Published in 2018
475 pages
Lisa Yaszek, editor, is Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and past president of the Science Fiction Research Association. She is the author of Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008), and coeditor of Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (2016); she currently serves as a juror for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for the Best Speculative Story of the Year.
What is this book about?
Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s
Warning: the visionary women writers in this landmark anthology may permanently alter perceptions of American science fiction, challenging the conventional narrative that the genre was conceived mainly by and for men. Now, two hundred years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the best of the female tradition in American science fiction, in the most comprehensive collection of its kind ever published. From Pulp Era pioneers to New Wave experimentalists, here are over two dozen brilliant writers ripe for discovery and rediscovery, including Leslie F. Stone (“The Conquest of Gola,” 1931), Judith Merril (“That Only a Mother,” 1948), Leigh Brackett (“All the Colors of the Rainbow,” 1957), Kit Reed (“The New You,” 1962), Joanna Russ (“The Barbarian,” 1968); Ursula K. Le Guin (“Nine Lives,” 1969), and James Tiptree Jr. (“Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” 1969).
Imagining strange worlds and unexpected futures, looking into and beyond new technologies and scientific discoveries, in utopian fantasies and tales of cosmic horror, these women created and shaped speculative fiction as surely as their male counterparts. Their provocative, mind-blowing stories combine to form a thrilling multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery.
Introduction / Lisa Yaszek
The miracle of the lily / Clare Winger Harris
The conquest of Gola / Leslie F. Stone
The black god’s kiss / C. L. Moore
Space episode / Leslie Perri
That only a mother / Judith Merril
In hiding / Wilmar H. Shiras
Contagion / Katherine Maclean
The inhabited men / Margaret St. Clair
Ararat / Zenna Henderson
All cats are gray / Andrew North
Created he them / Alice Eleanor Jones
Mr. Sakrison’s halt / Mildred Clingerman
All the colors of the rainbow / Leigh brackett
Pelt / Carol Emshwiller
Car pool / Rosel George Brown
For sale, reasonable / Elizabeth Mann Borgese
Birth of a gardener / Doris Pitkin Buck
The tunnel ahead / Alice Glaser
The new you / Kit Reed
Another rib / John Jay Wells & Marion Zimmer Bradley
When I was Miss Dow / Sonya Dorman
Baby, you were great / Kate Wilhelm
The barbarian / Joanna Russ
The last flight of Dr. Ain / James Tiptree Jr
Nine lives / Ursula K Le Guin
Biographical notes.
