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

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Elizabeth Mann Borgese (April 24, 1918–February 8, 2002) was born Elisabeth Mann in Munich, the fifth of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and Katia (Pringsheim) Mann’s six children. Fleeing Nazi Germany with her famous family, she finished her education at the Conservatory of Music in Zurich, where she studied piano and cello, and arrived in the United States in 1938. In 1939, she married literature professor Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, with whom she moved to Chicago and had two children. She became an American citizen in 1941 and made frequent public appearances throughout the 1940s, lecturing on subjects including European politics and “Women and the Future”; toward the end of the decade she became a proponent of world government, joining the Committee to Frame a World Constitution and editing its journal Common Cause. Her husband died in 1952.

While raising her daughters as a single parent, Borgese experimented with SF writing, placing three stories in SF magazines over the course of 1959. Although Borgese was known for her optimism and energy, most of her speculative tales are dark and pessimistic, revolving around near-future worlds whose dangerous scientific and technological arrangements are reflected in damaged human psyches and distorted human bodies. The most significant of these are collected in her 1960 anthology, To Whom It May Concern.

In 1963 Borgese published Ascent of Woman, which argued that sociological trends would eventually “produce superior women, men’s true equals.” Becoming a senior fellow at the Center for Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara in 1964, she began to focus on environmental issues facing the world’s oceans and the law of the sea. She organized the 1970 Pacem in Maribus Conference, which led to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; helped to establish the International Ocean Institute at the Royal University of Malta; and published The Drama of the Oceans (1975). She moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1978, taking Canadian citizenship, teaching political science at Dalhousie University, and writing subsequent books on maritime subjects. A global “Ambassador of the Seas,” she received numerous honorary degrees; was ordained a Member of the Order of Canada in 1988; and won Germany’s most prestigious award, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit, in 2001. Borgese died in St. Moritz, Switzerland, at eighty-three.

Leigh Brackett (December 7, 1915–March 18, 1978), known among SF fans as the “Queen of Space Opera,” was born Leigh C. Brackett in Los Angeles, California, the only child of Margaret (Douglass) Brackett and William Franklin Brackett, an accountant and aspiring writer. Her father died in 1918 during the flu pandemic and Brackett was raised by her mother and maternal grandparents in Santa Monica, where she attended a private girls’ school. Family financial difficulties forced her to decline a college scholarship.

Joining the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in 1939, Brackett published her first story, “Martian Quest,” in the February 1940 Astounding Science Fiction; by the end of World War II she had become a prolific contributor to SF magazines, including Astonishing Stories, Comet, Planet Stories, Super Science Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse (1944)—a work of detective fiction—attracted the attention of director Howard Hawks, who hired her to work with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman on the screenplay for The Big Sleep (1946), based on Raymond Chandler’s novel. Busy in Hollywood, she asked her friend Ray Bradbury to complete her novella “Lorelei of the Red Mist,” published jointly in 1946. The same year, she married author Edmond Hamilton, moving with him to rural Kinsman, Ohio.

Brackett began publishing novel-length SF with “Shadow over Mars” in the Fall 1944 issue of Startling Stories; it appeared in book form in 1951. She followed this with The Starmen (1952), The Sword of Rhiannon (1953), The Big Jump (1955), The Long Tomorrow (1955), The Galactic Breed (1955), Alpha Centauri or Die! (1963), The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976). At the same time, she published crime novels, Westerns, and other fiction, and earned screenwriting credit for Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1966), Rio Lobo (1970), and The Long Goodbye (1973). Several of her own works—including the crime novels An Eye for an Eye (1957) and The Tiger Among Us (1957)—were adapted for television. Brackett also famously collaborated on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back (1980, with Lawrence Kasdan), completing an early draft shortly before her death. The Best of Leigh Brackett, edited by Edmond Hamilton, was published in 1977, just one year before Brackett died of lung cancer in Lancaster, California. Since her death, Brackett’s contributions to the development of SF as a modern genre have been recognized in the form of a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (The Empire Strikes Back, 1981), a Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, and induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (2014).

Marion Zimmer Bradley (June 3, 1930–September 25, 1999) was born Marion Eleanor Zimmer on a farm near Albany, New York. Her parents Evelyn P. (Conklin) Zimmer and Leslie R. Zimmer, a truck driver and carpenter, later had two sons.

As a child, Bradley enjoyed reading SF and fantasy authors Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, C. L. Moore, and Leigh Brackett (the latter two of whom are also featured in this anthology). At seventeen, she began writing for, illustrating, and publishing the fanzine Astra’s Tower; contributors included her younger brother Leslie and her future husband Robert Alden Bradley, more than thirty years her senior, whom she married in 1949 after an epistolary courtship. Leaving upstate New York for Abilene, Texas, she had a son, David, in 1950; she also started publishing professionally, winning an Amazing Stories contest for “Outpost” in December 1949 and selling “Women Only” to Vortex Science Fiction in 1953. The first novels in her multivolume Darkover series appeared in magazine form in the late 1950s, to be published separately early in the next decade: Falcons of Narabedla (1964) and The Planet Savers (1962). Her first separately published novel, Lesbian Love (1960), was one of eight lesbian pulps she is known to have written from 1960 to 1966 under pseudonyms including Marlene Longman, Lee Chapman, Miriam Gardner, Morgan Ives, and John Dexter. She collected her early stories in The Dark Intruder & Other Stories (1964).

