by Lisa Yaszek
Carol Emshwiller (b. April 12, 1921) was born Agnes Carolyn Fries in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the eldest of Charles and Agnes (Carswell) Fries’s four children. Growing up, she spent several years in France and Germany while her father, a professor of English and linguistics, was on sabbatical. Graduating from the University of Michigan with a BA in music in 1945, she joined the Red Cross, aiding U.S. troops in postwar Italy, then returned to Ann Arbor for art school. She married fellow art student Ed Emshwiller in 1949. Together, they attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (1949–50), toured Europe on a motorcycle, and eventually settled in Levittown, New York, where they had three children, in 1955, 1957, and 1959.
Emshwiller began publishing SF in the mid-1950s, after being introduced to key people within the genre by her husband, who became one of the principal genre artists of the era. During the 1960s, Emshwiller and her husband expanded their circle to include avant-garde musicians, painters, poets, and filmmakers—as she put it, “we were enmeshed. Embedded. Passionate about that sixties world and nothing else.” Not surprisingly, her experimental stories were often associated with SF’s New Wave, and at the 1962 Hugo Awards she received an honorable mention for her short story “Adapted”—the first of many such honors she would accumulate in subsequent decades.
In 1974 Emshwiller became an adjunct assistant professor at New York University and published her first story collection, Joy in Our Cause. She has continued to publish almost nonstop since then. Her novels include Carmen Dog (1998), The Mount (2002), Mister Boots (2005), and The Secret City (2007). Her contemporary, Ursula K. Le Guin, praised her as a “major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction”; to date, Emshwiller has won one World Fantasy Award, one Philip K. Dick Award, two Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 2005). Since her husband’s death in 1990, she has divided her time between New York City and Owens Valley, California.
Alice Glaser (December 3, 1928–August 22, 1970) was born in New York City and raised on Long Island by her father, a Russian-born lawyer, and her mother, a homemaker from Pittsburgh. At Woodmere High School, from which she graduated in 1946, she worked on the student Bulletin and won praise for her poetry; at Radcliffe, she wrote a senior thesis on Joseph Conrad. Afterwards she moved to Paris, working at various U.S. government agencies, marrying and divorcing Jean-Paul Surmain, and finding friends in the expatriate SF community. Returning to New York in 1958, she began a career at Esquire magazine, rising to assistant and then associate editor during the 1960s.
At Esquire, Glaser solicited articles and stories (some from SF writers, including Fritz Leiber) and contributed articles of her own; her best known, an account of a week spent in India with Allen Ginsberg, appeared in 1963 as “Back on the Open Road for Boys.” “The Tunnel Ahead,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1961, is her only known work of speculative fiction. “The Tunnel Ahead” is one of the most frequently anthologized of modern SF stories, and in 2016 Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal (director of the critically acclaimed Trollhunter, 2010) released a short film adaptation of it that went on to win the prize for Best Overall Short Film at the Calgary International Film Festival. Glaser also reviewed books for the Chicago Tribune and is said to have written a roman à clef about life at Esquire. She died after a fall, reportedly by suicide, at forty-one.
Clare Winger Harris (January 18, 1891–October 26, 1968) is credited as the first woman to publish fiction under her own name in the SF specialist magazines of the 1920s. She was born Clare M. Winger in Freeport, Illinois. Her mother, Mary Stover Winger, was the daughter of the town’s richest man (inventor and industrialist D. C. Stover), and her father, Frank S. Winger, was an electrical contractor and SF writer who published The Wizard of the Island; or, The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger in 1917. As a child, Harris “preferred . . . the stories of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells” to more conventional girls’ fare. Graduating from Lake View High School in Chicago in 1910, she entered Smith College, but married in 1912 before completing her degree. She travelled in Europe and the Middle East, then went with her husband Frank Clyde Harris to California and Kansas, where he finished his education in architecture and engineering and where, in 1915, 1916, and 1918, she had three sons.
