on not being the first

or even the eighty-first

Daderot via Wikimedia Commons

Who was the first woman to write science fiction?

One traditional answer is Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818). Another is Margaret Cavendish (The Blazing World, 1666). Maybe you favor Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert (The Voyages of Lord Seaton to the Seven Planets, 1766). If you’re looking only at Americans—that is, if your question is really, “who was the first American woman to…”—you might pick Gertrude Barrows Bennett (who wrote under “Francis King”) or Claire Winger Harris (who is often tagged the first American woman writer who wrote science fiction under her own name).¹

That is, the question “who was the first woman to write science fiction” is kind of like asking “who wrote the first novel.” If you consider a novel to be a work of prose fiction sustained over a certain length, then the Romans were writing novels (including science fiction).² If you don’t, then it’s more complicated. If “science fiction” means any counterfactual narrative that doesn’t inv…