The 1970s may have been an era when most of the interesting new writers were women1, but you sure would not know it from that era’s Best SF of the Year anthologies. These were almost always2 overwhelmingly male3 .
Women pushed back. They managed to fund and publish their own anthologies, filled with notable works by women4—anthologies like 1976’s Aurora: Beyond Equality, edited by Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson, and Virginia Kidd’s 1978 Millennial Women. Which brings us to Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder anthologies.
Sargent had been shopping the initial anthology around for several years without luck. Publishers generally felt the market for such an anthology would be small. She got a lucky break when Vonda N. McIntyre asked Vintage Books how it was that despite having done all-male anthologies, they’d never published an all-women one. Vintage was interested in the idea, provided that someone not on their staff did the editing. McIntyre introduced Sargent to the folks at Vintage and the rest is SF history.
Women of Wonder could have stood on its own (and given the prejudices of the time, might have been intended as a one-off). The volume provided a short history of science fiction, a fine essay whose main flaw was that it came to an abrupt halt in 1974 (possibly due to the fact that it was written in 1974). The rest of the book was an assortment of prose pieces, plus one poem. With the possible except of Sonya Dorman’s “The Child Dreams,” all of the pieces included were reprints, arranged in order of publication. The oldest work was Judith Merril’s 1948 “That Only a Mother,” the most recent McIntyre’s 1973 “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand.”
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Success demands a sequel. Sargent eschewed recapitulation. The second volume, More Women of Wonder (1976) also drew on both vintage and recent works, but focused on novelettes. While everyone I have asked5 agrees that novellas are the optimum length for science fiction stories, novelettes are almost as good.
The New Women of Wonder (1978) rounded off the series by focusing on what were then recent works, like Russ’ “When It Changed,” and Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t See.” Works that are now classics.
Women of Wonder wasn’t the first all-women SF anthology to appear6, but it might have been the first one to reach the University of Waterloo’s bookstore7 , where I snapped up a copy. Unfortunately, three books and three years into the series, it seemed to be at an end.
[Thematically appropriate music here…]
Until 1995, that is! In 1995 there was a two-volume follow-up to the original series. Women of Wonder: The Classic Years (1995) featured older works, many of which had appeared in earlier WoW anthologies. Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years (1995) drew on the body of speculative fiction published in the seventeen years since The New Women of Wonder. Although The Classic Years sifted a span twice as long as The Contemporary Years, both volumes are of similar length. This may be a reflection of the greater number of women active in the field in recent years.
When I reread these books a few years ago, I was worried that time might have been cruel to the stories, that social progress might have stranded these works on the other side of a vast gulf. Not to worry! It’s not as if women are now getting equal pay, or even useful pockets. If anything, we’ve regressed. Issues that were pressing half a century ago are still pressing; those stories that comment on those issues are, for the most part, still quite relevant.
Rights issues make it unlikely that these books will be reprinted. When last I talked to the editor, she had no plans to continue the series. But there have been and will be other such anthologies, works that I am sure that I or some other Tor.com reviewer will visit.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Back in the day, comments re: the new prominence of women in the field came with a disclaimer “except for James Tiptree, Jr.” Tiptree was regarded as the most ineluctably masculine of authors. Subsequent developments stopped that disclaimer dead in its tracks.
[2]Terry Carr’s “The Best Science Fiction of the Year #7” is a notable exception. It was divided evenly between men and women.
[3]By a curious coincidence, so were the editors. After Judith Merril ended her “Year’s Best SF” in 1968, it would not be until the 21st century that a woman (co-)helmed a best SF annual anthology. Unfortunately for the It’s The Male Editors Who Are Sexist Model, Merril herself did not fill her anthologies with an overwhelming number of women: Her 11th anthology had, if I recall correctly, 35 stories by men, and one by a woman.
[4]I am speaking here of SF in the narrow sense. Obviously there have been Best Of anthologies that (also) collected horror and fantasy and were edited by women.
[5]How many people have I actually asked? Look over there, it’s the Winged Victory of Samothrace!
[6]If only because Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood’s “The Venus Factor,” which I have never seen, predates it.
[7]I don’t know who was buying books for UW’s bookstore’s SF section, but whoever they were had wide-ranging tastes which in turn shaped mine.
“a fine essay whose main flaw was that it came to an abrupt halt in 1974 (possibly due to the fact that it was written in 1974).”
That’s no excuse. We are, after all, talking science fiction here.
Too bad they had such uninspired covers.
Nothing wrong with those covers and very typical of the nascent Disco Era.
It took less than a month for used copies of Aurora: Beyond Equality to multiply in price by 50. James, apologies if I bought cheap and kept you from buying affordable.
edit: add ‘in price’. Oops
I snapped up a copy as soon as I rediscovered its existence.
I have , saved behind other books , in my bookcase the full series of Women of Wonder” . I loved the stories back when and always thought to reread them but there was always too many new books…..
I have owned all of these anthologies for DECADES! And I wish that Pamela Sargent would serve of a third round of anthologies for the 21st Century…8-)
I’ve always admired Pamela Sargent’s anthologies, and I love those Seventies covers.