Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction
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Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction
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Overview
For nearly half a century, feminist scholars, writers, and fans have successfully challenged the notion that science fiction is all about "boys and their toys," pointing to authors such as Mary Shelley, Clare Winger Harris, and Judith Merril as proof that women have always been part of the genre. Continuing this tradition, Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction offers readers a comprehensive selection of works by genre luminaries, including author C. L. Moore, artist Margaret Brundage, and others who were well known in their day, including poet Julia Boynton Green, science journalist L. Taylor Hansen, and editor Mary Gnaedinger. Providing insightful commentary and context, this anthology documents how women in the early twentieth century contributed to the pulp-magazine community and showcases the content they produced, including short stories, editorial work, illustrations, poetry, and science journalism. Yaszek and Sharp's critical annotation and author biographies link women's work in the early science fiction community to larger patterns of feminine literary and cultural production in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. In a concluding essay, the award-winning author Kathleen Ann Goonan considers such work in relation to the history of women in science and engineering and to the contemporary science fiction community itself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819576255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Series: | Early Classics of Science Fiction |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
LISA YASZEK is a professor and associate chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. PATRICK B. SHARP is a professor and chair in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.
Lisa Yaszek is a professor and associate chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
Patrick B. Sharp is a professor and chair in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
AUTHORS
In 1926 the Luxembourgian American inventor and publisher Hugo Gernsback released the inaugural issue of Amazing Stories, the first magazine dedicated exclusively to a new mode of storytelling: the "charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision" ("New" 3). In doing so, he set off a decades-long debate about the meaning and value of what would quickly become known as "science fiction" (SF). While editors made direct pronouncements on this subject, authors indirectly dramatized and refined such pronouncements through the creation of SF stories themselves. But even as the scores of women writers who joined the genre magazine community in its formative years enacted contemporary editorial visions of good SF, they invoked the representational strategies developed by earlier generations of popular women writers to critically assess the patriarchal impulses in modern science and imagine other, more egalitarian technocultural arrangements. In particular, they drew inspiration from women's work in Gothic, utopian, and domestic fiction to introduce into SF the new spaces and modes of interpersonal relations that, they insisted, would foster truly new and better futures for all. In doing so, they anticipated many of the themes and techniques that would be central to later traditions of postwar women's SF and contemporary feminist SF.
The women associated with Gernsback's publications were particularly adept at generating stories in line with his editorial vision. As his pronouncement in the first issue of Amazing Stories suggests, Gernsback believed that authors should infuse older genres of popular fiction writing — including the scientific romance, the utopia, the satire, the travel narrative, and even the Gothic — with "detailed explanations of current scientific knowledge and discoveries" as they might be applied in the future (Westfahl, Mechanics 39). This would enable authors to entertain a general reading audience, educate young people, and inspire scientists. Indeed, Gernsback directly cited Clare Winger Harris's Gothic-tinged "The Evolutionary Monstrosity" as an exemplar of SF that could educate young people and inspire scientists, reprinting alongside the tale the newspaper article about bacteria-based evolution that provoked Harris to write her story. Leslie F. Stone's "Out of the Void" and Lilith Lorraine's "Into the 28th Century" provided audiences with two other takeson the classic "charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision." While Stone wrote the kind of action-packed interplanetary adventure that readers loved, Lorraine depicted a high-tech utopian future much like the one imagined by Gernsback in his own 1911 serial novel, Ralph 124C 41+. These tales offered readers plenty of action and, for those who were interested, a dash of romance. But even as their protagonists grappled with domestic and alien threats (including their feelings for one another), they did so in ways meant to inspire scientists and social activists alike.
Even stories published by women in Amazing after Gernsback's departure from that magazine continued to reference his vision for the genre. Gernsback's successor, the retired natural history professor T. O'Conor Sloane, remained firmly committed to printing stories "founded on, or embodying always some touch of natural science" (qtd. in Westfahl, Mechanics 164). But he was more interested in established science than prophetic vision and downplayed the value of SF as an inspiration to scientists and engineers. Accordingly, in "The Man from Space," L. Taylor Hansen carefully avoids all reference to manned space flight (which Sloane believed was impossible), using the classic dream vision to move her characters from their earthbound science classroom to the depths of outer space. At the same time, she preserves the Gernsbackian belief in SF as science education by using her protagonists' adventures among the stars to make astronomy come alive for readers in ways that are both prompted by and in excess of the scientific lecture that inspires the narrator's dream.
