The (Re)Publication History of Overlooked Female Science Fiction Writers
Though it has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, the overlooked contributions of women writers to science fiction in the early twentieth century impacted a nexus of important discourses present in science fiction today. Alongside H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, the ‘forefathers’ of the genre, many women were producing radical works of science fiction (Tattersdill, 2013). In particular, Clare Winger Harris (1891–1968) and C. L. Moore (1911–1987) are meritorious writers whose short stories were published throughout the early twentieth century in pulp magazines. It is intriguing, now that their short stories have been republished in the twenty-first century, to reconsider the grounds upon which women writers and their works have been remembered or forgotten.
The Historical Context
Scarce critical attention has been paid to the role of women in the origins of science fiction beyond the leading works of Mary Shelley. It is important to begin this study with an account of how women writers have historically engaged with science fiction because the influential male critics who have written on the emergence of the genre have failed to mention even one woman writer in their studies.
Darko Suvin, a renowned critic in a genre that has been largely precluded from academia, identifies the origin of science fiction as May Day 1871. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking were published and Samuel Butler brought the manuscript of Erewhon to Chapman and Hall. Suvin dismisses Shelley’s Frankenstein as a ‘revealingly flawed hybrid’ (1983). Similarly, Patrick Brantlinger’s investigation into the ‘four types of Victorian Science Fiction’ (2005) exhibits the diversity of the emerging genre without including any female voices. And yet, despite Marie Corelli became the ‘queen of bestsellers’ and one of the most popular science fiction writers of all time, selling more than Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling combined, she has been overlooked by critical accounts of the genre in favour of her male contemporaries (Felski, 1995; Casey, 1996).
While many feminist critics have recovered important works by women science fiction writers from the 1960s onwards (namely Marleen S. Barr, Robin Roberts, Lisa Yaszek and Helen Merrick), contributions by earlier women writers have been overlooked by these critics and also dismissed by prominent editorial figures. John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Stories magazine, rejected a story by Leslie F. Stone in 1937, as he did ‘not believe that women are capable of writing science fiction — nor [did he] approve of it’, despite works by Francis Stevens, Clare Winger Harris and Stone herself being published in his magazine. Between ‘the mid 1920s and late 1960s, nearly three hundred women were published in science fiction magazines’, which amounts to ‘fifteen percent’ of all contributors (Yaszek, 2018). While the attitude of critics like Campbell might reinforce the assumption of an absence of women writers in science fiction, it is quite clear that women have been active throughout its history and have thus had a formative influence on the genre, its parameters, and its concerns.
Women were reading as well as writing science fiction in the early twentieth century, and we can find evidence of this surprising revelation in the pages of the pulp magazine. The science fiction magazine is the foundation of the genre’s legacy, but this legacy has seemingly dismissed the role of women in the genre as both readers, writers, and critics, as the challenges of writing in the period ‘forced women out of the workforce — and out of the pages of popular magazines’ (Waters, 2009). Indeed, while some women found work writing science fiction, they often abbreviated their names (C. L. Moore), adopted ambiguous pen names (Leslie F. Stone) or used male pseudonyms (Francis Stevens) to cloak their gender. Nonetheless, the format of the cheap mass-produced periodical made the pulp magazine accessible to women and wider audiences, allowing writers like Clare Winger Harris to enter (and win) competitions, to the surprise of Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback: ‘That the third prize winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientifiction writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited’ (Larbalestier, 2006).
But women were present in the pages of the pulp magazine in other intriguing ways. Among the many advertisements for weight loss, muscle-building, and career enhancements aimed at men, the pulps of the 1930s featured adverts aimed specifically at women as well, suggesting that they were recognisable consumers of these stories despite the ‘presuppositions that men were both writers and readers of science fiction’ (Westfahl, 2014). In the February 1934 issue of Astounding Stories, an advert that entices men to ‘Build Big Husky Muscles!’ appears alongside one promising to make women more popular at parties and desirable to men (Roberts, 1995). The advertisements aimed at ‘skin sufferers’ of all sexes reveals how gendered technology permeated these magazines, especially alongside stories that explored technological changes to bodies and machines (Amazing Stories, May 1947). It is unsurprising that science fiction writers became enamoured with the body, as the medium of the pulp magazine shared a fascination with technological bodies in its content, advertisements and factory production. The ‘notion of wireless transmission’ across bodies and electric corsets prevailed across other magazines aimed at women, such as Comfort, which encouraged a ‘use of technology that augment[ed] women’s sexuality’ (Marvin, 1988). Similarly, the era introduced unprecedented opportunities for women to enter into paid occupations. Many were drafted into factories where they gained skills in operating manufacturing machinery, showing women’s changing relationship to technological advancements facilitated through bodily interactions. George Tomlinson, Minister of Education of Britain in 1937 echoed these thoughts in the context of another working environment for women, the home, when he stated that ‘it has now become possible to make use of the results of scientific research to ease the housewife’s burden’ (Shaw, 2000).
