The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers
Mike Ashley
Dover Thrift Editions
ebook and print both $4.50
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So in a previous post, I wrote about forgotten women writers from the early days of the science fiction pulps.  While I was reading Partners in Wonder (the book under discussion in that post), I came across a review of The Feminine Future.  Several of the stories in the latter were specifically singled out by Eric Leif Davin in the former.

I immediately picked it up.  It didn’t cover quite the same ground as Partners in Wonder, which looked at women authors in the early pulps.  In other words, the time period it was concerned with began in 1926, when Hugo Gernsback launched the first pulp devoted entirely to science fiction, Amazing Stories.

Science fiction had of course existed long before then, although it was called scientific romance.  (I find it interesting that scientific romances were considered respectable, science fiction was, and at times still is, viewed as trash.)  Mike Ashley doesn’t confine himself to the pulp era.  He gathers stories from women writers going back to the popular fiction magazines of the late 1800s.

Here’s what the book includes: Continue reading →