Review: Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958 to 1963): Yesterday's Luminaries Introduced by Today's Rising Stars

Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958 to 1963): Yesterday's Luminaries Introduced by Today's Rising Stars by Gideon Marcus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reminded me very much of The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers , in that it reintroduces us to excellent stories by writers who are mostly, undeservedly, forgotten today. The other book has an earlier timeframe (1873 to 1930), and there are some clear differences. The women of that earlier time were mostly writing male points of view, sometimes under male names; by the late 1950s, when Rediscovery kicks off, women were still sometimes writing under male or ambiguous names (as indeed they are today), but a lot of their stories were from a female viewpoint.

It also reminded me a little of stories I've read by male authors in the same period, in that a lot of the stories assume that men are inherently this way and women are inherently that way, and the sexes are at war, and there will never be peace or alliance between them; they're too different. However far we still have to go, the intervening three generations have, at least, made progress in both of those respects; we recognize a much wider (and much more overlapping) range of ways of being for both men and women, and, while, as I say, there's still plenty of room for improvement, men and women are now able to be friends, allies, and colleagues while also being or not being lovers. Here, though, we see the early stirrings of modern feminism, when men (rather than patriarchy) were still seen as the problem, and a hard problem at that - perhaps insoluble.

Not every story is like that, though (and, don't get me wrong, the ones that are like that are still fine stories with a strong impact). Some of them are just really good stories of their time; some would stand up well if first published today, though there are a few that lean a bit too heavily on the tropes (and social assumptions) of the period to have aged well. They often take those tropes in a new and interesting direction, though.

One unfortunate thing, and I will mention it even though I read a review copy from Netgalley, because I know the book's been out for a while and assume I got the published version. Stories of the pre-digital age are usually reprinted by being scanned and having optical character recognition run over them, and despite being in use for more than 25 years, this technology is still not always accurate in its transcriptions and tends to produce typos. Some of them were easy to miss (some of them, no doubt, I did miss), but about half of the ones I noticed could have been caught with spellcheck. I don't know why people use OCR and then don't spellcheck. (Getting a machine to read it aloud while you read along would also be a good means of avoiding these issues, if you had the time.)

This doesn't detract much, though, from what is a fine collection of stories that should be more widely known. They are unpredictable, emotionally powerful, thoughtful, humane, and excellently crafted. As the editor's introduction notes, because of the prejudice against women that existed in the SFF field at the time, a woman had to be that much better to compete, and these women are fine writers who are long overdue to be rediscovered.

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