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The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women

From Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin More

Edited by Lisa Yaszek

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

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

Story of the Week Octavia E. Butler, “Positive Obsession”
February 5, 2021

Story of the Week Clare Winger Harris, “The Miracle of the Lily”
September 26, 2020

Interviews Susan Ware: Race, region, and the full story of the fight for women’s suffrage
August 24, 2020

Save $21.90 off the list price when you purchase both volumes of The Future Is Female.

Bending and stretching its conventions to imagine new, more feminist futures and new ways of experiencing gender, visionary women writers have been from the beginning an essential if often overlooked force in American science fiction. Two hundred years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the best of this female tradition, from the pioneers of the Pulp Era to the radical innovators of the 1960s New Wave, in a landmark anthology that upends the common notion that SF was conceived by and for men.

Here are 25 mind-blowing SF classics that still shock and inspire: Judith Merril and Wilmar H. Shiras’s startling near-future stories of the children of the new atomic age; Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman’s haunting explorations of alien otherness; dystopian fables of consumerism and overpopulation by Elizabeth Mann Borgese and Alice Glaser; evocations of cosmic horror from Margaret St. Clair and Andrew North (Andre Norton); and much more.

Other writers here take on some of SF’s sexist clichés and boldly rethink sex and gender from the ground up. C. L. Moore and Leslie Perri introduce courageous, unforgettable “sheroes”; Alice Eleanor Jones sounds a housewife’s note of protest against the conformities of life in a postapocalyptic suburb; Leslie F. Stone envisions an interplanetary battle of the sexes, in which the matriarchs of Venus ward off unprovoked attacks by barbaric spacemen from Earth; John Jay Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley wonder how future military men will feel about their pregnancies.

The Future Is Female! is a star-spanning, soul-stirring, multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery that will permanently alter your perceptions of American SF.

Visit the companion website for more on these stories and writers, including author biographies, appreciations by contemporary writers, original pulp covers and illustrations, adaptations into other media, press coverage, and more.

Lisa Yaszek, editor, is Professor of Science Fiction 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).

This special publication features full-cloth binding, acid-free paper, and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.
News & Views

Story of the Week Octavia E. Butler, “Positive Obsession”
February 5, 2021

Story of the Week Clare Winger Harris, “The Miracle of the Lily”
September 26, 2020

Interviews Susan Ware: Race, region, and the full story of the fight for women’s suffrage
August 24, 2020

Interviews Gary K. Wolfe: Reinvention and revolution in 1960s science fiction
January 3, 2020

Story of the Week Mildred Clingerman, “Mr. Sakrison’s Halt”
September 13, 2019
Table of Contents

CLARE WINGER HARRIS: The Miracle of the Lily | 1928
LESLIE F. STONE: The Conquest of Gola | 1931
C. L. MOORE: The Black God’s Kiss | 1934
LESLIE PERRI: Space Episode | 1941
JUDITH MERRIL: That Only a Mother | 1948
WILMAR H. SHIRAS: In Hiding | 1948
KATHERINE MACLEAN: Contagion | 1950
MARGARET ST. CLAIR: The Inhabited Men | 1951
ZENNA HENDERSON: Ararat | 1952
ANDREW NORTH: All Cats Are Gray | 1953
ALICE ELEANOR JONES: Created He Them | 1955
MILDRED CLINGERMAN: Mr. Sakrison’s Halt | 1956
LEIGH BRACKETT: All the Colors of the Rainbow | 1957
CAROL EMSHWILLER: Pelt | 1958
ROSEL GEORGE BROWN: Car Pool | 1959
ELIZABETH MANN BORGESE: For Sale, Reasonable | 1959
DORIS PITKIN BUCK: Birth of a Gardener | 1961
ALICE GLASER: The Tunnel Ahead | 1961
KIT REED: The New You | 1962
JOHN JAY WELLS & MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY: Another Rib | 1963
SONYA DORMAN: When I Was Miss Dow | 1966
KATE WILHELM: Baby, You Were Great | 1967
JOANNA RUSS: The Barbarian | 1968
JAMES TIPTREE, JR.: The Last Flight of Dr. Ain | 1969
URSULA K. LE GUIN: Nine Lives | 1969
Contributors

Elizabeth Mann Borgese
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Rosel George Brown
Leigh Brackett
Doris Pitkin Buck
Mildred Clingerman
Sonya Dorman
Carol Emshwiller
Alice Glaser
Clare Winger Harris
Zenna Henderson
Alice Eleanor Jones
Ursula K. Le Guin
Katherine Maclean
Judith Merril
C. L. Moore
Andrew North
Leslie Perri
Kit Reed
Joanna Russ
Wilmar H. Shiras
Margaret St. Clair
Leslie F. Stone
James Tiptree, Jr.
John Jay Wells
Kate Wilhelm

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-580-8 551 pages

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