Looking for Classic SF by Women? Here Are Five Places to Start…

From time to time, SF fans will observe that they didn’t know that there were any women writing science fiction back in the golden age of magazines in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. This is not terribly surprising, as magazines are by their nature ephemeral and (as documented by academic Liza Yaszek) early anthologists such as John W. Campbell, Jr. and Groff Conklin went out of their way to exclude women SF authors.

More recent editors have made very different decisions. SF fans wanting to explore the world of vintage science fiction by women should consider the collections and anthologies below.¹ I’ve limited myself to works that are, as far as I can tell, in print.²

Homecalling and Other Stories by Judith Merril (2005)

Merril made many contributions to SF as an author, editor, founder of what was then known as the Spaced Out Library (now Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy), Canadian media personality, and (of course) fan. Thanks to NESFA Press, her non-collaborative short fiction has been collected in Homecalling, a massive tome that will challenge the mechanical properties of your bookshelf even as it expands your knowledge of classic SF. Of particular note, the story “That Only a Mother,” in which a husband and wife have different attitudes toward their precocious war-time child.

The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair (2019)

Active under her own name, as Idris Seabright, and also under other pen names, St. Clair was a prolific contributor to golden age magazines. She published often in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy.³ While at first glance, her stories might seem to hew to pulp conventions, closer reading reveals slyly subversive undercurrents. The Hole in the Moon⁴ contains seventeen stories. My favourite is “The Little Red Owl,” whose horrific elements are all too mundane.

The Diploids by Katherine MacLean (1962)

As one might deduce from the fact that her work appeared in magazines as a diverse as Astounding (now Analog) and Galaxy, MacLean was comfortable working across a spectrum of subgenres, from overt satire to more conventional SF. Astonishingly (or perhaps Astoundingly), her 1962 collection is somehow still in print, a measure of how well her fiction stands up. My favourite, “The Snowball Effect,” details a social experiment as unbounded by ethics as it was unprepared for the consequences of its success.

Of course, no list like this would be complete without anthologies. There is a wealth of choice here but if I had to select just two—and my absurd insistence on five examples requires me to limit myself—these two anthologies are the obvious choice.

The Future is Female! by Lisa Yaszek (2018)

The Future Is Female! delivers twenty-five classic science fiction stories by women, from the 1920s to the late 1960s⁵, as well as commentary on the often-overlooked history of women SF authors. Yaszek anthologizes in the tradition of previous efforts such as Sargent’s Women of Wonder and Kidd’s Millennial Women, building on the early anthologies’ themes without recapitulating their contents. My favourite story is Kit Reed’s “The New You,” the moral of which (RTFM) is still timely.

Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953 – 1957) edited by Gideon Marcus (2022)

The second volume in the Rediscovery series, Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953–1957) anthologizes twenty Eisenhower-era SF stories. This series avoids stories that are already over-anthologized⁶, but clearly this choice was no impediment to finding entertaining works by women from this era. In addition, the volume includes ample ancillary material on each author. The quality is consistently high but if I had to choose a favourite, that would be St. Clair’s quiet “The Wines of Earth.”

Of course, these are just a few of the works I could have recommended—and an even smaller fraction of the works that I could have recommended, save for the fact I have not yet read them. If you have suggestions of in-print works of interest to readers seeking out golden age SF by women, please mention them in comments below.

1. Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder anthologies are omitted for two reasons: they were discussed in this previously published essay… and also they are out of print.
2. Figuring out which Leigh Brackett works were still in print proved unexpectedly difficult. I could find supposedly in-print books on a certain bookseller named for a river, but when I crosschecked with the publishers of those books, most of her collections and omnibuses appeared to be out of print. What’s particularly puzzling is that when I checked Free Speculative Fiction Online’s Brackett section, I found links to Baen book samples for books that I could not find on Baen’s site.
3. St. Clair received a memorably wretched back cover blurb on her novel, Sign of the Labrys. I won’t go into detail here lest that be the focus of the comment section, but it is not hard to find.
4. The Hole in the Moon and Other Stories edged out The Best of Margaret St. Clair because The Best appears to be available only in the UK.
5. Readers may object that a collection that includes stories from the late 1960s shouldn’t count, because the 1960s were well after my designated period of interest. Society was different then; feminism was burgeoning and more women were writing. But the book has enough great material from the golden age of magazines that I feel comfortable including it here.
   
6. The editors did well in their quest to avoid the over-anthologized; eighteen of the stories were new to me.