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 involve supernatural means, then you’ll get one answer. If you think “science fiction” necessarily involves a certain post-Enlightenment relationship to technology, you’ll get another. And so on.

So while I would probably not accept an answer to the question that is later than Mary Shelley—that is, if you say science fiction started with H.G. Wells or Jules Verne or Hugo Gernsback, I will not agree with you—the earlier writers all have their case.

If what we’re really looking at is American science fiction from the age of the pulps forward, one thing that’s plain is that women are a persistent minority of writers and readers, and in some ways the first woman writer is unknowable simply because so many pulp writers only corresponded with editors and never had to meet them or produce photographs. They are there, they are writing, they have fans, and they have some level of respect from their peers. Some of them write under male names, some don’t, and some do both (Pauline Whitby wrote as both “Pauline Ashwell” and “Paul Ash”).³

It would be an overcorrection to say that the world of SFF was a playground of gender equity, where absolutely nobody cared about it and you could do whatever you wanted. Accruing something like system-level power in SFF—the way an Isaac Asimov did—isn’t something you see happening until the seventies, I think.⁴ When women do show up, often they appear as if they are the only one, in the sense that they’ll write letters that begin with statements such as “I thought I was the only woman who liked science fiction,” and so on. But if you wanted to write it, and you were a woman, you could, and many women did. You could thrive as an individual—that is to say, as “the only one.” Even if you plainly weren’t.⁵

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All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Lena Dunham sort of annoyed me recently:

I want to say that this comment comes as part of a post where Lena Dunham is making a larger point about trans visibility, not science fiction, and so to some degree I am churlishly nitpicking an aside about something more important.⁶ Also, despite never having met her, I have a certain degree of loyalty to Lena Dunham because the “D” in “BDM” stands for “Dunham” and Dunhams gotta stick together. However, there are a few reasons I think it’s worth pushing back on this. (Reason zero is that it gives me a reason to soapbox about the topic of my book, but… aside from that.)

One is simply that it is absolutely true that SFF has historically been “pasty” (that is, white) and that’s true in a way that is simply not true when it comes to science fiction being a “boy’s club.” I think it’s sort of dishonest to put these two things together.⁷ Racism is a different problem from misogyny.

The second is that “women’s history” in its popular form has an extremely pernicious habit of always starting about twenty minutes ago, to the point where there seems to be a real belief that if you can’t claim to be the first woman to have done something, your achievements are valueless. Furthermore, if you are burdened with the terrible knowledge that you are not really the first, you can only get out of this by denigrating the women who were writing before you. They were there—possibly still are here—but they don’t count, because you are here now, and you need to count.

This leads you to moments like this one moment in 1977, where Marion Zimmer Bradley,⁸ peeved about various things, writes the following about herself:⁹

In the third Darkover novel, THE BLOODY SUN,¹⁰ I followed, again, the fantasy pattern of Rider Haggard and A. Merritt by contrasting two female characters; one timid and virginal, the Keeper Elorie; and the pert Taniquel, independent of speech and action. I recently realized that in Taniquel I had created the first truly independent woman in science fiction. Not the first in a book written by a woman, but the first ever in science fiction to have, not only a love life, but an independent and self-determined sex life.

This claim is… almost definitely not true, though of course it’s worded in such a way that to show it to be untrue requires fighting about various terms, such as “science fiction” and “self-determined sex life” and so on. Much like the question “who was the first woman to write science fiction,” this statement feels like an empirical claim but the terms are slippery. In any case, it’s kind of an encapsulation of the problem with starting twenty minutes ago—Bradley has to deal with the fact of a previous popular woman SFF author like Leigh Brackett, so she does… by finding a way Brackett just doesn’t count, because she wrote about men.¹¹

But, like, I recently read Brackett’s Queen of the Martian Catacombs (1949) and Berild (the titular queen) seems like a woman who has a self-determined sex life to me. She’s evil, sure, but “heroic” isn’t in Bradley’s list of attributes.