After moving with her family to Fairfield, Iowa, Harris published a historical novel, Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece (1923), and her first SF story, “A Runaway World,” in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales. “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” published in June 1927, earned Harris third place (and $100) in a contest organized by Amazing Stories publisher Hugo Gernsback and secured her place as a leading voice in the genre. “The Ape Cycle,” which appeared in the Spring 1930 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly, was her last-known story but she continued to actively participate in the SF community; her August 1931 letter to the editors at Wonder Stories, entitled “Possible Science Fiction Plots,” constitutes one of the earliest pieces of SF criticism.
By the time of the 1940 census, Harris was divorced and living in Pasadena, California. Gathering eleven of her works in the self-published volume Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science in 1947, she noted that her sons had “inherited their mother’s love of science” and produced a “third generation of scientists” in the form of three grandchildren. Away from the Here and Now earned Harris one of the very first genre awards, granted to her by the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. About a year before her death at seventy-seven, Harris inherited one-quarter of her grandfather’s estate, valued in excess of two million dollars. It was contested in the courts for almost sixty years.
Zenna Henderson (November 1, 1917–May 11, 1983) was born Zena Chlarson in Tucson, Arizona (she began spelling her name “Zenna” in the early 1950s), the second of five children; her mother Emily Vernell (Rowley) Chlarson, a housekeeper for a private family, had emigrated from Mexico in 1912 after the destruction of Colonia Díaz, a Mormon settlement, and her father, Louis Rudolph Chlarson, worked as a chauffeur, railroad carpenter, and dairyman. A graduate of Phoenix Union High School and Arizona State Teachers’ College, Henderson had a lifelong career as a teacher, mostly of elementary school children in the Tucson area. However, she also taught at the Gila River Relocation Center, an internment camp for Japanese Americans (1942–43); on a U.S. military base in France (1956–58); and at Seaside Children’s Hospital in Waterford, Connecticut (1958–59). She married Richard H. Henderson, a miner, in 1944, divorcing him in 1951 and subsequently completing her master’s degree at Arizona State.
Henderson published her first SF story, “Come On, Wagon!,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December 1951 and was quickly singled out for praise by Sam Merwyn in an essay celebrating what was then seen as a new boom of women SF writers. In 1959, her long story “Captivity” received a Hugo nomination. She is most widely remembered for “The People,” a series of stories first published from 1952 to 1980 about a group of humanoid aliens stranded on Earth who represent our better selves. Along with Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (1966), Henderson’s short fiction is collected in The Anything Box (1965) and Holding Wonder (1971). The People, a made-for-TV movie based on her series of the same name and starring Kim Darby and William Shatner, was released in 1972. Ingathering: The Complete People Stories (1995), including previously uncollected material, was published after Henderson’s death in Tucson, at the age of sixty-five.
Alice Eleanor Jones (March 30, 1916–November 6, 1981) was born in Philadelphia, where her father, Henry Stayton Jones worked, as a photoengraver for a publishing firm and her mother, Lucy A. (Schuler) Jones, stayed home to raise Jones and her sister. Jones graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1936, continuing her education in the English department, from which she earned her PhD in 1944, writing a dissertation on the seventeenth-century dra
matist Shakerly Marmion. She married fellow graduate student Homer Nearing Jr. and moved with him to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. They had two sons, Geoffrey and Gregory, in 1944 and 1948.
Jones had an intense but brief career as a writer of speculative fiction, publishing five stories in genre magazines from April to December 1955. In April of 1955, she published her first short story, “Life, Incorporated,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under her maiden name. In June of the same year, Jones published “Created He Them,” her most successful speculative fiction work. Somewhat ironically—given that “Created He Them” details the deprivations suffered by an average housewife in the wake of World War III—Jones used the first check from that story to go on a shopping spree, buying herself “an extra special dress, the sort that wives of professors normally only look at in shops.”