It is important to understand how gendered technology contextualised stories about technologized bodies. In both women’s magazines and science fiction publications, women were exposed to technological intrusions upon bodies, reflected in both the mass production of the magazines by factory workers and the content of the science fiction stories themselves. Both human and textual bodies became a touchstone through which to explore and interpret the unfamiliar. By turning to the work of Clare Winger Harris and C. L. Moore, two intriguing twentieth-century science fiction writers, we can see how this context impacted their publishing history.
Case Study: Clare Winger Harris and C. L. Moore
The relationship between real and textual bodies emerges again in one of Clare Winger Harris’ most intriguing works, ‘Possible Science Fiction Plots’. It is a short letter addressed to the editor of Wonder Stories magazine that also operates as a manifesto for her understanding of the evolving science fiction genre and its presence as a textual body in pulp magazines. Harris understands there to be ‘five or six’ original plots in science fiction, but she insists on the genre progressing to include sixteen diverse plots, and she encourages growth and expansion within a notoriously conservative genre (Roberts, 1993).
Catherine Lucille Moore (1911–1987) is a worthy successor of Clare Winger Harris and has even been considered a pioneer of feminist science fiction due to her innovative explorations of cyberfeminism (Gubar, 1980; Bredehoft, 1997). And yet, criticism of Moore’s stories is limited to a handful of essays in widely scattered journals, with book-length studies on feminism and science fiction by Jenny Wolmark, Robin Roberts and Marleen S. Barr taking no account of Moore and her contemporaries. These editors have preferred to focus on more recent writers whose works are often overtly informed by later feminist ideals. But Moore’s writing warrants engaged critical interest in her work. Her early stories develop Shelley’s concern with the coercive effects of technology on the lives and bodies of women. The words of Moore’s contemporary, Leigh Brackett, perfectly epitomise Moore’s understanding that ‘readers are tired of the yarn based on the superhero and the ravishing babe’ (1944). Her career began with ‘Shambleau’, a short story published in Weird Tales magazine in 1933. Although outwardly conforming to the masculinist conventions of pulp science fiction through the womanizing and brooding protagonist Northwest Smith, a closer read of ‘Shambleau’ reveals its deeply subversive potential.
Moore’s ‘Footnotes to “Shambleau”… and Others’ is an unusual documentation of her writing process and a crucial document that reveals the complex conjunction of how gender and technology is figured in Moore’s writing. The context of Moore’s writing process reveals how she uses her technological context to impact the gendered discourses of her work. She begins the ‘Footnote’ by reminding readers that her name is Catherine, a gendered name as opposed to her name in print (1976). Readers are invited to witness her self-fashioning and de-gendering as a science fiction writer. The ‘Footnote’ then progresses to link the origins of ‘Shambleau’ to the economic and gendered realities of life during the Depression:
“I lived in a large midwestern city and the Depression of the 1930s was rampant over the land. So I was snatched from my sophomore year at the state university and crammed into a business school to learn the rudiments of shorthand and typing.” (p. 365)
Moore’s career as a science fiction writer was initiated by her role as a typist, as ‘this is where “Shambleau” began’. She even uses the tools of her job to infiltrate the content of her story, as the character ‘Yarol’ in ‘Shambleau’ is ‘an anagram of the Royal Typewriter Moore used in her job’ (Bredehoft, 1997). Reading ‘Shambleau’ through the lens of the ‘Footnote’ urges readers to see that the short story springs from within publishing discourses that surround Moore.
