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

by Lisa Yaszek

  Tiptree collected her stories in Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (1973), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975), Star Songs of an Old Primate (1978), Out of the Everywhere, and Other Extraordinary Visions (1981), The Starry Rift (1986), and other volumes; she also published two novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985). At seventy-one, increasingly suffering from depression and ill health, she took her own life at home in McLean, Virginia, in a murder-suicide pact with her husband. The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, conceived in 1991, honors work that explores and expands ideas about gender.

  John Jay Wells (b. February 12, 1933), a pseudonym Juanita Coulson used only once, was born Juanita Ruth Wellons in Anderson, Indiana. Her parents Grant and Ruth (Omler) Wellons were both employed in a local auto parts factory. Coulson graduated from Anderson High School, where she worked on The X-Ray, a student newspaper. She was introduced to Robert Coulson at a meeting of the Eastern Indiana Science Fiction Association in 1953, and they married the following year; together, they published the fanzine Yandro (1953–86), winner of a 1965 Hugo Award for best amateur magazine. Graduating from Ball State University in 1954 and earning her master’s degree in Education in 1961, Coulson briefly taught second grade; she had a son in 1957.

  Coulson was coauthor with Marion Zimmer Bradley of “Another Rib,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in June 1963. This was Coulson’s first published story and the only time she employed the Wells pseudonym. The story “had a vaguely sexual theme, and the editor was a little nervous, it being 1963,” Coulson later recalled; “he thought that [it] needed masculine names on it.” After “Another Rib,” Coulson went on to write more than a dozen SF novels under her own name, beginning with Crisis on Cheiron (1967). Her most recent is Star Sister (1990). She has also published historical romance and mystery novels and some short fiction. After the death of her husband in 1999, she moved to London, Ohio, where she works part-time in the mayor’s office and attends “as many cons as money will allow.” An active filker (or SF-folk music performer) since the 1940s, she received the Pegasus Award for Best Filk Writer/Composer in 2012.

  Kate Wilhelm (June 8, 1928–March 8, 2018), born Kate Gertrude Meredith in Toledo, Ohio, was the fourth child of Jesse and Ann (McDowell) Meredith, both natives of Kentucky; at twelve, she moved with her family to Louisville, where her father worked in a flour mill. Soon after her graduation from Louisville Girls’ High School she married Joseph Wilhelm and had two sons, in 1949 and 1953. Her first published story, “The Pint-Size Genie,” appeared in Fantastic in October 1956, and she became a regular contributor to genre magazines thereafter, collecting her stories in The Mile-Long Spaceship (1963), The Downstairs Room and Other Speculative Fiction (1968), Abyss (1971), The Infinity Box (1975), Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions (1978), Listen, Listen (1981), Children of the Wind (1989), and And the Angels Sing (1992).

  Divorcing her first husband, in 1963 Wilhelm married fellow writer Damon Knight; together, they raised five children from previous marriages and had a son of their own. As hosts of the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference from their home in Milford, Pennsylvania, and later as cofounders of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, they began a tradition of literary mentorship and mutual criticism that has influenced many careers and continues to the present. They also both lectured on speculative fiction at universities around the world.

  Wilhelm won Nebula Awards in 1969 (for “The Planners”), 1987 (for “The Girl Who Fell into the Sky”), and 1988 (for “Forever Yours, Anna”); her 1976 novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang received both Hugo and Locus Awards, and in 2003 she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Along with speculative fiction she has also published more than a dozen mystery novels, her first, More Bitter Than Death, in 1963 and her most recent, cowritten with Richard Wilhelm and featuring her noted detective protagonist Barbara Holloway, Mirror, Mirror in 2017. She died in Eugene, Oregon, where she had lived since the 1970s.

  NOTES

  In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of the hardcover edition (the line count includes headings but not blank lines). For further information about the authors in this volume and women’s SF during this period, along with references to other studies, see Brian Attebery, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002); Eric Leif Davin, Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965 (2005); Jane Donawerth, Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (1997); Justine Larbalestier, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002), and Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006); Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (2010); Robin Roberts, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (1993); Lisa Yaszek, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008); and Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp, eds., Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (2016).

  9.6 television] The first television broadcast experiments were taking place in both Europe and the United States around the time “The Miracle of the Lily” was published in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in April 1928; Gernsback himself began regular “radio television” broadcasts from his New York radio station WRNY in August 1928.