Jones focused her subsequent literary energies on better-paying mainstream publications, including Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Woman’s Day, American Girl, and Seventeen, to which she contributed both fiction and nonfiction well into the 1960s. She died in 1981 and is buried in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Her stories are now available in podcast form at Strange Horizons.
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018), born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California, was the daughter of Theodora (Kracaw) Kroeber, an anthropology student and later a writer, and Alfred Kroeber, head of the University of California anthropology department; she had three older brothers and stepbrothers, with whom she spent summers on the family’s small ranch in the Napa Valley. At ten or eleven she submitted one of her early literary productions to Astounding Science Fiction, of which she was a devoted reader.
Graduating from Berkeley High School in 1947, Le Guin attended Radcliffe College and then Columbia University, from which she earned a master’s degree in Renaissance French and Italian Language and Literature in 1952. The following year, on the way to France as a Fulbright scholar to pursue her doctorate, she met fellow Fulbright recipient Charles Alfred Le Guin, and they married in Paris. Returning to the U.S., both began teaching, first at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia (he in the history department, she in French), then at the University of Idaho. Settling permanently in Portland, Oregon, they raised three children, born in 1957, 1959, and 1964, respectively.
Le Guin’s first published works—“Folksong from the Montayna Province” (Prairie Poet, Fall 1959) and “An die Musik” (Western Humanities Review, Summer 1961)—began her series set in the fictional European nation of Orsinia, later expanded with the story collection Orsinian Tales (1976) and the novel Malafrena (1979). She began to appear in genre magazines with the time-travel story “April in Paris,” in the September 1962 Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and published her first SF novel, Rocannon’s World, in 1966.
Le Guin’s subsequent works include the multiple-award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), and Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990); story collections The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), The Compass Rose (1982), Changing Planes (2003), and others; and collections of essays and poetry. In 1993, with Brian Attebery, she edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990. Le Guin’s accomplishments have long been recognized by her peers: in 1975 she was named the sixth Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy; in 1989 the Science Fiction Research Association granted her a Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement; in 2001 she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2003 she became the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s twentieth Grand Master. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017, before her death in Portland Le Guin was revising and adding new material to her 1985 novel Always Coming Home, for a new edition in the Library of America series.
Katherine MacLean (b. January 22, 1925) was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and raised in Flushing, New York. She was the daughter of chemical engineer Gordon MacLean and homemaker Ruth (Crawford) MacLean, who raised her along with two older brothers. Beginning in high school, MacLean worked at a wide variety of jobs, including “nurse’s aide, store detective, pollster, econ graph-analyst, antibiotic lab researcher, food factory quality controller, office manager, payroll bookkeeper, college teacher, reporter.” After a brief first marriage to Charles Dye, she married David Mason, with whom she had a son in 1957.
MacLean published her first short story, “Defense Mechanism,” in the October 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction while she was still an economics undergraduate at Barnard and working part-time as a lab technician. By the time her first collection, The Diploids, appeared in 1962 she had over two dozen stories in print, many of which were celebrated for their innovative adaptation of ideas from the hard sciences and for their celebration of the social sciences. Along with a second story collection, The Trouble with You Earth People (1980), she is the author of four novels: Cosmic Checkmate (1962, with Charles V. De Vet), The Man in the Bird Cage (1971), Missing Man (1975), and Dark Wing (1979, with Carl West).
In the late 1960s, MacLean moved to Maine to care for her invalid mother, and in 1979 she married fellow SF author Carl P. West. She currently lives near Portland, Maine. The quality of MacLean’s work has long been recognized by the SF community: in 1962 fellow author and editor Damon Knight noted that “as a science fiction writer, [MacLean] has few peers”; and in 1971 she won a Nebula Award for her novella “Missing Man.” She was the professional Guest of Honor at the first WisCon, held in 1977 (WisCon is the largest and oldest feminist SF convention in the world), and in 2003 she was honored by the Science Fiction Writers of America as Author Emeritus. In 2011, she received the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.