Bradley graduated from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene in 1964 and headed to Berkeley, California, to continue her education in psychology. She divorced her first husband and married numismatist Walter H. Breen in Marin, California, the same year; they had two children, Patrick in 1964 and Moira in 1966. Along with future literary collaborator Diana L. Paxson, she is credited with helping to found the Society for Creative Anachronism on May Day, 1966. In 1981, along with Paxson and others, she incorporated the Center for Non-Traditional Religion in Berkeley. Bradley was well-known for her active interest in SF and fantasy fandom, coediting a number of fanzines, publishing her own Lord of the Rings fan fiction, and encouraging fans to write stories in her own Darkover universe (a practice she ended when she found herself in a skirmish with a fan over intellectual property issues).

Moving to Staten Island, New York, in 1968, Bradley edited the influential anthology series Sword and Sorceress (1984–99) and began the magazine Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy (1988–99), serving as editor and publisher. In 1984, she received the Locus Award for Best Novel for her bestselling Arthurian fantasy, The Mists of Avalon (1983), and in 2000 she posthumously won a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Dying of a heart attack in Berkeley at sixty-nine, she was credited as the author of over six dozen novels.

For many years Bradley was best remembered for The Mists of Avalon. However, posthumous allegations of child abuse have muddied her reputation. Bradley divorced Walter H. Breen in 1990 following his arrest on child sex abuse charges for which he was later imprisoned; they had separated earlier, in 1979, but remained business partners and friends. Having helped to edit Breen’s pseudonymously published treatise Greek Love in 1964, Bradley was certainly aware of her husband’s theoretical advocacy of pedophilia. In 1963–64, the SF community debated the exclusion of Breen on related grounds from Pacificon II, in what became known as “Breendoggle.” In 2014, Bradley’s daughter Moira Greyland accused Bradley of abusing her and her younger brother; in 2017 she published The Last Closet, a memoir of her childhood.

Rosel George Brown (March 15, 1926–November 26, 1967), born Rosel George in New Orleans, Louisiana, was the second of Sam and Elizabeth Rightor George’s three children; she grew up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and New Orleans, where her father worked as a nurseryman. Graduating from Sophie Newcomb College in 1946 with a degree in ancient Greek, she married Tulane student and returning veteran W. Burlie Brown the following year. Continuing her education in the classics at the University of Minnesota, she specialized in fifth-century Greece, a lifelong interest, and began writing a life of Alcibiades. Returning to New Orleans, where her husband joined the history department at Tulane, she had two daughters (in 1954 and 1959) and worked as a teacher and welfare visitor.

Brown’s first published story, “From an Unseen Censor,” appeared in Galaxy in September 1958; that same year, she received a Hugo nomination for the best new SF or fantasy author. Brown went on to publish nearly two dozen more speculative stories in the next five years, many of which were featured in her 1963 collection, A Handful of Time. She was a charter member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and in 1966 she published two novels, Earthblood (in collaboration with Keith Laumer) and Sibyl Blue Sue (retitled Galactic Sibyl Blue Sue for the paperback edition), the latter featuring a future-detective main character Judith Merril described as “the swingingest mama since—well, since.”

Brown’s promising career was tragically cut short when she died at forty-one of lymphoma. As Daniel F. Galouye recalls in his memorial piece from Nebula Award Stories (1969), Brown was a “crisp stylist” whose signal accomplishment was the production of short stories “rich in emotion and satirical content” while the character of Sibyl Blue Sue was “a landmark in science fiction” that underscored Brown’s “skill at cloaking unconventional protagonists with vividly drawn credibility.” The Waters of Centaurus, a sequel to Sibyl Blue Sue, was published posthumously in 1970.

Doris Pitkin Buck (January 3, 1898–December 4, 1980) started her career as a writer of speculative fiction relatively late in life, publishing her first story—“Aunt Agatha,” in the October 1952 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—at fifty-four. She was born in New York City, where her father Lucius Pitkin owned a chemical and metallurgical consulting laboratory. Though he hoped someday to rename his firm “Pitkin and Daughter” and hand it down, she studied literature instead, graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1920 and teaching at the Brearley School in Manhattan while completing her master’s degree in English at Columbia in 1925. Marrying architect Richard S. Buck Jr. in 1926, she moved with her husband to Columbus, Ohio, where both taught at Ohio State; in 1932 she had a son. The family relocated to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1940s, where she joined the Little Theatre of Alexandria and wrote a radio play, “Wish Upon a Star” (1944).

Buck contributed dozens of stories and poems to genre magazines before her death in 1980. While she was most closely associated with the literary experiments of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, she was proud of her status as a scientist’s daughter who did careful research for her art. As she told The Washington Post in 1963, “real science fiction is based on science.” Her short story, “The Little Blue Weeds of Spring,” made the first ballot for the 1967 Nebula Awards and her short story “Cacophony in Pink and Ochre” is one of the stories slated to appear in Harlan Ellison’s still-unpublished Last Dangerous Visions anthology.

Buck actively contributed to the development of the modern SF community in other ways as well. She helped found the Science Fiction Writers of America (now the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) and was a regular participant at the Milford Writers’ Conference, an annual SF event organized by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm. She also wrote articles on traveling and gardening and, with her husband, on landscaping and remodeling. She died at eighty-two in a Hyattsville, Maryland, nursing home. A final poem, “Travel Tip,” appeared posthumously in the June 1981 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Mildred Clingerman (March 14, 1918–February 26, 1997) was born Mildred McElroy in Allen, Oklahoma, the first of two daughters of Arthur McElroy, a railroad construction superintendent, and Meda (Bush) McElroy, who worked for a mining company boardinghouse; her parents divorced in 1925. Raised in Iowa, Missouri, California, Texas, and New Mexico, she moved to Arizona with her mother and sister in 1929, attending Tucson High School. She married Stuart Clingerman, a wholesale milkman and later construction project manager, in 1937, and had a son and daughter in 1940 and 1942, attending the University of Arizona in 1941. During World War II, while her husband served as an army paratrooper, she worked at a Tucson flight training school. In subsequent decades she was active in the Tucson Writer’s Club and the Tucson Press Club.