Women also contributed to the development of SF in the multi-genre horror and fantasy magazine Weird Tales. Although neither Farnsworth Wright (who edited the magazine from 1924 to 1940) nor his successor, Dorothy McIlwraith, were particularly interested in SF per se, they recognized their audience's enthusiasm for it and so promised to print "the cream of weird-scientific fiction that is written today," especially as authors used the cosmic horror story, the laboratory monster tale, and the bizarre SF adventure to tell "tales of the spaces between the worlds, surgical stories, and stories that scan the future with the eye of prophecy" (qtd. in Weinberg, "Weird" 120). C. L. Moore's "Shambleau"— one of the most celebrated stories in SF history — blends elements of cosmic horror and the bizarre SF adventure to warn readers that the universe is large and complex and, as such, may not always be amenable to scientific scrutiny or technological control. In a related vein, Dorothy Quick's weird-scientific surgical story "Strange Orchids" demonstrates the potentially horrifying aspects of technoscientific intervention into the natural world. While Moore and Quick explore two very different aspects of the utopian engineering paradigm gone awry, both seek to unsettle readers with the lush descriptions of physical space and detailed depictions of characters' psychological reactions to untenable scientific truths that Wright attributed to "the cream of weird-scientific fiction."
Like their counterparts elsewhere in genre magazine fiction, women writing for Astounding Stories and the dozens of new magazines that sprung up in the 1940s embraced the editorial principles of their chosen literary homes. In the mid-1930s, F. Orlin Tremaine distinguished Astounding from its competitors with the introduction of the thought-variant story, whose "driving force was a speculative idea, rather than a gadget or a sequence of cliff-hangers" (James 49). While other SF editors, including Gernsback and Sloane, emphasized the natural sciences and engineering in their publications, Tremaine encouraged authors to draw from the social sciences to develop complex characters and detailed alien cultures. For example, Amelia Reynolds Long's 1937 Astounding publication "Reverse Phylogeny" extrapolates from ideas in anthropology and archaeology to flesh out descriptions of ancient human cultures that turn out to be just as strange as those that other SF authors imagine on alien worlds. In a similar vein, Leslie Perri's "Space Episode" and Dorothy Les Tina's "When You Think That ... Smile!"— both of which originally appeared in Robert A. W. Lowndes's Future Fiction — mobilize insights from psychology and sociology to dramatize characters' reactions to surprising new technocultural situations in outer space and the home, respectively. Taken together, Long, Perri, and Les Tina update some of the oldest tropes of speculative fiction — mesmerism, space flight, and telepathy — for modern audiences through the strategic use of this new story form and its associated writing techniques.
Women also contributed to the development of SF as a unique literary genre by drawing on the themes and techniques of popular women writers who came before them. In particular, many borrowed from their feminist predecessors in Gothic fiction to explore the inequities of patriarchal scientific practice. As Donna Heiland explains, "The stories of Gothic novels are always stories of transgression. The transgressive acts at the heart of Gothic fiction generally focus on corruption in, or resistance to, the patriarchal structures that [shape a] country's political life and its family life" (5). Much like Mary Shelley's Gothic SF tale Frankenstein, Harris's "The Evolutionary Monstrosity" and Quick's "Strange Orchids" demonstrate the danger of male scientists who tamper with natural "powers of reproduction" (Roberts 25). Meanwhile, C. L. Moore's "Shambleau" pays homage to the female Gothic as pioneered by Anne Radcliffe, who used her characters' encounters with the sublime as "an aesthetic that multiplies differences, and that therefore empowers rather than effaces women" (Heiland 5). As Moore's hypermasculine protagonist encounters a seemingly feminized Martian sublime, he — and, by extension, Moore's readers — are confronted with a set of differences that erode the patriarchal assumptions guiding some of early-twentieth-century America's most dearly held scientific and social beliefs.
Elsewhere, SF authors used the themes of feminist utopian writing to imagine better futures for all. Such authors were particularly indebted to works including Mary E. Bradley Lane's Mizora: A Prophecy (1881) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), in which women use advanced sciences and technologies to create "collective or mechanical alternatives" to traditional patterns of housework and childcare (Pfaelzer 50). This is evident in the human future of Lorraine's "Into the 28th Century" and the alien society of Stone's "Out of the Void," both of which show how new domestic technologies such as the production of chemically synthesized foods might free women to pursue "further education and ... public responsibilities" (Donawerth, "Science Fiction" 142). Additionally, Stone depicts her male and female humans as equitably sharing the domestic chores associated with shipboard life. Although they are faint, traces of the feminist utopian sensibility also inform Les Tina's "When You Think That ... Smile!" In this case, the scientific (or magical; Les Tina does not provide much detail) transformation of a masculine domestic ritual — pipe smoking — undermines masculine assumptions about marriage as an institution. In contrast to those utopian writers who made women's technoscientific discoveries central to their narratives, early SF authors such as Lorraine, Stone, and Les Tina usually displaced such discoveries into the deep past, focusing their prophetic vision instead on the potential benefits of such discoveries to both women as a specific group and humanity as a whole.
