by Lisa Yaszek
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 sol
d 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 witho
ut 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.