Clingerman noted late in her career that she had “firmly kept [her] writing life secondary to other joys,” calling it “an avocation,” but she was relatively productive, publishing almost two dozen works of speculative short fiction from 1952 to 1975, most in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 1958, Anthony Boucher dedicated the seventh volume of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction to her, calling Clingerman “the most serendipitous of discoveries.” She also published speculative fiction in mainstream magazines, including Collier’s and Woman’s Home Companion, and at least one story in a local paper, the Arizona Daily Star; additionally she contributed nongenre fiction to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Good Housekeeping. A collection of her stories, A Cupful of Space, appeared in 1961. Clingerman died of heart failure at seventy-eight, in McKinney, Texas, and received a posthumous Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2014. The Clingerman Files: Collected Works, containing previously uncollected and unpublished stories, appeared in 2017.

Sonya Dorman (June 4, 1924–February 14, 2005), born Sonya Gloria Hess in New York City, was raised by foster parents on a farm in West Newbury, Massachusetts; her mother, a dancer and model, died while she was an infant. Unable to afford more than a year of agricultural college, she worked as a stablehand, maid, fish canner, riding instructor, and tuna boat cook while giving herself an education, reading widely in world literature. After a brief first marriage in 1945–46, she married Jack Dorman, an engineer, in 1950, and had a daughter, Sherri, in 1959. Moving from Stony Point, New York, to West Mystic and then New London, Connecticut, during the 1970s, the family bred Akitas and other dogs and exhibited at dog shows.

Dorman published approximately two dozen SF stories from 1961 to 1980, gathering three of these as a young adult novel, Planet Patrol, in 1978; she also published fiction in The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, and other nonspecialist magazines. Dorman was particularly associated with SF’s New Wave of edgy, experimental writing, and indeed, her short story “Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird” was featured in Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking Dangerous Visions anthology (1967). Her experimental novel “Onyx” was rejected by publishers in 1971, but her collected Poems appeared in 1970, followed by Palace of Earth (1984), Constellations of the Inner Eye (1991), Carrying What You Love (1996), and other volumes of poetry. She moved to Taos, New Mexico, after her divorce in 1986, publishing once again under her maiden name, and died there at eighty. Dorman’s recognition from the SF community includes a 1978 Science Fiction Poetry Association Rhysling Award for “The Corruption of Metals” and a 1995 James Tiptree, Jr. retroactive award for “When I Was Miss Dow” (1966, reprinted in this anthology).

Carol Emshwiller (b. April 12, 1921) was born Agnes Carolyn Fries in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the eldest of Charles and Agnes (Carswell) Fries’s four children. Growing up, she spent several years in France and Germany while her father, a professor of En­glish and linguistics, was on sabbatical. Graduating from the University of Michigan with a BA in music in 1945, she joined the Red Cross, aiding U.S. troops in postwar Italy, then returned to Ann Arbor for art school. She married fellow art student Ed Emshwiller in 1949. Together, they attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (1949–50), toured Europe on a motorcycle, and eventually settled in Levittown, New York, where they had three children, in 1955, 1957, and 1959.

Emshwiller began publishing SF in the mid-1950s, after being introduced to key people within the genre by her husband, who became one of the principal genre artists of the era. During the 1960s, Emshwiller and her husband expanded their circle to include avant-garde musicians, painters, poets, and filmmakers—as she put it, “we were enmeshed. Embedded. Passionate about that sixties world and nothing else.” Not surprisingly, her experimental stories were often associated with SF’s New Wave, and at the 1962 Hugo Awards she received an honorable mention for her short story “Adapted”—the first of many such honors she would accumulate in subsequent decades.

In 1974 Emshwiller became an adjunct assistant professor at New York University and published her first story collection, Joy in Our Cause. She has continued to publish almost nonstop since then. Her novels include Carmen Dog (1998), The Mount (2002), Mister Boots (2005), and The Secret City (2007). Her contemporary, Ursula K. Le Guin, praised her as a “major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction”; to date, Emshwiller has won one World Fantasy Award, one Philip K. Dick Award, two Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 2005). Since her husband’s death in 1990, she has divided her time between New York City and Owens Valley, California.

Alice Glaser (December 3, 1928–August 22, 1970) was born in New York City and raised on Long Island by her father, a Russian-born lawyer, and her mother, a homemaker from Pittsburgh. At Woodmere High School, from which she graduated in 1946, she worked on the student Bulletin and won praise for her poetry; at Radcliffe, she wrote a senior thesis on Joseph Conrad. Afterwards she moved to Paris, working at various U.S. government agencies, marrying and divorcing Jean-Paul Surmain, and finding friends in the expatriate SF community. Returning to New York in 1958, she began a career at Esquire magazine, rising to assistant and then associate editor during the 1960s.

At Esquire, Glaser solicited articles and stories (some from SF writers, including Fritz Leiber) and contributed articles of her own; her best known, an account of a week spent in India with Allen Ginsberg, appeared in 1963 as “Back on the Open Road for Boys.” “The Tunnel Ahead,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1961, is her only known work of speculative fiction. “The Tunnel Ahead” is one of the most frequently anthologized of modern SF stories, and in 2016 Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal (director of the critically acclaimed Trollhunter, 2010) released a short film adaptation of it that went on to win the prize for Best Overall Short Film at the Calgary International Film Festival. Glaser also reviewed books for the Chicago Tribune and is said to have written a roman à clef about life at Esquire. She died after a fall, reportedly by suicide, at forty-one.