Whether they worked in Gothic or utopian variants of SF, women writing for the early genre magazine community insisted that the home could be just as exciting a space of technoscientific action as the laboratory or the alien frontier. Indeed, many authors followed the example of their literary predecessors by insisting that the private and public spheres are always interconnected. Harris and Quick, for example, underscore the connection between bad science and bad marriages by locating the laboratories of their mad scientists in isolated homes. Conversely, Lorraine and Stone link utopian change to the public transformation of private rituals such as mating and marriage. Although their stories seem radically different on first reading, both Moore and Les Tina insist that the incorporation of alien people and new technologies in the traditional home necessarily upsets conventional ideas about natural gender relations. In a similar vein, Perri and Stone explore how the new domestic spaces created by space flight might yield newly egalitarian social and sexual relations. Taken together, such authors used the experiences of women as technocultural subjects to expand the scope of what makes for good SF.
Women also contributed to the ongoing development of their chosen genre with the introduction of new voices. As Jane Donawerth explains, many women writing SF in this period followed the example of their male counterparts, using male narrators to appeal to what was then presumed to be a primarily male audience. At the same time, they used a variety of techniques to "subvert masculine dominance" in SF storytelling (Frankenstein's Daughters xxvii). Authors like Stone and Lorraine followed the tradition established by Shelley's Frankenstein of employing male narrators while introducing female points of view through letters, recordings, and other documents. While Stone's story uses a male narrator reading a female explorer's journal to convey her points about utopian social reform, Lorraine offers readers a more novel — and dizzying — experience by relating one woman's account of a future utopia founded by women through the letter that another woman publishes on behalf of her male nephew. SF authors also borrowed the technique pioneered by Charlotte Perkins Gilman of using male narrators to show how men might be converted to feminine and even feminist points of view as they encounter women from other times and places. This conversion story is central to Lorraine's "Into the 28th Century," prompting the male narrator to wonder how he might introduce utopian ideals in his own time, and to Les Tina's "When You Think That ... Smile!" in which the male narrator comes to a new appreciation of his marriage and his wife's role within it.
Women employed other techniques to convey their perspectives on science and society as well. For instance, in "Reverse Phylogeny," Long seizes on the emergent SF cliché of the humorously "absent-minded" and "benignly scatty or dotty scientist" to gently mock male scientific pride, especially as it fueled early-twentieth-century fascination with pseudoscience (Langford, "Mad"). While Long makes feminist arguments about science without employing a single female character, other authors did indeed use female narrators to make these arguments. Such stories appeared with some frequency in Weird Tales, where authors drew upon the rich history of the female Gothic to expose the failings of patriarchy through "the central figure [of] a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine" (Moers 91). Dorothy Quick's "Strange Orchids" embodies this tradition while updating it for twentieth-century audiences, using the female narrator's encounter with a mad scientist to critique the masculine appropriation of a feminized nature. These stories also appear, albeit less frequently, in SF specialist magazine tales such as Leslie Perri's "Space Episode," in which the female narrator realizes that true heroism entails breaking free of sex and gender stereotypes.
Finally, early women SF authors borrowed from a third tradition of nineteenth-century popular women's writing called domestic fiction to nuance science fictional representations of masculinity. As the literary critic Nina Baym explains, domestic tales such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (the 1851 novel that engendered the notion of the best seller) revolve around the adventures of an intelligent young woman who seeks agency in both the workplace and the home. Along the way, she earns the love of a man who is "solid, ethical, generous, frank, hardworking, energetic, an admirer and respecter of women who likes the heroine as much or more than he lusts for her" (Baym 41). Variations of this domestic hero appear frequently in early magazine SF. For example, both the gentleman soldier of Lorraine's "Into the 28th Century" and the flannel-suited businessman of Les Tina's "When You Think That ... Smile!" are hardworking but somewhat directionless men who find new political and domestic purpose in their encounters with intelligent, strong-willed women. In a related vein, Stone's "Out of the Void," Quick's "Strange Orchids," and to a lesser extent Harris's "The Evolutionary Monstrosity" relate the tale of dynamic women who fall in love, respectively, with a socially compassionate engineer, a confident government agent, and a mild-mannered biology professor, all of whom recognize women as extraordinary people involved in extraordinary adventures. Indeed, even the scheming aliens and mad scientists of these stories evince traces of domestic heroism in that they value these authors' heroines as much for their bravery and intelligence as for their beauty. As such, these stories demonstrate how women shaped the political and literary agendas of SF as a distinct popular genre.
