and social situations that have endangered these women in the first place. Katherine MacLean, Andre Norton, and others cast women as experts who embrace alternate modes of science emphasizing intuition and empathy with the natural world. C. L. Moore, Leslie Perri, and Joanna Russ transform the damsels of SF cliché into “sheroes” who engage in quests and fight for truth and justice with almost superhuman strength, but who reject the stoicism, rugged individualism, and separation from nature that define the classic male hero. Still other stories by Judith Merril, Rosel George Brown, and Alice Eleanor Jones introduce readers to an entirely new character type: the housewife heroine whose relative happiness or unhappiness in the future becomes a barometer for evaluating the relative merits of our technocultural arrangements in the present. (Jones’s “Created He Them”—published in 1955, two years before the debut of Leave It to Beaver—is a striking example of the latter class. Darkly dystopian and profoundly antipatriarchal, it sounds a housewife’s note of protest against the expectations and conformities of the baby boom years. Jones is one of those authors, and there are others in this collection, who almost no one has heard of but whom many will find worth reading.)

  Traversing interstellar voids, piloting vast spaceships, and exploring exotic planets as nimbly as male SF writers, the women of early SF also built more intimate, down-to-earth worlds for speculation and reflection. The revelations of Wilmar H. Shiras’s mutant-child story “In Hiding”—an influential text for the X-Men comics—unfold in an ordinary, present-day office and suburban home, spaces that seem as exciting in Shiras’s hands as any high-tech lab. Judith Merril’s midcentury classic “That Only a Mother” tackles the consequences of nuclear proliferation without special effects, in modest, near-future interiors. Zenna Henderson’s “Ararat” transforms a typical rural schoolhouse and its surroundings into a scene of alien and paranormal encounter. (A first-grade teacher for all of her adult life, Henderson saw Kim Darby and William Shatner portray her characters in The People, made for TV in 1972.)

  Motherhood, community survival, and the future of human reproduction are significant concerns in these and other stories featured here, both early and late. The ways in which science and technology might be used to literally reconstruct sex, overturning readers’ assumptions about “natural” gendered behavior and enabling radical new modes of living, are a third prominent theme throughout women’s speculative fiction. Anticipated on occasion in stories of the Pulp Era and Golden Age, it is particularly evident in the New Wave stories of Sonya Dorman, Marion Zimmer Bradley and John Jay Wells (Juanita Coulson), and Ursula K. Le Guin, all of whom extrapolate from current scientific and technological developments to imagine worlds in which sex, gender, sexual orientation, and individual humanity have been profoundly altered. How will cohorts of clones address each other? How will military men feel about their pregnancies? Shape-shifting and protoplasmic, will we look back with nostalgia on bodies, or on love? From provocative thought-experiments such as these, the overtly feminist SF of the 1970s began to take form. It is one thing to map the limits of traditional gender roles and the damage they do to women and men alike, as many authors in this volume do implicitly. It is another to envision and articulate new arrangements that might have some positive bearing on the present—as several New Wave authors, including Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ in The Female Man (1975), went on to do over the course of their subsequent careers.

  And this is why we need to remember the women of early SF: they are the missing link between the pioneering experiments of Mary Shelley and the finely honed, radiant results we see increasingly in the work of women writing today. Even more consciously than their famous foremother, the twenty-six women included here were dedicated to creating a new kind of fiction that could communicate individual hopes and fears about life in a technoscientific world across centuries, continents, and cultures. In doing so, they identified some of the most pressing issues facing women—and indeed, all people—at the beginning and middle of the twentieth century, laying the groundwork for the contemporary women authors we continue to celebrate, and for the writers of tomorrow. So we learn that women who dream about new and better futures for all did not come from outer space, 20,000 leagues under the sea, or even a swiftly tilting planet. Instead, they have always been with us, always insisting that the future is female.

  1 See Pamela Sargent, “Women in Science Fiction,” in Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1975), and Eric Leif Davin, Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006).

  2 Paul Walker, “Leigh Brackett: Interview,” Speaking of Science Fiction (Oradell, NJ: Luna Publications, 1978), 371–83.

  3 In a 1974 speech to the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, published as “Day of the Pulps,” Fantasy Commentator 9.50 (Fall 1997): 100–101.

  4 Jeffrey M. Elliot, “C. L. Moore: Poet of Far-Distant Futures,” Pulp Voices; or, Science Fiction Voices #6: Interviews with Pulp Writers and Editors (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1983), 45–51.