Clare Winger Harris (January 18, 1891–October 26, 1968) is credited as the first woman to publish fiction under her own name in the SF specialist magazines of the 1920s. She was born Clare M. Winger in Freeport, Illinois. Her mother, Mary Stover Winger, was the daughter of the town’s richest man (inventor and industrialist D. C. Stover), and her father, Frank S. Winger, was an electrical contractor and SF writer who published The Wizard of the Island; or, The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger in 1917. As a child, Harris “preferred… the stories of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells” to more conventional girls’ fare. Graduating from Lake View High School in Chicago in 1910, she entered Smith College, but married in 1912 before completing her degree. She travelled in Europe and the Middle East, then went with her husband Frank Clyde Harris to California and Kansas, where he finished his education in architecture and engineering and where, in 1915, 1916, and 1918, she had three sons.

After moving with her family to Fairfield, Iowa, Harris published a historical novel, Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece (1923), and her first SF story, “A Runaway World,” in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales. “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” published in June 1927, earned Harris third place (and $100) in a contest organized by Amazing Stories publisher Hugo Gernsback and secured her place as a leading voice in the genre. “The Ape Cycle,” which appeared in the Spring 1930 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly, was her last-known story but she continued to actively participate in the SF community; her August 1931 letter to the editors at Wonder Stories, entitled “Possible Science Fiction Plots,” constitutes one of the earliest pieces of SF criticism.

By the time of the 1940 census, Harris was divorced and living in Pasadena, California. Gathering eleven of her works in the self-published volume Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science in 1947, she noted that her sons had “inherited their mother’s love of science” and produced a “third generation of scientists” in the form of three grandchildren. Away from the Here and Now earned Harris one of the very first genre awards, granted to her by the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. About a year before her death at seventy-seven, Harris inherited one-quarter of her grandfather’s estate, valued in excess of two million dollars. It was contested in the courts for almost sixty years.

Zenna Henderson (November 1, 1917–May 11, 1983) was born Zena Chlarson in Tucson, Arizona (she began spelling her name “Zenna” in the early 1950s), the second of five children; her mother Emily Vernell (Rowley) Chlarson, a housekeeper for a private family, had emigrated from Mexico in 1912 after the destruction of Colonia Díaz, a Mormon settlement, and her father, Louis Rudolph Chlarson, worked as a chauffeur, railroad carpenter, and dairyman. A graduate of Phoenix Union High School and Arizona State Teachers’ College, Henderson had a lifelong career as a teacher, mostly of elementary school children in the Tucson area. However, she also taught at the Gila River Relocation Center, an internment camp for Japanese Americans (1942–43); on a U.S. military base in France (1956–58); and at Seaside Children’s Hospital in Waterford, Connecticut (1958–59). She married Richard H. Henderson, a miner, in 1944, divorcing him in 1951 and subsequently completing her master’s degree at Arizona State.

Henderson published her first SF story, “Come On, Wagon!,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December 1951 and was quickly singled out for praise by Sam Merwyn in an essay celebrating what was then seen as a new boom of women SF writers. In 1959, her long story “Captivity” received a Hugo nomination. She is most widely remembered for “The People,” a series of stories first published from 1952 to 1980 about a group of humanoid aliens stranded on Earth who represent our better selves. Along with Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (1966), Henderson’s short fiction is collected in The Anything Box (1965) and Holding Wonder (1971). The People, a made-for-TV movie based on her series of the same name and starring Kim Darby and William Shatner, was released in 1972. Ingathering: The Complete People Stories (1995), including previously uncollected material, was published after Henderson’s death in Tucson, at the age of sixty-five.

Alice Eleanor Jones (March 30, 1916–November 6, 1981) was born in Philadelphia, where her father, Henry Stayton Jones worked, as a photoengraver for a publishing firm and her mother, Lucy A. (Schuler) Jones, stayed home to raise Jones and her sister. Jones graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1936, continuing her education in the English department, from which she earned her PhD in 1944, writing a dissertation on the seventeenth-century dramatist Shakerly Marmion. She married fellow graduate student Homer Nearing Jr. and moved with him to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. They had two sons, Geoffrey and Gregory, in 1944 and 1948.

Jones had an intense but brief career as a writer of speculative fiction, publishing five stories in genre magazines from April to December 1955. In April of 1955, she published her first short story, “Life, Incorporated,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under her maiden name. In June of the same year, Jones published “Created He Them,” her most successful speculative fiction work. Somewhat ironically—given that “Created He Them” details the deprivations suffered by an average housewife in the wake of World War III—Jones used the first check from that story to go on a shopping spree, buying herself “an extra special dress, the sort that wives of professors normally only look at in shops.”

Jones focused her subsequent literary energies on better-paying mainstream publications, including Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Woman’s Day, American Girl, and Seventeen, to which she contributed both fiction and nonfiction well into the 1960s. She died in 1981 and is buried in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Her stories are now available in podcast form at Strange Horizons.

Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018), born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California, was the daughter of Theodora (Kracaw) Kroeber, an anthropology student and later a writer, and Alfred Kroeber, head of the University of California anthropology department; she had three older brothers and stepbrothers, with whom she spent summers on the family’s small ranch in the Napa Valley. At ten or eleven she submitted one of her early literary productions to Astounding Science Fiction, of which she was a devoted reader.

