Female science fiction authors

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The novel Frankenstein, written in 1818 by Mary Shelley, has been called the first science fiction novel but there is a persistent and mistaken belief women did not begin writing science fiction until the 1960s and 1970s. Authors like Leigh Brackett, Katherine MacLean and Idris Seabright were writing science fiction almost from the genre's naming and increasing isolation from 1926 (since it had, in fact, been born nearly a century earlier and not ghettoized into specialty pulps marketed to a male focus). Some, like Andre Norton or C. L. Moore were amongst the most popular writers in the field, using initials or masculine pseudonyms to disguise their female identity. Judith Merril was another noted female writer of American science fiction throughout the 1950s and 60s. She also edited the catalytic Year's Best anthology series of science fiction stories which ran from 1956 to 1967. Pamela Sargent edited two of the first anthologies of women sf writers, Women of Wonder (1974) and More Women of Wonder (1976).

1960s science fiction mirrored society as a whole. New Wave writers such as Merril broke old taboos and a new generation of female writers was published. In the late 1960s and 1970s Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley began writing about gender issues in explicitly feminist science fiction. New writers such as James Tiptree Jr., Suzy McKee Charnas and Sheri S. Tepper flourished in the 1970s and 1980s and addressed feminism directly. A plethora of female writers published books in the 1980s and 1990s and in the early 21st century publications by female and male writers seem to have kept pace.