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 New American Library.

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!). Read the rest