Graduating from Berkeley High School in 1947, Le Guin attended Radcliffe College and then Columbia University, from which she earned a master’s degree in Renaissance French and Italian Language and Literature in 1952. The following year, on the way to France as a Fulbright scholar to pursue her doctorate, she met fellow Fulbright recipient Charles Alfred Le Guin, and they married in Paris. Returning to the U.S., both began teaching, first at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia (he in the history department, she in French), then at the University of Idaho. Settling permanently in Portland, Oregon, they raised three children, born in 1957, 1959, and 1964, respectively.

Le Guin’s first published works—“Folksong from the Montayna Province” (Prairie Poet, Fall 1959) and “An die Musik” (Western Humanities Review, Summer 1961)—began her series set in the fictional European nation of Orsinia, later expanded with the story collection Orsinian Tales (1976) and the novel Malafrena (1979). She began to appear in genre magazines with the time-travel story “April in Paris,” in the September 1962 Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and published her first SF novel, Rocannon’s World, in 1966.

Le Guin’s subsequent works include the multiple-award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), and Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990); story collections The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), The Compass Rose (1982), Changing Planes (2003), and others; and collections of essays and poetry. In 1993, with Brian Attebery, she edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990. Le Guin’s accomplishments have long been recognized by her peers: in 1975 she was named the sixth Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy; in 1989 the Science Fiction Research Association granted her a Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement; in 2001 she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2003 she became the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s twentieth Grand Master. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017, before her death in Portland Le Guin was revising and adding new material to her 1985 novel Always Coming Home, for a new edition in the Library of America series.

Katherine MacLean (b. January 22, 1925) was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and raised in Flushing, New York. She was the daughter of chemical engineer Gordon MacLean and homemaker Ruth (Crawford) MacLean, who raised her along with two older brothers. Beginning in high school, MacLean worked at a wide variety of jobs, including “nurse’s aide, store detective, pollster, econ graph-analyst, antibiotic lab researcher, food factory quality controller, office manager, payroll bookkeeper, college teacher, reporter.” After a brief first marriage to Charles Dye, she married David Mason, with whom she had a son in 1957.

MacLean published her first short story, “Defense Mechanism,” in the October 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction while she was still an economics undergraduate at Barnard and working part-time as a lab technician. By the time her first collection, The Diploids, appeared in 1962 she had over two dozen stories in print, many of which were celebrated for their innovative adaptation of ideas from the hard sciences and for their celebration of the social sciences. Along with a second story collection, The Trouble with You Earth People (1980), she is the author of four novels: Cosmic Checkmate (1962, with Charles V. De Vet), The Man in the Bird Cage (1971), Missing Man (1975), and Dark Wing (1979, with Carl West).

In the late 1960s, MacLean moved to Maine to care for her invalid mother, and in 1979 she married fellow SF author Carl P. West. She currently lives near Portland, Maine. The quality of Mac­Lean’s work has long been recognized by the SF community: in 1962 fellow author and editor Damon Knight noted that “as a science fiction writer, [MacLean] has few peers”; and in 1971 she won a Nebula Award for her novella “Missing Man.” She was the professional Guest of Honor at the first WisCon, held in 1977 (WisCon is the largest and oldest feminist SF convention in the world), and in 2003 she was honored by the Science Fiction Writers of America as Author Emeritus. In 2011, she received the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

Judith Merril (January 21, 1923–September 12, 1997) was the principal pseudonym under which Judith Josephine Grossman published stories, novels, and criticism beginning in 1947. Born in Boston, she moved to the Bronx after her freshman year in high school; her father Samuel Solomon (“Shlomo”) Grossman, a columnist and drama critic for a Yiddish newspaper, had committed suicide when she was six, and her mother Ethel (Hurwitch) Grossman had accepted a job running a settlement house for juvenile offenders. Graduating in 1939, she met Dan Zissman at a Trotskyist Youth picnic the following year. They married and in 1942 had a daughter, Merril, who was raised during her infancy on military bases across the country.

Moving to Greenwich Village after the war, Merril became one of the few female members of the Futurians (the men included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, C. M. Kornbluth, and Frederik Pohl; other women included Leslie Perri and Virginia Kidd). She published a SF fanzine, TEMPER!, and contributed two stories under her married name to Crack Detective. Separated in 1946, she turned to writing and editing to support herself and her daughter, working briefly for Bantam Books and selling more than a dozen sports stories, under the pseudonyms Eric Thorstein and Ernest Hamilton, to pulp magazines. Her first SF story, “That Only a Mother” (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1948), was her first publication as Judith Merril and was written to win a bet with Astounding editor John W. Campbell, who claimed that women couldn’t write SF good enough to appear in his magazine. Not only did Merril win that bet, but “That Only a Mother” has gone on to be one of the most widely anthologized SF stories since its initial appearance.

Merril collected her subsequent short fiction in Out of Bounds (1960), Daughters of Earth (1968), Survival Ship and Other Stories (1974), and The Best of Judith Merril (1976). Her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth (1950)—adapted for television in 1954 as Atomic Attack—was followed by The Tomorrow People in 1960. She also wrote two novels in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth, Gunner Cade and Outpost Mars; both appeared in 1952 under the joint pseudonym Cyril Judd. Along with these works, Merril was a prolific reviewer and edited SF anthologies, including Shot in the Dark (1950), England Swings SF (1968), and the annual series S–F: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy (1956–68).

