I’ve found myself missing longform blogging from the weird old days of the internet. I hate my own recorded voice and don’t really bother to look like anything other than a tired gremlin on the regular, so despite the hours I spend cheerfully consuming weird informative junk on Youtube (I am too old to have to understand tiktok), I have no desire to add to that sphere. I just want to ramble occasionally. I haven’t tried to maintain anything of the kind since a bit after college, when I reviewed books and blathered in a frankly very 2012, twenty-two year old way. My youthful ideas are not very good but thanks to wordpress here they still are, apparently.
This attempt at a series will be aimed at early spec-fic by women. The intrinsic gender-essentialism and fundamental limitations of articulating the project thusly irritates me on principle. But. I am fascinated by the strangeness of early SF, something of a masochist when it comes to dated prose, and interested in staying in my lane. Also there are a lot of anthologies and articles where these things have been collected for scholarly purposes already. I am not a scholar. I am a dweeb who writes stories about robots who have feelings and shit, and so were a lot of other weird nerd girls. (Some of whom may not have been girls; we don’t know! And some people who were girls or who weren’t either probably belong on this list that I won’t ever know about! It’s just an arbitrary starting point!)
I love an informative Youtube channel, as stated, and I quite enjoy the Extra Credits history of science fiction series. Really. I like it. It’s how I learned about a bunch of wacky old books and also The Stars My Destination which maybe I will review one day because I so rarely hear it discussed and its so delightfully weird.
Anyway. Good series. It features one woman at the beginning (Frankenstein time, of course), and again at the almost-end (it’s Le Guin, because of course it is). A few other big names are mentioned in passing. Even in a world full of anthologies and dissections and big conversations about intersectionality, a pretty solid summary of SF history can only scare up two white ladies. So yeah. I’m doing women of early science fiction. Not as a historian, which I am not, nor even a literary critic, which I don’t really have the training for. Just as stories.
I’m launching with the help of Sisters of Tomorrow, an academic assembly of work more than a traditional anthology edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp. I think I can best capture the approach of the tome by stating that on the back cover, Ursula K. Le Guin is cited as the winner of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. You know. That Le Guin. Anyway, this gives me a little boost of context and biographical information as I get going.
Which will only help so much, as the opening essay discussed Charlotte Perkins Gilman and didn’t mention, you know, the eugenics. So if in looking at a bunch of almost exclusively white, upper class and up women from a hundred years ago, I stumble across someone horrifying and don’t realize…
I don’t have a good end to that sentence. I will try to keep that from happening and provide what context I can with the help of the internet.
Today’s tale comes to us from Clare Winger Harris, the caveat laden First (American) Woman to Publish A Science Fiction Story (under her own name) (in a dedicated science fiction magazine) (probably). She was the daughter of a weirdo writer, an escapee from Illinois who returned to Chicago anyway, and a Smith College graduate, so I’m just gonna concede she and I may have some sympathies. Ghost of Clare. If you’re around. We should hang out. I mean, I never go to the alumnae college club meetings with living people, but I bet you have good stories.
“The Evolutionary Monstrosity” is a strange choice for the editors of Sisters of Tomorrow on the surface. Other works by the same writer seem to have focused more on women. Its protagonists are three terrible men, each with less personality than the last, with the only women the walk-on roles of worried mother and useless ingenue. Good to know the tradition of focusing on dull dudes and their suspect interpersonal tensions rather than writing what you know goes way back. Context for my teenaged fanfiction habits.
Anyway. They’re all awful. Based on the Smith connection I imagine they are Amherst boys and nothing will disabuse me of the notion. The plot of the story is very much a descendant of the gothic horror side of SF, with secrets man was not meant to know and gruesome monstrosities and a laboratory that turns in a few pages from shining beacon of progress to haunted castle. The actual story is very pulpy, with a world domination plot concocted seemingly out of boredom, pleasing gibberish science, and characters who are comically wooden about the whole thing. It’d fit right into an old radio serial or the sort of gruesome funnybook that scared middle America into concocting the Comics Code.
The dreadful Amherst boys discuss a weird science theory. They do this… jocosely. (I learned a new word today and will be using it extremely freely.) Two of them strike off to do their science at the giant house belonging to one of them. Horrors ensue. The horrors eventually get smashed with a crowbar. I do not consider this a spoiler. A story like this is all vibes. Pure atmosphere. At one point a housecat is turned into an indescribable monstrosity that walks around bipedally and talks in a horrible little voice.