  5 Zenna Henderson, “The People Series,” in Joseph Olander, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Frederik Pohl, eds., The Great Science Fiction Series (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 173–74.

  6 Elliot, “C. L. Moore: Poet of Far-Distant Futures.”

  7 Clare Winger Harris, “Possible Science Fiction Plots,” Wonder Stories 3.3 (August 1931): 426–27.

  8 Walker, “Leigh Brackett: Interview.”

  9 Margaret St. Clair, “Wight in Space: An Autobiographical Sketch,” in Martin H. Greenberg, ed., Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 144–56.

  10 Judith Merril, “What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?” Extrapolation 7, 8 (May 1966, December 1966): 30–46; 2–19.

  11 “Joanna Russ,” in Charles Platt, Dream Makers II: The Uncommon Men & Women Who Write Science Fiction (New York: Berkley, 1983), 191–202.

  12 Paul Walker, “Andre Norton: Interview,” Speaking of Science Fiction (Oradell, NJ: Luna Publications, 1978), 264–70.

  13 Leigh Brackett, “The Science-Fiction Field,” Writer’s Digest, July 1944, 20–27.

  CLARE WINGER HARRIS

  The Miracle of the Lily

  I. The Passing of a Kingdom

  SINCE the comparatively recent resumé of the ancient order of agriculture I, Nathano, have been asked to set down the extra­ordinary events of the past two thousand years, at the beginning of which time the supremacy of man, chief of the mammals, threatened to come to an untimely end.

  Ever since the dawn of life upon this globe, life, which it seemed had crept from the slime of the sea, only two great types had been the rulers; the reptiles and the mammals. The former held undisputed sway f
or eons, but gave way eventually before the smaller, but intellectually superior mammals. Man himself, the supreme ­example of the ability of life to govern and control inanimate matter, was master of the world with apparently none to dispute his right. Yet, so blinded was he with pride over the continued exercise of his power on Earth over other lower types of mammals and the nearly extinct reptiles, that he failed to notice the slow but steady rise of another branch of life, different from his own; smaller, it is true, but no smaller than he had been in comparison with the mighty reptilian monsters that roamed the swamps in Mesozoic times.

  These new enemies of man, though seldom attacking him personally, threatened his downfall by destroying his chief means of sustenance, so that by the close of the twentieth century, strange and daring projects were laid before the various governments of the world with an idea of fighting man’s insect enemies to the finish. These pests were growing in size, multiplying so rapidly and destroying so much vegetation, that eventually no plants would be left to sustain human life. Humanity suddenly woke to the realization that it might suffer the fate of the nearly extinct reptiles. Would mankind be able to prevent the encroachment of the insects? And at last man knew that unless drastic measures were taken at once, a third great class of life was on the brink of terrestrial sovereignty.

  Of course no great changes in development come suddenly. Slow evolutionary progress had brought us up to the point, where, with the application of outside pressure, we were ready to handle a situation, that, a century before, would have overwhelmed us.

  I reproduce here in part a lecture delivered by a great American scientist, a talk which, sent by radio throughout the world, changed the destiny of mankind: but whether for good or for evil I will leave you to judge at the conclusion of this story.

  “Only in comparatively recent times has man succeeded in conquering natural enemies; flood, storm, inclemency of climate, distance, and now we face an encroaching menace to the whole of humanity. Have we learned more and more of truth and of the laws that control matter only to succumb to the first real danger that threatens us with extermination? Surely, no matter what the cost, you will rally to the solution of our problem, and I believe, friends, that I have discovered the answer to the enigma.

  “I know that many of you, like my friend Professor Fair, will believe my ideas too extreme, but I am convinced that unless you are willing to put behind you those notions which are old and not utilitarian, you cannot hope to cope with the present situation.

  “Already, in the past few decades, you have realized the utter futility of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that had no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continued to hoard, thus lessening the degree of your life’s efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life’s accomplishments. You have given these things up slowly, but I am now going to ask you to relinquish the rest of them quickly; everything that interferes in any way with the immediate disposal of our enemies, the insects.”

  At this point, it seems that my worthy ancestor, Professor Fair, objected to the scientist’s words, asserting that efficiency at the expense of some of the sentimental virtues was undesirable and not conducive to happiness, the real goal of man. The scientist, in his turn, argued that happiness was available only through a perfect adaptability to one’s environment, and that efficiency sans love, mercy and the softer sentiments was the short cut to human bliss.