Even as women helped create modern science fiction in its formative years by combining old story forms with new ones and updating earlier modes of women's popular fiction for the twentieth century, they identified themes and developed techniques that would remain central to later SF as well. The postwar era saw an influx of new women writers, including Judith Merril, Alice Eleanor Jones, and Anne McCaffrey, whose interest in the impact of science and technology on women as homemakers and caretakers fostered the development of women's SF. Like the first generation of women writing magazine SF, midcentury authors working in this new subgenre insisted that the home could be an exciting space of technoscientific action and that men could be domestic heroes who respected women's intellectual authority. Additionally, postwar women writers capitalized on an emergent trend seen in the work of their predecessors Dorothy Quick and Leslie Perri by narrating their stories from the perspective of women as both scientific and domestic subjects.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Plates
Acknowledgments
Introduction: New Work for New Women
1. AUTHORS
Clare Winger Harris—"The Evolutionary Monstrosity" (1929)
Leslie F. Stone—"Out of the Void" (1929)
Lilith Lorraine—"Into the 28th Century" (1930)
L. Taylor Hansen—"The Man from Space" (1930)
C. L. Moore—"Shambleau" (1933)
Dorothy Gertrude Quick—"Strange Orchids" (1937)
Amelia Reynolds Long—"Reverse Phylogeny" (1937)
Leslie Perri—"Space Episode" (1941)
Dorothy Louise Les Tina—"When You Think That... Smile!" (1943)
2. POETS
JULIA BOYNTON GREEN
"The Night Express" (1931)
"Evolution" (1931)
"Radio Revelations" (1932)
VIRGINIA KIDD
"Untitled" (1933)
LEAH BODINE DRAKE
"They Run Again" (1939)
"The Wood-Wife" (1942)
"Sea-Shell" (1943)
TIGRINA
"Defiance" (1945)
"Affinity" (1945)
LILITH LORRAINE
"Earthlight on the Moon" (1941)
"The Acolytes" (1946)
"Men Keep Strange Trysts" (1946)
3. JOURNALISTS
ELLEN REED, FRAN MILES, HENRIETTA BROWN, LYNN STANDISH, AND LAURA MOORE WRIGHT
Ellen Reed, "Natural Ink" (1942)
Fran Miles, "Oil for Bombing" (1944)
Henrietta Brown, "Marine Engineering in the Insect World" (1945)
Lynn Standish, "The Battle of the Sexes" (1943)
Lynn Standish, "Scientific Oddities" (1945)
Laura Moore Wright, "Sunlight" (1946)
L. TAYLOR HANSEN
"Scientific Mysteries: The White Race—Does It Exist?" (1942)
"Scientific Mysteries: Footprints of the Dragon" (1944)
H. Malamud, I. Berkman, and H. Rogovin, "A Protest" (1943)
L. Taylor Hansen, "L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself" (1943)
4. EDITORS
MARY GNAEDINGER
"Editorial Note" (1939)
"The Editor's Page" (1940)
"The Editor's Page" (1943)
DOROTHY STEVENS MCILWRAITH
"The Eyrie" (1940)
"The Eyrie" (1940)
"The Eyrie" (1941)
LILITH LORRAINE
"Cracks—Wise and Otherwise" (1943)
"Training for World Citizenship" (1946)
"The Story of Different" (1950)
5. ARTISTS
Olivette Bourgeois
Lucille Webster Holling
Margaret Johnson Brundage
Dorothy Louise Les Tina
Dolly Rackley Donnell
Conclusion: Challenging the Narrative, Or, Women Take Back Science Fiction—Kathleen Ann Goonan
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
“This brilliant multi-genre anthology traces the origins and influences of women writers, editors, and artists who found a home in early science-fiction magazines.”
“I hope Sisters of Tomorrow flies long and high.”
"An indispensable introduction, overview, and guide to women writers of sf in the pulps from 1929 to the 1940s, making available work previously only accessible to those with access to fast-disintegrating pulp magazines. No scholar of science fiction should be without this remarkable book."—Justine Larbalestier, author of Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction
"Lucid, meticulously researched, and engaging, providing early science-fiction writing from pioneering women in the field, and an excellent critical apparatus for framing these works within their respective historical contexts.""—Jane Donawerth, author of Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction
"I hope Sisters of Tomorrow flies long and high.""—Ursula Le Guin, winner of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
"This brilliant multi-genre anthology traces the origins and influences of women writers, editors, and artists who found a home in early science-fiction magazines.""—Lisa Swanstrom, Department of English, Florida Atlantic University
"An indispensable introduction, overview, and guide to women writers of sf in the pulps from 1929 to the 1940s, making available work previously only accessible to those with access to fast-disintegrating pulp magazines. No scholar of science fiction should be without this remarkable book."—Justine Larbalestier, author of Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction
“Lucid, meticulously researched, and engaging, providing early science-fiction writing from pioneering women in the field, and an excellent critical apparatus for framing these works within their respective historical contexts.”
“An indispensable introduction, overview, and guide to women writers of sf in the pulps from 1929 to the 1940s, making available work previously only accessible to those with access to fast-disintegrating pulp magazines. No scholar of science fiction should be without this remarkable book.”