Arguably, here Harris invented furries. As in real life, some people found them charming, some merely shrugged, and some screamed about how god would be offended, and those latter people thought they were the reasonable ones. The narrator Amherst boy, of course, is among the latter, and spends most of the story screaming about offending god. And then wandering off for years at a time because… Reasons. (Of the three horrible Amherst boys, the least tolerable one is our protagonist, and the least tolerable one is not the one who evolves himself into a giant glowing head-spider.)(That’s head+spider, not the spider who is in charge of other spiders. Though that would also be cool.)
And also. Dot. One of the terribly Amherst boys has a sister. (They all have names but, you know, fuck them.) She first appears as a vapid flapper. She is onstage for about thirty seconds and the terrible narrator boy showers her in purest contempt for, uh, the vanity he imagines she has? She just walks on to say hello to him and he seethes with disdain. It’s a pretty weird scene. She’s got a thing for his friend, the other terrible Amherst boy who isn’t her brother. Generously to Harris, one might read this as jealousy on his part, because the next time they meet, he falls in love with her in about an hour, imagining just as promptly that she is no longer vain and silly and fashionable based on equal evidence. It’s tempting to read all this as happening inside his thick head, but she plays along neatly, and it’s explicitly said that she got a single shot of evolution-slurry that cured her of her feminine stupidness and made her an acceptable mate. I hope after the end of the story she also evolved into a head spider and ate him.
There’s honestly nothing salvageable here. But. You know. 1929. There are women nearly a century later who can’t write other women who don’t seethe with internalized misogyny. And they make sure we know all about it when twitter explodes with their self-martyrdom over it.
What I was really fascinated by, once the quiet self-loathing was digested and the gothic trappings and pulpy nonsense properly enjoyed, was the science part of the science fiction. None of the sources I’ve found on Clare Winger Harris mention what she actually studied at my alma mater, only that she didn’t finish her degree. Given Smith at the time was the first women’s college (there’s one of those confidently asserted firsts again) to have a dedicated science facility, and her approach to fiction, I’m, let’s say, inclined to the idea that she spent at least some of her time in that drafty building.
Paging the ghost of Clare again. Did any of your professors leave large bags of pickled lampreys in the elevator? Was there an elevator at the time? How about mislaid human remains? I just wanna talk.
My point before I fell into the world’s weirdest nostalgia (miss those dead lampreys) was that she was writing this at a fascinating time in science as well as science fiction. Sci-fi, in its infancy, was already hyperfocused on the story about An Idea. Harris delivers, and as it happens she is the one who elicited that infamous Gernsback quote. “...as a rule, women do not make good science fiction 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.” You know. The infuriating one.
The moment does explain why the characters being tedious and also absolute dorks doesn’t matter too much. This is a story about What If Evolution Is Bacteria?
That sounds like perfect nonsense. But. The story was published in 1929. Evolution as modification by descent as codified by Chuck Darwin was a theory developed within living memory. Nobody knew what the fuck DNA was. The Modern Synthesiswas more than ten years out. What if evolution is bacteria? Why shouldn’t it be? The mechanism behind the gothic descent into horror, that being really good at bacteria somehow will force evolutionary change, may be bananapants in retrospect, but it was arguably less weird than lots of speculative science going on at the time. It was standard (and appears in this story) to have science fiction include telepathy at this point. The bacteria thing is orders of magnitude less stupid.
And it opens the central thesis of the story, the only interesting idea that dumb Amherst boy the narrator actually has. The villain uses his control of evolution-triggering bacteria to evolve himself into an awesome being with cool powers who can rule the world, which is bad for some reason. (Clare, if you can hear me, it’s 2022 and we would welcome the giant head glowing spider.) But what the story is hung up on is that change for the sake of change is meaningless, that evolution is a response to the environment, not mere progress and aggrandizement for its own sake. Frankly, there are science communicators and even practitioners now who could stand to hear this.
Honestly, replace evolution bacteria with genetic engineering and the whole thing could be a Netflix miniseries without a lot of rewriting.
Clare Winger Harris’s next-to-last story appeared just a few months after this. Her career just stopped, though in 1933 she sneaked out one last short to be published by the guys who would go on to create Superman (the spec-fic world is always like this). “The Evolutionary Monstrosity” is just before this public voice of hers peters out. All I could find suggested she’d left to raise her children, and as the twenties ended and the depression rolled in, speculation into someone else’s life would just be imposing a neat narrative. Thanks for the thoughts, Clare Winger Harris. I hope you were happy with the choices open to you.
Also, did they have that horrifying taxidermied orangutan hanging out by the biology labs in your day? I still have nightmares about that thing.