I found this blog by Eleanor Arnason as I researched material for Women of Futures Past. Eleanor has kindly allowed me to share it here. The blog originally appeared in Strange Horizons, and articulates exactly how I felt as I…
Author: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Stair Trick by Mildred Clingerman
Clingerman’s short stories often rely on a shift in perception. So if I tell you what the story’s about, I will ruin it. “Stair Trick” centers on Dick the bartender who would entertain his customers by pretending to go down…
Stickney and the Critic by Mildred Clingerman
As I’ve delved deeper into the research for the essay I’m writing for Women of Futures Past, I’m learning a bunch of things about my field that I didn’t know. For example, I didn’t know that James Blish, and the…
Childish Joy
I write a bimonthly column for Eric Flint’s Grantville Gazette. I was getting ready to write the next column, and so I reread the previous column because—y’know—don’t want to repeat myself, and realized that it’s pertinent here. The column discusses…
A Title!
After much deliberation, we have a title for the women in sf anthology that’ll come out of Baen next year. The title is…(drum roll please)…Women of Futures Past: Classic Stories. I think we went through 50 different titles before finding…
Guest Blog by Linda Nagata
Linda Nagata wrote some well-received short stories in the late 1980s, but she really caught the field’s attention with her Nanotech Succession series, which first appeared in 1995. In 2000, her novella “Goddesses” became the first story published online to…
Found Quotes 2
Discovered in my research: “If any woman believes that science fiction and fantasy publishers are closed to women, she is either gravely misinformed, or she is making excuses for her own incompetence by attributing her failure to editorial prejudice.” —Marion…
Sisters of the Revolution
Most of the women in sf anthologies were published in the 20th century. As I embarked on this project, I saw a lot of magazine work—Lightspeed’s women-only issues come to mind—but few anthologies. I didn’t realize that Ann and Jeff…
Guest Blog by Cat Rambo
The first women in sf anthology I’m doing for Baen Books will only cover stories from the 20th century, which meant I would have to leave out writers who have come to prominence in the 21st century. So I’m going…
“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett
“The Queer Ones” reminds me more of stories by Stephen King or Zenna Henderson or Sharyn McCrumb, stories set in a rural America that makes its own rules. Hank Temple and his friends run into a badly beaten child who…