  It took a number of years for the scientist to put over his scheme of salvation, but in the end he succeeded, not so much from the persuasiveness of his words, as because prompt action of some sort was necessary. There was not enough food to feed the people of the earth. Fruit and vegetables were becoming a thing of the past. Too much protein food in the form of meat and fish was injuring the race, and at last the people realized that, for fruits and vegetables, or their nutritive equivalent, they must turn from the field to the laboratory; from the farmer to the chemist. Synthetic food was the solution to the problem. There was no longer any use in planting and caring for food stuffs destined to become the nourishment of man’s most deadly enemy.

  The last planting took place in 2900, but there was no harvest, the voracious insects took every green shoot as soon as it appeared, and even trees, that had previously withstood the attacks of the huge insects, were by this time, stripped of every vestige of greenery.

  The vegetable world suddenly ceased to exist. Over the barren plains which had been gradually filling with vast cities, man-made fires brought devastation to every living bit of greenery, so that in all the world there was no food for the insect pests.

  II. Man or Insect?

  Extract from the diary of Delfair, a descendant of Professor Fair, who had opposed the daring scientist.

  From the borders of the great state-city of Iowa, I was witness to the passing of one of the great kingdoms of earth—the vegetable, and I can not find words to express the grief that overwhelms me as I write of its demise, for I loved all growing things. Many of us realized that Earth was no longer beautiful; but if beauty meant death; better life in the sterility of the metropolis.

  The viciousness of the thwarted insects was a menace that we had foreseen and yet failed to take into adequate account. On the city-state borderland, life is constantly imperiled by the attacks of well organized bodies of our dreaded foe.

  (Note: The organization that now exists among the ants, bees and other insects, testifies to the possibility of the development of military tactics among them in the centuries to come.)

  Robbed of their source of food, they have become emboldened to such an extent that they will take any risks to carry human beings away for food, and after one of their well organized raids, the toll of human life is appalling.

  But the great chemical laboratories where our synthetic food is made, and our oxygen plants, we thought were impregnable to their attacks. In that we were mistaken.

  Let me say briefly that since the destruction of all vegetation which furnished a part of the oxygen essential to human life, it became necessary to manufacture this gas artificially for general diffusion through the atmosphere.

  I was flying to my work, which is in Oxygen Plant No. 21, when I noticed a peculiar thing on the upper speedway near Food Plant No. 3,439. Although it was night, the various levels of the state-city were illuminated as brightly as by day. A pleasure vehicle was going with prodigious speed westward. I looked after it in amazement. It was unquestionably the car of Eric, my co-worker at Oxygen Plant No. 21. I recognized the gay color of its body, but to verify my suspicions beyond the question of a doubt, I turned my volplane in pursuit and made out the familiar license number. What was Eric doing away from the plant before I had arrived to relieve him from duty?

  In hot pursuit, I sped above the car to the very border of the state-city, wondering what unheard of errand took him to the land of the enemy, for the car came to a sudden stop at the edge of what had once been an agricultural area. Miles ahead of me stretched an enormous expanse of black sterility; at my back was the teeming metropolis, five levels high—if one counted the hangar-level, which did not cover the residence sections.

  I had not long to wait, for almost immediately my friend appeared. What a sight he presented to my incredulous gaze! He was literally covered from head to foot with the two-inch ants, that next to the beetles, had proved the greatest menace in their attacks upon humanity. With wild incoherent cries he fled over the rock and stubble-burned earth.

  As soon as my stunned senses permitted, I swooped down toward him to effect a rescue, but even as my plane touched the barren earth, I saw that I was too late, for he fell, borne down by the vicious attacks of his myriad foes. I knew it was useless for me to set foot upon the ground, for my fate would be that of Eric. I rose ten feet and seizing my poison-gas weapon, let its contents out upon the tiny black evil things that swarmed below.
I did not bother with my mask, for I planned to rise immediately, and it was not a moment too soon. From across the waste-land, a dark cloud eclipsed the stars and I saw coming toward me a horde of flying ants interspersed with larger flying insects, all bent upon my annihilation. I now took my mask and prepared to turn more gas upon my pursuers, but alas, I had used every atom of it in my attack upon the non-flying ants! I had no recourse but flight, and to this I immediately resorted, knowing that I could outdistance my pursuers.

  When I could no longer see them, I removed my gas mask. A suffocating sensation seized me. I could not breathe! How high had I flown in my endeavor to escape the flying ants? I leaned over the side of my plane, expecting to see the city far, far below me. What was my utter amazement when I discovered that I was scarcely a thousand feet high! It was not altitude that was depriving me of the life-giving oxygen.