The Future is Female!
"Bending and stretching its conventions to imagine new, more feminist futures and new ways of experiencing gender, visionary women writers have been from the beginning an essential if often overlooked force in American science fiction. Two hundred years after Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the best of this female tradition, from the pioneers of the Pulp Era to the radical innovators of the 1960s New Wave, in a landmark anthology that upends the common notion that SF was conceived by and for men. Here are 25 mind-blowing SF classics that still shock and inspire: Judith Merril and Wilmar H. Shiras's startling near-future stories of the children of the new atomic age; Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman's haunting explorations of alien otherness; dystopian fables of consumerism and overpopulation by Elizabeth Mann Borgese and Alice Glaser; evocations of cosmic horror from Margaret St. Clair and Andrew North (Andre Norton); and much more. Other writers here take on some of SF's sexist clichés and boldly rethink sex and gender from the ground up. C. L. Moore and Leslie Perri introduce courageous, unforgettable "sheroes"; Alice Eleanor Jones sounds a housewife's note of protest against the conformities of life in a postapocalyptic suburb; Leslie F. Stone envisions an interplanetary battle of the sexes, in which the matriarchs of Venus ward off unprovoked attacks by barbaric spacemen from Earth; John Jay Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley wonder how future military men will feel about their pregnancies. The Future Is Female! is a star-spanning, soul-stirring, multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery that will permanently alter your perceptions of American SF."--Publisher's website.
American Science fiction, American Short stories, Women authors, Science fiction, American fiction (collections), 20th century
Lisa Yaszek, Clare Winger Harris, Leslie F. Stone, C. L. Moore, Wilmar H. Shiras, Katherine MacLean, Margaret St. Clair, Zenna Henderson, Andre Norton, Andre Norton, Mildred Clingerman, Leigh Brackett, Carol Emshwiller, Rosel George Brown, Elizabeth Mann Borgese, Doris Pitkin Buck, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Juanita Coulson, Sonya Dorman, Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, Sonya Dorman, Ursula K. Le Guin
Catherine Lucille Moore || Margaret St. Clair was an American science fiction writer, who also wrote under the pseudonyms Idris Seabright and Wilton Hazzard.  - Wikipedia || Andre Norton was born Alice Mary Norton in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of rug company owner and his wife.  She began writing while she was in high school, and she was the editor of a literary page in the school's paper.  She also wrote her first novel, Ralestone Luck, which was published in 1938.  Her first published novel was The Prince Commands (1934).  She graduated from high school in 1930 and began studying teaching at Flora Stone Mather College of Western Reserve University.  In 1932 she dropped out early due to economic conditions and began working for the Cleveland Library System.  In 1934, she legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton, the pen name she had adopted to increase her marketability since boys were the main audience for fantasy.  In 1941, she bought a bookstore called the Mystery House in Mount Rainier, Maryland, but the business failed and she returned to the Cleveland Public Library.  In 1950 she became a reader for the Gnome Press Co.  In 1958 she became a full-time author.  In 1966 she moved to Florida for health reasons, and then to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  In 1977, she received the Gandalf Grand Master Award from the World Science Fiction Society, and in 1983 she received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  She died in March of 2005 of congestive heart failure.

She has been called the Grande Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Over the course of her career, she published over 300 published titles read by four generations.  Shortly after her death, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America created the Andre Norton Award for outstanding work of fantasy or science fiction for Young Adults. || Leigh Brackett was born in in Los Angeles, California and raised near Santa Monica.  She spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy, playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard.  She began writing fantastic adventures of her own, and her first published science fiction story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse (1944), was a hard-boiled mystery novel.  This novel inspired Hollywood director Howard Hawks to ask her to help William Faulkner write the script for the film The Big Sleep (1946).  In 1946 she married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton, and after the release of The Big Sleep, returned to writing science-fiction writing, producing several novel-length science fiction works in addition to short stories.  In 1955, as pulp magazines were folding and the market for short science fiction adventure stories was cooling, she began to work more for the film and television markets, although she still produced some science fiction, such as The Long Tomorrow (1955).  She returned to fiction writing in the 1970s, producing The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976), collected as The Book of Skaith in 1976. || Marion Zimmer was born on a farm in Albany, New York, during the Great Depression.  As a child, she enjoyed reading adventure fantasy stories.  She began writing them herself in 1949 and sold her first story to Vortex in 1952.  She also married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949.  Early in her career, she used pseudonyms for stories she wrote outside the speculative fiction genre, including some gay and lesbian pulp fiction novels such as I Am a Lesbian (1962).  In 1964 she divorced her first husband and married numismatist Walter H. Breen.  In 1965 she received her B.A. degree from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas.  She then moved to Berkeley, California, to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  In 1966, she co-founded the Society for Creative Anachronism.  In 1967 she moved to Staten Island, New York.  She separated from her second husband in 1979 but remained married and continued a business relationship, until 1990 when he was arrested on child molestation charges and they divorced.  After suffering declining health for years, she died in Berkeley in 1999.  In 2000, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. || Kate Wilhelm was an American author. She wrote novels and stories in the science fiction, mystery, and suspense genres, including the Hugo Award–winning Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Wilhelm established the Clarion Workshop along with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson. || "As of 2010, Ursula K. Le Guin has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, three collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include a volume of poetry, Incredible Good Fortune, the novel Lavinia, and an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl. She lives in Portland, Oregon." - [source][1]


  [1]: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Biography-70Word.html