Earlier this year, probably on the FOCL (Friends of the Covington Library) booksale shelf, I picked up an old used copy of a book called Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection by Isaac Asimov. I immediately recognized it and knew that I had to buy it. That I recognized some book is not unusual. That I recognized a relatively obscure posthumous book of uncollected writings from decades ago is probably a bit odd (for me). But what is important is how and why I recognized it. You see, Gold is one volume of a posthumous collection of Asimov's work. It was published in 1995. He died in 1992. There was a companion volume, Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection published in 1996. I read it in 1997, about twenty years ago. And at that time, I had no idea who Isaac Asimov was. I can confidently say, with no exaggeration, that that book changed my life.Anyway, in Gold Isaac Asimov mentioned other science fiction authors several times and had this particular line, which I'd happen to come back to...
I wasn't especially interesting in science fiction. Didn't have anything against it, but I just didn't know anything about it or especially care. I liked books, though. I was always looking for new books to read. Somehow, while performing different searches on the KCLS catalog (it was computerized, even back then), I came across the title. It had both "Magic" and "Final Fantasy" in it. I hadn't heard of Isaac Asimov before in my life (although I'd later discover that his work had hugely influenced a whole lot of things that I did know about). But I had recently become enamored both with a card game, Magic: the Gathering (which I still play) and with a video game, Final Fantasy VII (which is probably a bit hamfisted in retrospect, but it impressed me at the time). So with nothing other than a title that piqued my curiosity, I checked it out. My eleven-year-old mind was thoroughly blown. It's not so much that Magic was Asimov's best work, but that it exposed me to a world I hadn't seen before. The fiction was fun, fascinating, and really hooked me in. But the nonfiction in the collection was something I'd never imagined, something so totally novel to me that it was, well, I can only describe it as formative. I had to have more! Magic led me to looking into Isaac Asimov, which led me to I, Robot, which I recognized as the title of an Alan Parsons Project album, so I checked that one out too. But the copy I checked out came bundled with Foundation, so I also read that, which subsequently transformed me into a science fiction nerd for life.
If I'd been pressed to cite the most important book I've read in terms of its influence on me or my appreciation for it, I'd probably start thinking of things like Alastor, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Death Gate Cycle, East of Eden, The Gods Themselves, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or maybe even The Lord of the Rings. And then I met Gold. It's a fine read, don't misunderstand. But I am perhaps uniquely affected by it. The stories are interesting and the nonfiction is, for those with a specific interest in the world of science fiction publication in the late 20th century, enlightening. But for me, this book was heartwrenching. It was so evocative, so similar to Magic, a book that had been buried in the back of my mind. I'd forgotten how damn impressed I was by that book, how it had driven me in the sorts of books I sought out thereafter, how as a kid I'd gotten a kind of crash course of insight into topics I'd never even considered. The memories came flooding back. I'd seen that Gold was the other volume back then. But I didn't find it at the library back then and eventually I moved on. I came full-circle twenty years later, by sheer coincidence.
Asimov had been dead for five years before I ever ran into him. And it would be another twenty before I realized just how much he inspired me.
Don't get me wrong. There were women writers even in the early days of magazine science fiction, and women editors, too. When I was young, some of my favorite stories were by A.R. Long and by Leslie F. Stone. I didn't know they were women, but they were.Because of that one line, I bought a copy of Leslie F. Stone's Out of the Void. I later saw the claim on a website that Asimov had cited Leslie F. Stone as being one of the female science fiction writers who disguised her sex to appeal to a male readership, with the appended statement that Asimov was incorrect, that Leslie had been born with the name Leslie and had always been Leslie and wasn't hiding anything. However, as far as I can tell, their source for that is the exact line I just quoted, which doesn't actually say what they said it says. I could be wrong about that, though. Sorry, bit of a tangent there. That point occurred to me, but it's not very important and not the real reason I started this blog post.
I'm currently reading Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen. In the preface, I saw this...
Along with that new openness to creativity in the field came an influx off women writing science fiction. There had always been a few women SF writers who were very successful, but the majority of them wrote under male pseudonyms, like Andre Norton, or had female names that could easily be mistaken for male names, like Marion Zimmer Bradley. Others used only their initials and last name. The majority of readers very likely never realized that they were women, until they started coming out of the gender closet.I've seen the sentiment, essentially, in other places. But here it was concrete. And I don't want to just dismiss it: I wasn't around back then. By the time I heard about Andre Norton or Marion Zimmer Bradley, it was probably common knowledge that they were women. And I grew up with the rise of the world wide web, which probably changed the landscape for these sorts of things. And yet, I have some real qualms with this. It's not that I contend none of the women who wrote science fiction disguised their gender. I just see casual claims like Vinge's here. "The majority of them wrote under pseudonyms" and such. Did they? Is that true? I'm skeptical. Asimov may have sincerely assumed, in his youth, that the magazine stories with "Leslie F. Stone" in the byline were written by a man, and that's understandable since the name "Leslie" would have been more common for boys than girls back then. But it really was her real name, the one she was born with. Even back in 1905, some parents named their little girls "Leslie." Same goes for Marion Zimmer Bradley: that was her actual name. And I, for one, immediately assumed that she was a woman the first time I saw a story under her name. I didn't learn until much later that any men were ever named "Marion."
Andre Norton is a bit of a strange case. I know that when I first saw the name, it was in the context of Mercedes Lackey writing about her, so I got the information up-front, and didn't think much of it. Honestly, I didn't think anything of it until I came across the concept in Joan Vinge's preface just recently. And then I kinda did a double-take. Because of course Andre is a masculine name. There was Andre the Giant and the tennis dude and probably some others I assume. But, and I forget how I knew this, it was also Andre Norton's real name. It wasn't a pseudonym: it was her legal name. But here's where it gets strange. I looked it up with teh Google, and it seems that Andre Norton was born "Alice Mary Norton" and legally changed her name to "Andre Alice Norton." According to her obituary, she initially used Andre as a pseudonym in the 1930's because publishers told her that her books would get more boys reading them if the author name was masculine. I don't know where the obituary got that information, but assuming it's true, that really would have been an early case of the concept Joan Vinge (and others) mentioned.
Still, I'm not convinced. Maybe I should be, but it all seems extremely circumstantial. I do know that there were other examples, like the well-known case of "James Tiptree Jr." being a pseudonym for a woman whose identity was initially a mystery to the public. But some people like pseudonyms! The same author also used "Raccoona Sheldon" as a pseudonym and that was before her identity was public. Lots of authors, men and women, use pseudonyms or initialisms. I haven't even seen someone claim that it's more common for women, let alone use evidence of such a disparity to argue that this had to do with the perception by readers of the quality of writing by women. But what I have seen is allusions to some dark age of science fiction when women had to disguise themselves. It all sounds far more exciting than "there were women writing, but some of them use pseudonyms and other used initialisms and others did neither of those things."
Now, what I do see to be pretty demonstrable is that some women used overtly masculine pseudonyms (like when the aforementioned Amelia Reynolds Long wrote under the name "Peter Long"). And in constrast, I don't know of any instances of 20th century male science fiction authors hiding their sex with female pseudonyms. Presumably it happened at some point, but it seems like it must have been more rare. But why is that? My tentative answer is that men generally felt less comfortable with the notion of using a feminine pseudonym than women did with the notion of using a masculine one.