  19.27 Ex Terreno] Latin: from the earth.

  25.1 the nine planets] Pluto became the ninth planet of the solar system on its discovery in February 1930, just over a year before Stone published “The Conquest of Gola.” (It was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, after scientists discovered other objects of similar size in the Kuiper belt.)

  89.6 Oak Ridge] Tennessee city established in 1942 as headquarters for the Manhattan Project, responsible for atomic bomb development; it housed a pilot plutonium reactor and uranium enrichment plants.

  94.13 WACs] Members of the Women’s Army Corps, created as an auxiliary branch of the U.S. Army in 1942 and disbanded in 1978 when women soldiers were integrated into the regular military.

  105.12 the ink-pool in the Kipling stories,”] See Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World,” first published in the Contemporary Review in July 1891.

  119.19 Macaulay] Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), British historian and politician often described as a child prodigy.

  140.19 in ‘Through the Looking Glass,’] Like Tim’s story, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872) dramatizes a game of chess.

  163.26–27 Deerslayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke] Deerslayer (also known as Natty Bumppo) is the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s five-volume Leatherstocking Tales series (The Pioneers, 1823; The Last of the Mohicans, 1826; The Prairie, 1827; The Pathfinder, 1840; The Deerslayer, 1841); John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (also known as Tarzan), first appeared in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel Tarzan of the Apes (1914).

  197.2 Ararat] In the Old Testament, Noah’s ark comes to rest “on the mountains of Ararat” after the great flood (see Genesis 8:4).

  206.5 Pan] In Greek mythology, a bestial nature god associated with fertility and usually depicted as part man, part goat.

  321.29 Neo-Helots] The helots were a class of serfs or slaves in ancient Sparta.

  327.28–29 the Cheshire Cat’s grin . . . Wonderland.”] See Chapter VI of Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

  340.3 Topolino] Nickname for the earliest-model Fiat 500, an Italian city car produced from 1936 to 1955; literally, “little mouse.”

  449.4 BOAC] British Overseas Airway Corporation, an English state-owned airline created in 1940. BOAC merged with British European Airways in 1974 to form today’s British Airways.

  449.8 Save the last Green Mansions] See William Henry Hudson’s 1904 novel Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest.

  449.12 Who’s Afraid?] See Edward Albee’s 1962 pla
y Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which examines the breakdown of a middle-aged couple’s marriage.

  450.22 Oread] In Greek mythology, a mountain nymph.

  453.2 Chicom] Vietnam-era U.S. military slang for “Chinese communist.”

  453.8 Mata Hari] Stage name of Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod (1876–1917), convicted and executed as a German spy during World War I.

  453.16 Hudson’s bell bird “singing for a later race,”] See Hudson’s Green Mansions, Chapter X: “O mystic bell-bird of the heavenly race of the swallow and the dove, the quetzal and the nightingale! When the brutish savage and the brutish white man that slay thee, one for food, the other for the benefit of science, shall have passed away, live still, live to tell thy message to the blameless spiritualized race that shall come after us to possess the Earth, not for a thousand years, but for ever.”

  454.20 Sinair] Singapore Airlines.

  455.20 Hamilton Air Base] U.S. airfield in Marin County, California, decommissioned in 1974.

  456.2 Gaea] In Greek mythology, a primordial earth-mother goddess.

  458.9 Nijinsky and Nureyev] Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950) and Rudolf Nureyev (1938–1993), prominent ballet dancers.

  458.24 bach] A word apparently invented by Le Guin; perhaps an honorific, like the Japanese -san. (Also page 481, line 12, in the present volume.)

  466.29 Heb.] Hebrew.

  471.20 the golden horde] A phrase also used to describe a Mongol khanate established in the thirteenth century.

  472.7 spla] A word apparently invented by Le Guin; another character later gives “insane” and “psycho” as synonyms (see page 480, lines 11–12, in the present volume).

  478.1 Totentanz] The dance of death or danse macabre, an allegorical theme that emerged in late medieval European art and literature, typically featuring a personified Death leading the living to the grave. Composers including Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Arnold Schoenberg subsequently set the theme to music.

  SOURCES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This volume contains twenty-five stories first published in the period 1928 to 1969. The texts of all stories have been taken from their original magazine printings, with the exception of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives,” the text of which is taken from the first book edition.

