Clare Winger Harris (1891–1968), a US writer, was the first woman to publish science fiction in the first generation of American pulp magazines. Her first story publication was “A Runaway World” in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Harris wrote about women protagonists fairly regularly, especially in stories like “The Fifth Dimension” (Amazing Stories, December 1928) and “The Ape Cycle” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Spring 1930). In an environment that suffered from a dearth of strong female characters, this fact made Harris an early feminist in the field by default. Her work also contained a preoccupation with creatures not quite human, cyborgs and ape-people in particular. Although Harris has been reprinted frequently in the modern era, when she first assembled her work in Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science (1947), she had to resort to self-publication through a vanity press.
The story reprinted here, “The Fate of the Poseidonia” (1927), also features a female lead and won third prize in an Amazing Stories contest. In addition to portraying women in a way uncommon for the times, the story deals with the surprisingly modern themes of fear of technology and loss of privacy. This was the first science fiction story by a woman published in that magazine. Perhaps unsurprisingly Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback, whose name would soon grace the Hugo Award, wrote in his introduction to the story: “That the third place winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientifiction writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule, the exception in this case being extraordinarily impressive.”
Gernsback added that he hoped to see more of “Mrs. Harris’s scientifiction” in Amazing Stories because “the story has a great deal of charm, chiefly because it is not overburdened with science, but whatever science is contained therein is not only quite palatable, but highly desirable, due to its plausibility. Not only this, but you will find that the author is a facile writer who keeps your interest unto the last line.” Some think Winger may have been inspired by her father, Frank Stover Winger, who wrote a novel inspired by Jules Verne. Others give credit to her husband, who was an engineer and architect.
Harris went on to publish eleven more stories with Gernsback over the next three years. She stopped writing in order to see to the education of her children, but her name in the table of contents inspired other women to write and submit their own stories—including another contributor to this anthology, Leslie F. Stone.