Married to Frederik Pohl from 1948 to 1953, Merril had a second daughter, Ann, in 1950. She later cofounded and served on the board of the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference (1956–60) and in 1960 married union organizer Dan Sugrue, separating three years later. In 1968, after a year in England, she immigrated to Canada, joining the staff of Rochdale College in Toronto and helping to organize the Committee to Aid Refugees from Militarism (CARM). Her private book collection, donated to the Toronto Public Library in 1970 to form the “Spaced Out Library,” became the nucleus of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, now numbering over 70,000 volumes. She died in Toronto of heart failure the same year she became a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Author Emeritus. Her posthumously published autobiography, Better to Have Loved (2003), earned a Hugo Award for Best Related Book, and in 2013 she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

C. L. Moore (January 24, 1911–April 4, 1987), the eldest child of Indiana natives Otto Moore and Maude Jones Moore, was born Catherine Lucille Moore in Indianapolis, where her father was an inventor and mechanical engineer. An often sickly child “reared on a diet of Greek mythology, Oz books, and Edgar Rice Burroughs,” she entered Indiana University in 1929, publishing stories in The Vagabond, a student magazine, but left in the middle of her sophomore year. Working as a stenographer in an Indianapolis bank through the Great Depression, she began to sell her stories; the first, “Shambleau,” appeared in Weird Tales in November 1933. (Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright was reportedly so impressed upon receiving it that he closed his offices for the day in celebration.) Moore continued to write stories featuring “Sham­bleau” protagonist Northwest Smith (a swashbuckling rogue adventurer who went on to inspire characters including Han Solo) while publishing a series of sword-and-sorcery tales featuring the first female protagonist in that subgenre, Jirel of Joiry.

Moore’s work attracted an admiring letter in 1936 from aspiring author Henry Kuttner, who addressed her as “Mr. Moore.” The confusion was soon cleared up and the two married in 1940, thereby initiating a prolific, collaborative literary relationship. Using pennames including Lewis Padgett, C. H. Liddell, and Lawrence O’Donnell, Moore and Kuttner published dozens of stories (including mystery, detective, and suspense as well as speculative fiction) and several novels. They also completed their undergraduate degrees in English, at the University of Southern California, in 1954.

Separately, Moore published the novels Judgment Night (1952) and Doomsday Morning (1957) and was nominated for a Hugo Award for her 1955 novella “Home There’s No Returning.” After Kuttner’s death in 1958, she turned to television writing, completing scripts for Tales of Frankenstein (1958), The Alaskans (1959), 77 Sunset Strip (1960), and Maverick (1961). In 1963 she married businessman Thomas Reggie. In 1981, the onset of Alzheimer’s disease prevented her from personally accepting the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. She died at seventy-six in Hollywood, California, and was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. In 2004 she posthumously received the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

Andrew North (February 17, 1912–March 17, 2005) was a pseudonym SF author Andre Norton used occasionally in the 1940s and 1950s. Born Alice Mary Norton and taking the name “Andre” with the publication of her first novel in 1934, she was the younger of two daughters of Adalbert Freely Norton, a carpet salesman, and Daisy Bertha (Stemm) Norton. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she graduated from Collingwood High School, where she edited the literary page of The Collingwood Spotlight, and spent a year at Western Reserve University. Leaving school in 1931 in the wake of the Great Depression, she took a job as a children’s librarian at the Cleveland Public Library, where she remained, with a brief hiatus in 1940–41 as an archivist at the Library of Congress and as the owner of an independent bookstore, until 1950. Forced by disability to retire (she suffered from what she described as “continuing attacks of vertigo”), she supported herself, working from bed, as an editorial reader for the SF specialist Gnome Press (c. 1952–58), and eventually with her own fiction.

Norton began her notably prolific literary career as a writer of boys’ adventure stories, publishing The Prince Commands (1934), Ralestone Luck (1938), and several other novels. She first turned to SF with “The People of the Crater,” featured on the cover of Fantasy Book in July 1947, and with the novel Star Man’s Son: 2250 A.D. (1952). Her novel Witch World (1963) is perhaps her best known; the fictional universe that it began ultimately included dozens of novels and stories, many coauthored and some completed posthumously.

In 1966, Norton moved to Winter Park, Florida, with her mother, with whom she lived for most of her life. In 1997, after her mother’s death, she relocated to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where she founded High Hallack, a retreat and research library for genre writers. Norton was the first woman to win the Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy Award and the Nebula Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Science Fiction Writers of America. She was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement three times and won it in 1998. She was also nominated twice for the Hugo Award. She died of congestive heart failure; in lieu of a funeral, she was cremated with copies of her first and last novels. In 2005 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America established the annual Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy in her honor.

Leslie Perri (April 27, 1920–January 31, 1970) was born Doris Marie Claire (“Doë”) Baumgardt in Brooklyn, New York, to German-immigrant bank manager Fritz Perri and housewife Marie Baumgardt. She joined the Science Fiction League and then the Futurian Society (whose members included Judith Merril, Virginia Kidd, Frederik Pohl, and Isaac Asimov) in New York while still a teenager. She attended the first Worldcon in 1939 and helped to circulate fanzines as a founding member of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association. During her brief first marriage (1940–42) to fellow Futurian Frederik Pohl, Perri edited (and reportedly largely wrote) the romance pulp Movie Love Stories. Later, she had a daughter (1944–?) by her second husband, the painter Thomas Owens, and a son by her third (1951–65), the former Futurian Richard Wilson.

Baumgardt took on the penname Leslie Perri when she began writing, illustrating, editing, and otherwise contributing to SF fandom in the late 1930s. She is credited as the author of numerous sketches and short items in fanzines, including Future Art, Futurian News, Le Vombiteur Literaire, Mind of Man, Mutant, and Fantasy Fictioneer. During this time, Perri also published three professional SF stories, the first of which was “Space Episode” for the December 1941 issue of Future Combined with Science Fiction. “Space Episode” provoked a great deal of controversy with its depiction of a heroic female astronaut who sacrifices her life to save her male companions: predictably, women found the story compelling and realistic while male readers dismissed it as sour grapes (and editor Donald Wollheim happily fanned the flames of controversy). Moving from Brooklyn to New City, New York, Perri worked intermittently as a journalist while raising her children. She died of cancer at forty-nine.