Judith Merril (January 21, 1923–September 12, 1997) was the principal pseudonym under which Judith Josephine Grossman published stories, novels, and criticism beginning in 1947. Born in Boston, she moved to the Bronx after her freshman year in high school; her father Samuel Solomon (“Shlomo”) Grossman, a columnist and drama critic for a Yiddish newspaper, had committed suicide when she was six, and her mother Ethel (Hurwitch) Grossman had accepted a job running a settlement house for juvenile offenders. Graduating in 1939, she met Dan Zissman at a Trotskyist Youth picnic the following year. They married and in 1942 had a daughter, Merril, who was raised during her infancy on military bases across the country.
Moving to Greenwich Village after the war, Merril became one of the few female members of the Futurians (the men included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, C. M. Kornbluth, and Frederik Pohl; other women included Leslie Perri and Virginia Kidd). She published a SF fanzine, TEMPER!, and contributed two stories under her married name to Crack Detective. Separated in 1946, she turned to writing and editing to support herself and her daughter, working briefly for Bantam Books and selling more than a dozen sports stories, under the pseudonyms Eric Thorstein and Ernest Hamilton, to pulp magazines. Her first SF story, “That Only a Mother” (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1948), was her first publication as Judith Merril and was written to win a bet with Astounding editor John W. Campbell, who claimed that women couldn’t write SF good enough to appear in his magazine. Not only did Merril win that bet, but “That Only a Mother” has gone on to be one of the most widely anthologized SF stories since its initial appearance.
Merril collected her subsequent short fiction in Out of Bounds (1960), Daughters of Earth (1968), Survival Ship and Other Stories (1974), and The Best of Judith Merril (1976). Her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth (1950)—adapted for television in 1954 as Atomic Attack—was followed by The Tomorrow People in 1960. She also wrote two novels in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth, Gunner Cade and Outpost Mars; both appeared in 1952 under the joint pseudonym Cyril Judd. Along with these works, Merril was a prolific reviewer and edited SF anthologies, including Shot in the Dark (1950), England Swings SF (1968), and the annual series S–F: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction an
d Fantasy (1956–68).
Married to Frederik Pohl from 1948 to 1953, Merril had a second daughter, Ann, in 1950. She later cofounded and served on the board of the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference (1956–60) and in 1960 married union organizer Dan Sugrue, separating three years later. In 1968, after a year in England, she immigrated to Canada, joining the staff of Rochdale College in Toronto and helping to organize the Committee to Aid Refugees from Militarism (CARM). Her private book collection, donated to the Toronto Public Library in 1970 to form the “Spaced Out Library,” became the nucleus of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, now numbering over 70,000 volumes. She died in Toronto of heart failure the same year she became a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Author Emeritus. Her posthumously published autobiography, Better to Have Loved (2003), earned a Hugo Award for Best Related Book, and in 2013 she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
C. L. Moore (January 24, 1911–April 4, 1987), the eldest child of Indiana natives Otto Moore and Maude Jones Moore, was born Catherine Lucille Moore in Indianapolis, where her father was an inventor and mechanical engineer. An often sickly child “reared on a diet of Greek mythology, Oz books, and Edgar Rice Burroughs,” she entered Indiana University in 1929, publishing stories in The Vagabond, a student magazine, but left in the middle of her sophomore year. Working as a stenographer in an Indianapolis bank through the Great Depression, she began to sell her stories; the first, “Shambleau,” appeared in Weird Tales in November 1933. (Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright was reportedly so impressed upon receiving it that he closed his offices for the day in celebration.) Moore continued to write stories featuring “Shambleau” protagonist Northwest Smith (a swashbuckling rogue adventurer who went on to inspire characters including Han Solo) while publishing a series of sword-and-sorcery tales featuring the first female protagonist in that subgenre, Jirel of Joiry.
