SPEAKER_00: This bonus episode is brought to you by NURTEC ODT Remedipant 75 mg orally disintegrating tablets.
Hello. From Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica. This month we're talking about women of science fiction. These women inspire us to imagine impossible worlds, alien creatures, and fantastical inventions,
revealing our deepest fears and hopes for the future.
Today we're talking about one of the first women to publish science fiction stories under her own name. Her stories often featured strong female characters on the borders of humanity.
Meet Claire Winger-Harris.
Claire was born in Freeport, Illinois, on January 18, 1891. Her mother was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist.
Her father was an electrical contractor who also enjoyed creative hobbies like writing. In 1917, he published a novel called The Wizard of the Island or The Vindication of Professor Waldinger.
Claire's future writings in science fiction might have stemmed from her father's interest in the genre.
Claire attended Smith College before meeting and marrying her husband, Frank Clyde Harris, in 1912.
The couple went on to have three children.
After a few years of being a housewife, Claire began to write.
She published her first novel in 1923, a historical fiction piece called Persephone of Eleusis, a Romance of Ancient Greece.
After her novel, Claire shifted to short stories.
A Runaway World was published in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales under the name Mrs. F.C. Harris. The story begins in the year 2026.
It describes the events after Earth is pulled away from its orbit around the sun.
Though science fiction works had been published a century before, it wasn't until pulp magazines that the genre became popular.
These magazines were cheap and aimed at younger readers.
In addition to taking submissions, these magazines included columns where readers could send in their thoughts and critiques of stories.
This accessibility to writers helped the genre explode in popularity.
In December of 1926, Claire submitted a story for a contest being run by Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback.
It was called The Fate of Poisedonia, a space opera about Martians who steal the Earth's water.
She came in third, publishing it under her full name, Claire Winger Harris.
Hugo was so shocked by her great work that he printed in his editorial,
Women do not make good scientific writers. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule, the exception in this case being extraordinarily impressive.
Claire went on to publish short stories of the most famous pulp magazines of the era, Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Science Wonder Quarterly.
The stories covered various science fiction tropes like space travel and alien invasions.
Claire's last story, The Ape Cycle, tells the story of a scientist who alters evolution to make apes smart enough to work for humans.
Another character, Melva, questions the experiment's ethics.
Eventually, the apes become aware of their unjust treatment and rise up to overthrow the humans. Melva was just one of Claire's female characters who had active roles in her works.
Claire stopped her writing in 1930 to focus on raising her children.
But as the story goes, her fans missed her so much that one boy wrote a letter asking her to submit a story to his magazine in 1933.
She obliged, and her story, The Vibrometer, appeared in the last issue of a short-lived, homespun fanzine called Science Fiction.
The pamphlet may have been the last for high school student Jerry Siegel and his friend Joe Shuster, but the pair would go on to create one of the most recognized superheroes of all time, Superman.
Eventually, Claire and Frank divorced, and Claire moved out west.
In 1947, Claire self-published a collection of her short stories, away from the here and now, Stories in Pseudoscience. Claire died on October 26, 1968, in Pasadena, California.
Even though Claire published just a few works in her lifetime, the stories were reprinted over the years, introducing her to new fans.
Because she printed works in her name, and because of her embrace of female characters, Claire has been recognized in recent years as a pioneer of women's and feminist science fiction.
All month we're talking about women in science fiction. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram, at Womanica Podcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite Sistering Po creator.
As always, we'll be taking a break for the weekend. Talk to you on Monday!