Bradley could have written an essay about her own evolving relationship to the female characters in her books without trying to make claims about her place in literary history as the first person to do something. But she didn’t. I’m sure she believed she was the first writer to ever write this way, because there is a lot of external pressure that says that if you are not the first, you don’t really matter. If you think you matter, and presumably you do think this about yourself, you’ll find some way to be the first.

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My third reason, which is a bit hazier, is that I wonder why precisely this narrative of overcoming masculine opposition is so treasured as the main way of saying a woman artist has done something good. Doing something is valuable (depending on the “something,” I guess) and overcoming obstacles is praiseworthy.¹² That’s true. But male hostility is not a video game boss that is defeated by attaining a position of prestige. That’s one objection.

For another, writing an excellent piece of science fiction—or any kind of fiction—doesn’t get easier just because somebody else did it. It remains exactly as hard. What somebody else “doing something” creates in another is the ability to see what is possible. The person who creates something worthwhile despite hostility or outright hatred is doing something valuable for other artists not insofar as they demonstrate that those forces can be overcome but rather in showing that they don’t have to be accommodated. In other words, the story of the remarkable woman (singular) who gets into the boy’s club ultimately assumes that the club is valuable because the boys are there.¹³

In its way, the claims about who was the first to do something remind me of the way stan twitter loves to argue about Billboard charts. Nobody really has the appetite for qualitative discussion of music, so they argue about metrics: who is the biggest, who grew the fastest, who has the most “cultural impact,” who debuted bigger, who fell off faster. The metrics are interesting if your questions are about popularity, but that’s about as far as they go. Arguments about somebody’s critical or historical position—who is first, who is forgotten, who is overrated, who is underrated, who is influential, who is a curiosity—similarly feel like ways to try to make things into an objective question of numbers instead of embracing the ways in which works of art are both singular and interrelated.

So what happens if we conceive of these authors as in a relationship with one another, rather than as isolated moments? That is, they are building off each other, riffing off each other, tearing down each other, and hating each other (negative relationships are still relationships, after all).¹⁴ Obviously, that is my project, so I’m invested in this being a better way to think about things.

But in general, I think it is important to go back into the past and find your peers there (and, of course, for women writers that doesn’t mean only—or even primarily—women writers).¹⁵ You know them when you find them—there’s a sense of recognition. A door opens. A tie forms. You aren’t alone, you aren’t the first, and you don’t have to think of yourself as the only one. It’s a lot better that way. In my opinion! Which is the only opinion that matters.

1. Obligatory (funny).

2. If you want a longer argument about all of this, I recommend Adam Roberts’s history of science fiction (affiliate link).

3. There’s some useful discussion of Paul(ine) Ash(well)’s names by Marie Vibbert in the third Rediscovery anthology (affiliate link).

4. You’re gonna hate my opinion on who “the female Isaac Asimov” is (in this sense) but it’s not ready for primetime.

5. In my book proposal the analogy I used was a cafeteria—women could always sit at the table of “science fiction,” even if they weren’t quite enmeshed with the group at the table.

6. Trans women have also been writing science fiction for a while—Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Rachel Pollack are two examples that come to mind. But two swallows do not make a summer, as they say.

7. Or—to be more precise—whoever’s potted history Lena Dunham has absorbed was dishonest; I don’t think she is.

8. Obligatory (depressing).

9. You can read the whole thing here if you want to.

10. 1964.

11. Leigh Bracket is literally alive when Bradley is writing this (though not for much longer).

12. In practice, we rarely actually value the person who really was the first person to do something, which is weird but true. It’s the second or third person to do something… that’s the sweet spot. Why? I dunno.

13. In general social terms, that’s probably true—this is why colleges actually discriminate against women applicants. (eta: forgot to link but)

14. Octavia Butler, for instance, was influenced by Zenna Henderson, a fact that will seem bizarre if you have read anything by either of them… but which is nonetheless true.

15. Jane Austen hotness specialist

a. natasha joukovsky

recommended this book about Jane Austen’s influences to me recently and mentioned that it prominently cites Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing.… I haven’t gotten a copy yet but I’m pretty psyched to do so.