It is rare to have an early biographical account of a woman’s experience in science fiction, but similar explorations of textual bodies and writer’s bodies are also unearthed in Clare Winger Harris’s ‘Popular Science Fiction Plots’, and even Marie Corelli’s ‘My First Book’. Although written in the preceding century, Corelli has a notable relationship with her textual body that offers insight into the ways we read Harris and Moore’s material fascination with female bodies and their textual counterparts. In A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), Corelli draws on the relationship between technology and women’s bodies because her female protagonist is used as a vessel for electrical communication. Women have a direct relationship with technology in Corelli’s novel as communicators of God’s moral authority, and technology becomes a spiritual and mythical force across Corelli’s corpus. The same cannot be said for the accounts of Corelli’s writing process. In ‘My First Book’, an 1893 account detailing the writing process of A Romance of Two Worlds, she explains how she writes out her stories in pencil, ‘deliberately reject[ing] middlemen’ such as literary agents and typewriters, and exerting her own ‘unmitigated control over the route by which her story reaches readers’ (Galvan, 2003).
These experiences expose the context of the mid-century publishing industry for emerging female writers in science fiction magazines. It is valuable to reflect on how Harris and Moore were posthumously published in the twenty-first century to explore the shifting interests of our publishing industry.
(Re)Publishing Harris, Moore and their contemporaries
In coming to the end of this study, I must acknowledge that not enough has been documented on the contributions of female science fiction writers in the early twentieth century. Science fiction has emerged as a compelling genre in recent years, supported in part by the establishment of academic journals devoted to science fiction, such as Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies. Gradually, science fiction has acquired a place in academic circles: ‘Library collections were housed; annual academic meetings were funded... scholarly presses were founded, and several major academic publishers became hospitable to monographs on science fiction’ (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., 2005). But journals on women in science fiction in this academic setting are much needed, as Harris and Moore are not the only women writers we should be uncovering. While they have been the focus of this project, this study also operates as an exercise in reading other overlooked works by writers who deserve our attention: James Tiptree Jr, Leslie F. Stone, Leigh Brackett and Francis Stevens are equally deserving of this treatment. Writers such as Mark O’Connell have also exposed the similarity of current scientific contexts to what the genre of science fiction was imagined to be by Westfahl, Gernsback and Campbell:
‘There was no ignoring the fact that we were an overwhelmingly male group. Aside from the fact that almost all these faces were lit by the pallid luminescence of smartphone screens, this could be happening at almost any point in the last two centuries; a group, composed of mainly men, arranged in tiered seating in a room in Bloomsbury there to listen to another man talk about the future.’ (2018)
The stories of Harris and Moore are increasingly important because the faces of scientific and literary spaces are still overwhelmingly dominated by men. But it is also worth noting how Harris and Moore have been received after their respective deaths in 1968 and 1987, and how we can acknowledge their legacy. In 1981, Moore received the World Fantasy Award and posthumously won the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2004 with Henry Kuttner. Harris has received less attention from awarding bodies, but her work has generated critical praise, with Richard Lupoff writing that her story ‘The Miracle of the Lily’ would have ‘won the Hugo Award for best short story if the award had existed then (Lupoff, 1998).
Awarding bodies play an important role in crafting the science fiction canon, especially as the Hugo Awards have been the recipients of controversy in recent years. As part of the outlandishly named ‘Sad Puppies’ and ‘Rabid Puppies’, run by Brad R. Torgersen and Vox Day respectively, groups of science fiction writers reacted to what they called the ‘niche, academic, overtly [leftist] nominees of the Hugo Awards, that had become ‘an affirmative action award’ that preferred female and non-white voices (Torgersen, 2016). Despite this controversy, the Hugo Awards have upheld the inclusion of diverse voices, and the support towards Harris and Moore has even resulted in the republications of their works. Moore was reprinted by Gollancz Publishing in 2014, and Harris by Bell Publishing in 2019, revealing that there is a growing audience for these overlooked writers. Their stories are the predecessors of the canonical greats of science fiction, such as works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Octavia Butler, and we must pay homage to these brilliant literary foremothers.
These stories are predecessors of an ongoing narrative of change and transformation present in science fiction today. Readers are welcomed into a growing community of women by following these early female pioneers of science fiction on their literary adventures.
Bibliography
Primary Texts
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