Carol Emshwiller (1921– ) is a notable US writer of science fiction who has won the Nebula Award and Philip K. Dick Award, among others. She grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in France until she was a teenager, making her “hopelessly confused” between English and French. In college, she took classes with Anatole Broyard, Kay Boyle, and the poet Kenneth Koch. She began to sell short stories while still a student, to literary magazines, and then discovered science fiction magazines. Damon Knight published her in his Orbit anthologies and she also appeared frequently in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her science fiction novels include Carmen Dog (1988) and The Mount (2002), which won the Philip K. Dick Award and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. In 2005, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, spanning Emshwiller’s entire fifty-year career, was published in 2011.
Emshwiller’s husband, Ed Emshwiller, started out as an abstract expressionist painter and experimental filmmaker and became an influence on his wife, who herself explored experimental writing and “what others called the New Wave.” (Ed illustrated Harlan Ellison’s iconic Dangerous Visions anthologies.) Together, the Emshwillers lived a bohemian life in the 1960s, soaking up the counterculture and getting to know a number of musicians, painters, poets, and filmmakers as they traveled abroad, including a trip back to France. Throughout this period, her interest in postmodern literature grew, and her fiction has ever since existed in a space that synthesizes experimental approaches, mainstream literary modes, and speculative subject matter, often from an overtly feminist perspective. The result has been truly interesting and unique fiction.
Ursula K. Le Guin has called Emshwiller “a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.” Karen Joy Fowler said of Emshwiller, “She still defies imitation. But it is my contention that sometime in the last fifteen to twenty years, she has become stealthily influential.”
Emshwiller has given her own assessment of her work: “A lot of people don’t seem to understand how planned and plotted even the most experimental of my stories are. I’m not interested in stories where anything can happen at any time. I set up clues to foreshadow what will happen and what is foreshadowed does happen. I try to have all, or most of the elements in the stories, linked to each other. [My husband,] Ed, used to call it, referring to his experimental films, ‘structuring strategies.’ How I write is by linking and by structures, and by, I hope, not ever losing sight of the meaning of the story. My favorite writer is Kafka. He kept everything linked and together and full of meaning.”
“Pelt” is on the surface one of Emshwiller’s more traditional stories, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1958. The story was submitted and critiqued at the Milford Writer’s Workshop at Michigan State University, which was founded by Damon Knight, and also the Turkey City writer’s workshop.
At the time of its publication, “Pelt” was considered to exemplify a strand of “literary” science fiction that bridged the gap between mainstream realism and core science fiction. In the modern era, of course, “Pelt” would not be considered anything other than an excellent and unusual science fiction story, one that deals with issues of the environment and how humans view other species. It is the kind of story that has become only more relevant, and better, with the passage of time.