Kit Reed (June 7, 1932–September 24, 2017) was born Lillian Hyde Craig in San Diego, California; her infant nickname “Kitten” was later shortened to “Kit.” The only surviving child of naval officer John R. Craig and teacher Lillian (Hyde) Craig, she grew up on and around military bases in Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, and elsewhere. After her father’s death in 1943 (he was lost at sea in the Pacific as lieutenant commander of the submarine USS Grampus), she attended high schools in Florida, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., and in 1954 graduated from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. She married Joseph Reed Jr. in 1955 while working as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times. Her salary at the New Haven Register, where she won awards for her reporting on the juvenile justice system, helped to put her husband through graduate school. Moving to Middletown, Connecticut, in the early 1960s, the couple had three children; both taught at Wesleyan University for most of the rest of their lives.

Reed’s earliest-known SF story, “Space Traveler,” appeared in the Sunday magazine of the St. Petersburg Times in July 1955. “The Wait,” published in the April 1958 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, set her on a professional writing career that ultimately included almost a dozen story collections, more than a dozen novels, and occasional nonfiction as well. Principally known as a writer of speculative fiction, she published works in a variety of genres, including the comic novel Mother Isn’t Dead, She’s Only Sleeping (1961), psychological thrillers under the pseudonym (a variation of her maiden name) Kit Craig, and the horror novel Blood Fever (1986, as Shelley Hyde). She died in Los Angeles at eighty-five of an inoperable brain tumor. Reed’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a five-year grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, three nominations for the James Tiptree, Jr., Award, and the Young Adult Library Services Alex Award (for her 2005 novel Thinner Than Thou).

Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937–April 29, 2011), often cited as the author of the landmark feminist SF novel The Female Man (1975), was also a prolific reviewer and essayist and published several collections of short fiction, including Alyx (1976), The Zanzibar Cat (1983), Extra(ordinary) People (1984), and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1988). Born Joanna Ruth Russ in the Bronx to public school teachers Evarett and Bertha (Zinner) Russ, she demonstrated early aptitude in the sciences (becoming a finalist in the 1953 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for her project “Growth of Certain Fungi Under Colored Light and in Darkness”) but turned to literature at Cornell, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov and published in undergraduate magazines. After college, she attended the Yale School of Drama, earning an MFA in playwriting in 1960, and began a career as an English professor at Queensborough Community College in New York.

Russ read SF as a teenager because it promised a world “where things could be different,” and sold her first SF story, “Nor Custom Stale,” while still in graduate school. In 1963 she married journalist Albert Amateau and then in 1967 divorced him. During this period Russ established herself as a leading voice in SF’s New Wave, one who embraced the radical politics of her time—especially its feminist variants—and who wove it into her stories accordingly. As she noted in a letter to Susan Koppelman, Russ saw anger as an important part of both politics and art, noting that “from now on, I will not trust anyone who isn’t angry.” While some members of the SF community were uneasy with Russ’s political views, others recognized the innovative nature of her fiction, and in 1968 she received a Hugo nomination for her first novel, Picnic on Paradise, which follows the adventures of a female mercenary named Alyx. Alyx (who stars in Russ’s “The Barbarian,” featured in this anthology) is both an homage to C. L. Moore’s groundbreaking 1940s adventuress Jirel of Joiry (also featured in this anthology, in the story “The Black God’s Kiss”) and the template for nearly every strong female protagonist in contemporary SF.

Teaching subsequently at Cornell, SUNY Binghamton, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Washington (from which she retired in ill health in the 1990s), Russ published influential feminist literary criticism (including How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) and To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995) alongside her fiction. Her story “When It Changed” won a 1973 Nebula Award; “Souls” received both Hugo and Locus Awards in 1983. In 1995, Russ received retrospective Tiptree Awards (for the best explorations of sex and gender in speculative fiction) for “When It Changed” and The Female Man. She died in Tucson after a series of strokes, and was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and named a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master. Her papers are archived at the University of Oregon.

Margaret St. Clair (February 17, 1911–November 22, 1995) was born Eva Margaret Neeley in Hutchinson, Kansas. The only child of Eva Margaret (Hostetler) Neeley and George Neeley, a recently elected congressman, she spent some of her early years in Washington, D.C. When her father died of influenza in 1919, St. Clair moved with her mother to Lawrence, Kansas, and then, in 1928, to Los Angeles, where she finished high school. She married Raymond Earl (“Eric”) St. Clair shortly after completing her Berkeley undergraduate degree in 1932; two years later Berkeley awarded her a master’s degree in Greek Classics. After a trip to China, the couple settled in El Sobrante, California, where they owned St. Clair Rare Bulb Gardens (1937–41) and where she raised and sold Dachshunds. During World War II, she took a “brief and unsatisfactory” job as a welder.

St. Clair started her career as a professional writer in the mid-1940s, publishing both detective fiction (beginning with “Letter from the Deceased” in the May 1945 Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine) and SF (beginning with “Rocket to Limbo” in Fantastic Adventures, November 1946). By the 1950s she had focused on the latter genre: more than seventy of her SF stories appeared in print over the course of that decade (some under the pseudonym Idris Seabright or Wilton Hazzard) along with her first novels, Agent of the Unknown (1956) and The Green Queen (1956). St. Clair’s stories were popular with readers and television viewers alike; her short story “Mrs. Hawk” (1950) was filmed for the 1961 season of Thriller, while “The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes” (1950) and “Brenda” (1954) were filmed as segments for the 1971 season of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

St. Clair’s later writings, particularly Sign of the Labrys (1963) and The Shadow People (1969), reflect an increasing interest in neopaganism; in 1966, she and her husband were inducted into the Wiccan religion under the names Froniga and Weyland. In a 1981 interview, she reported she was at work on two novels, “The Euthanasiasts” and “The Once and Future Queen,” which were never published. After her husband’s death in 1986 she moved to a retirement community in Santa Rosa, California, where she died at eighty-four. Her papers are archived at the University of California–Riverside.