  Great efforts have been made to locate all owners of copyrighted material. Any owner who has inadvertently been omitted will gladly be acknowledged in future printings.

  Clare Winger Harris, “The Miracle of the Lily,” Amazing Stories 3.1 (April 1928): 48–54.

  Leslie F. Stone, “The Conquest of Gola,” Wonder Stories 2.11 (April 1931): 1278–87.

  C. L. Moore, “The Black God’s Kiss,” Weird Tales 24.4 (October 1934): 402–21. Copyright © 1934 by Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.

  Leslie Perri, “Space Episode,” Future Combined with Science Fiction 2.2 (December 1941): 106–12.

  Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother,” Astounding Science Fiction 41.4 (June 1948): 88–95. Later collected in Homecalling and Other Stories (NESFA Press, 2005). Copyright © 1948, 1976 by Judith Merril. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Judith Merril and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

  Wilmar H. Shiras, “In Hiding,” Astounding Science Fiction 42.3 (November 1948): 40–70. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Wilmar H. Shiras.

  Katherine MacLean, “Contagion,” Galaxy 1.1 (October 1950): 114–40. Later collected in The Trouble With You Earth People (Donning, 1979). Copyright © 1950, 1978 by Katherine MacLean. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

  Margaret St. Clair, “The Inhabited Men,” Planet Stories 5.2 (September 1951): 44–49. Copyright © 1951, 1978 by Margaret St. Clair. Reprinted by permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc.

  Zenna Henderson, “Ararat,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 3.6 (October 1952): 103–22. Later collected in Ingathering: The Complete People Stories (NESFA Press, 1995). Copyright © 1952, 1980 by Zenna Henderson. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Zenna Henderson and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

  Andrew North, “All Cats Are Gray,” Fantastic Universe 1.2 (August–September 1953): 129–34. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Andre Norton.

  Alice Eleanor Jones, “Created He Them,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 8.6 (June 1955): 29–36. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Alice Eleanor Jones.

  Mildred Clingerman, “Mr. Sakrison’s Halt,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 10.1 (January 1956): 122–27. Later collected in The Clingerman Files (Size 5½ B Publishing, 2017). Reprinted by permission of A Cupful of Space LLC.

  Leigh Brackett, “All the Colors of the Rainbow,” Venture Science Fiction 1.6 (November 1957): 108–28. Reprinted by permission of Spectrum Literary Agency on behalf of the Huntington National Bank.

  Carol Emshwiller, “Pelt,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 15.5 (November 1958): 102–10. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Rosel George Brown, “Car Pool,” If 8.6 (July 1959): 80–94.

  Elizabeth Mann Borgese, “For Sale, Reasonable,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 17.1 (July 1959): 70–72.

  Doris Pitkin Buck, “Birth of a Gardener,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 20.6 (June 1961): 50–59.

  Alice Glaser, “The Tunnel Ahead,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 21.5 (November 1961): 54–61.

  Kit Reed, “The New You,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 23.3 (September 1962): 100–109. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  John Jay Wells & Marion Zimmer Bradley, “Another Rib,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 24.6 (June 1963): 111–26. Reprinted by permission.

  Sonya Dorman, “When I Was Miss Dow,” Galaxy 24.5 (June 1966): 153–63. Copyright © 1966, 1994 by Sonya Dorman. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Sonya Dorman and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

  Kate Wilhelm, “Baby, You Were Great,” Orbit 2, ed. Damon Knight (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 19–36. Reprinted by permission of InfinityBox Press LLC.

  Joanna Russ, “The Barbarian,” Orbit 3, ed. Damon Knight (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), 84–108. Copyright © 1968 by Joanna Russ. Reprinted by permission of the Diana Finch Literary Agency on behalf of the Estate of Joanna Russ.

  James Tiptree, Jr., “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” Galaxy 28.2 (March 1969): 121–27. Later collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Arkham House, 1990). Copyright © 1969 by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon), renewed 1997 by Jeffrey D. Smith. Reprinted by permission of Jeffrey D. Smith and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

  Ursula K. Le Guin, “Nine Lives,” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 129–60. First published in Playboy in November 1969 under the byline U. K. Le Guin (imposed to conceal her gender) and in a version edited without her involvement. Later collected in The Unreal and the Real (Small Beer Press, 2012). Copyright © 1969 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.