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

by Lisa Yaszek

  The silence continued.

  “I finished the computations.”

  Pugh nodded thanks.

  “The signal from Martin came through, but I couldn’t contact you or him.”

  Pugh said with effort, “I should not have gone. He had two hours of air left even with only one can. He might have been heading home when I left. This way we were all out of touch with one another. I was scared.”

  The silence came back, punctuated now by Martin’s long, soft snores.

  “Do you love Martin?”

  Pugh looked up with angry eyes: “Martin is my friend. We’ve worked together, he’s a good man.” He stopped. After a while he said, “Yes, I love him. Why did you ask that?”

  Kaph said nothing, but he looked at the other man. His face was changed, as if he were glimpsing something he had not seen before; his voice too was changed. “How can you . . . How do you . . .”

  But Pugh could not tell him. “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s practice, partly. I don’t know. We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”

  Kaph’s strange gaze dropped, burned out by its own intensity.

  “I’m tired,” Pugh said. “That was ugly, looking for him in all that black dust and muck, and mouths opening and shutting in the ground. . . . I’m going to bed. The ship will be transmitting to us by six or so.” He stood up and stretched.

  “It’s a clone,” Kaph said. “The other Exploit Team they’re bringing with them.”

  “Is it then?”

  “A twelveclone. They came out with us on the Passerine.”

  Kaph sat in the small yellow aura of the lamp seeming to look past it at what he feared: the new clone, the multiple self of which he was not part. A lost piece of a broken set, a fragment, inexpert at solitude, not knowing even how you go about giving love to another individual, now he must face the absolute, closed self-sufficiency of the clone of twelve; that was a lot to ask of the poor fellow, to be sure. Pugh put a hand on his shoulder in passing. “The chief won’t ask you to stay here with a clone. You can go home. Or since you’re Far Out maybe you’ll come on farther out with us. We could use you. No hurry deciding. You’ll make out all right.”

  Pugh’s quiet voice trailed off. He stood unbuttoning his coat, stooped a little with fatigue. Kaph looked at him and saw the thing he had never seen before, saw him: Owen Pugh, the other, the stranger who held his hand out in the dark.

  “Good night,” Pugh mumbled, crawling into his sleeping bag and half asleep already, so that he did not hear Kaph reply after a pause, repeating, across darkness, benediction.

  1969

  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 volu
me 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).