Wilmar H. Shiras (September 23, 1908–December 23, 1990) was born Wilmar Alberta House in Boston, her father a machinist and both of her parents Massachusetts natives. She married in 1927 at eighteen, after a year at Boston University, and moved with her husband, a newly graduated chemical engineer, to the suburbs of Los Angeles. There and in Oakland, California, beginning in the early 1940s, they raised three girls and two boys. In 1946 she published an autobiographical account of her conversion to Catholicism, Slow Dawning, under the pseudonym Jane Howes, as a reviewer for New Catholic World and other magazines and as a translator of Catholic theology and philosophy. Going back to school, she earned her bachelor’s degree from the College of the Holy Names in Oakland in 1955, and a master’s degree in History at Berkeley in 1956.

Shiras is principally remembered for her first published story—the widely anthologized “In Hiding” (Astounding Science Fiction, November 1948)—and for the Children of the Atom series, collected as the novel Children of the Atom in 1953. “Whatever else I wrote,” she later remarked, “came back with a note asking for another ‘In Hiding.’” These stories, which follow the adventures of mutant geniuses who are created by exposure to nuclear radiation, are often identified by SF fans and critics as important precursors to Marvel’s X-Men series.

Leslie F. Stone (June 8, 1905–March 21, 1991) was born Leslie Francis Rubenstein in Philadelphia to homemaker Lillian A. (Spellman) Rubenstein and clothing merchant George S. Rubenstein. Stone published her first fantasy stories in local newspapers as a teenager while finishing high school in Norfolk, Virginia. Marrying labor reporter William Silberberg in 1927, she raised two sons in and around Washington, D.C., and won prizes as a gardener and ceramist. After her husband’s death in 1957, she worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Stone was one of the first women to publish in the new SF specialist magazines, contributing over twenty stories from 1929 to 1940. Though “Stone” was a pseudonym and “Leslie F.” ambiguously gendered, she was an openly female author. Not only did Stone’s portrait appear alongside her works, but editors were quick to correct readers who mistook her gender. While Stone could write space operas and thought-experiments as well as her male counterparts, she made her mark (and occasionally upset readers) by writing some of the first stories that featured female and black protagonists who are the heroes of their own stories (including 1931’s “The Conquest of Gola,” featured in this anthology). Stone stopped publishing SF at midcentury, attributing her early retirement from the field to changes in both science and SF—namely, the “horrifying use” of atomic weapons (which made it difficult to imagine positive high-tech futures) and an increase in “sexist experiences” with some of the male editors who entered the field around World War II, including John W. Campbell Jr. and Horace Gold.

During the 1960s and 1970s Stone revisited her literary career, revising “Out of the Void” as a stand-alone novel and appearing as an invited guest at SF conventions in Baltimore, offering reminiscences in 1974 later published as “Day of the Pulps.” Her work is featured in anthologies, including Groff Conklin’s The Best of Science Fiction (1946), Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age (1974), and Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010).

James Tiptree, Jr. (August 24, 1915–May 19, 1987) was the primary pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon. Born Alice Hastings Bradley in Chicago, Illinois, to author Mary Hastings Bradley and lawyer and naturalist Herbert Bradley, Tiptree was educated at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and then at finishing schools in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Tarrytown, New York. As a child, she accompanied her parents on three safari expeditions to Africa, becoming the child-celebrity protagonist and illustrator of her mother’s books Alice in Jungleland (1927) and Alice in Ele­phantland (1929). In 1934, after a year at Sarah Lawrence, she married Princeton undergraduate William Davey; both attended the University of California at Berkeley and then New York University without taking degrees. An aspiring painter, she exhibited her work at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

After her divorce in 1941, Tiptree worked as an art critic for the Chicago Sun before enlisting in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, where she trained as a photo-intelligence analyst and rose to the rank of major. Stationed in Europe in 1945–46, she married fellow intelligence officer Huntington Denton Sheldon. After their return to the United States, the Sheldons ran an ill-fated chicken hatchery before joining the newly minted CIA in 1953, where Tiptree helped expand the agency’s photo-intelligence section and later specialized in the analysis of African politics. After completing her undergraduate education at American University in 1959, Tiptree studied psychology at George Washington University, earning her PhD in 1967 and publishing “Preference for Familiar Versus Novel Stimuli as a Function of the Familiarity of the Environment” in the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology in 1969.

Tiptree invented her famous pseudonym in 1967 when she began submitting to SF magazines, inspired by a jar of Tiptree marmalade she saw at the supermarket. As her stories began to appear in print and to attract attention—she won the 1974 Hugo Award for “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” the 1974 Nebula Award for “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death,” and both Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1977 for “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”—Sheldon withheld details about her identity, offering “Tip” as an increasingly elaborate persona both for publication and in her extensive private correspondence with writers, including Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joanna Russ. She also published a handful of items as Raccoona Sheldon, ostensibly one of Tiptree’s female friends. Tiptree was publicly exposed as Sheldon early in 1977, prompting a rather good-natured embarrassment among critics who had discerned “something inherently masculine” in Tiptree’s prose and wide discussion of the relationship between reading, writing, and gender.

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.