Answers to Early Women Science Fiction Writers Quiz

Here are the answers to the quiz I posted a couple of days ago. (Here's the original quiz.)

1.  One of the earliest women to hold major creative roles in television science fiction, D. C. Fontana followed the producer of The Lieutenant to a new franchise where she became a writer, story editor, and later associate producer, helping shape much of its early mythology. Name this franchise.

STAR TREK

2.  The very first woman to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America began writing historical fiction for young readers in the 1930s, adopting a male pseudonym as was common in that era. She turned to science fiction with the short story "People of the Crater" in 1947, and published her first science fiction novel, Star Man's Son, 2250 A. D., in 1952. Dozens of novels followed until (and beyond!) her death in 2005. Her most famous series is probably Witch World. Name this writer (either her given name or the male-coded pseudonym (which she later took as her legal name.))

ALICE MARY NORTON/ANDRE NORTON

3.  Any quiz about pioneering women science fiction writers could hardly omit mentioning Mary Shelley, whom Brian W. Aldiss championed as the first SF writer, thanks to her first novel, Frankenstein (1818). But Shelley was no one-hit wonder -- she published six further novels as well as short fiction, poetry, travel narratives, and biographies. Name the 1826 post-apocalyptic novel that was her final venture into science fiction.

THE LAST MAN

4.  While Mary Shelley is now widely cited as the first "true" science fiction writer, there were earlier works involving science-fictional tropes, such as Lucian of Samosata's True History (late 2nd Century CE), Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1634), and The Blazing World (1666). Name the Englishwoman, a prominent natural philosopher in her time, who wrote the latter novel.

MARGARET CAVENDISH nee LUCAS/DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE

5.  Possibly no science fiction/fantasy magazine has been so closely associated with a single artist as Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, when 66 covers, for almost half the magazine's issues, were painted by which woman? The most iconic of these covers is shown in the image below.

MARGARET BRUNDAGE (I really didn't mean to have two Margarets back to back!)

6.  One of the very best SF writers of all time had a career in the field that lasted from 1933 to 1958, after which she mostly wrote for television. She was known for her early series about Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith, and for later masterworks including "No Woman Born" and "Vintage Season", and while much of her work was in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, the best of it (in my opinion) was her work alone. Name this woman -- but don't use her married name(s) nor any of her pseudonyms, which included Lawrence O'Donnell, Lewis Padgett, and C. H. Liddell among others.

CATHERINE L. MOORE

7.  Women editors were rare in science fiction magazines before the 1970s -- Dorothy McIlwraith at the aforementioned Weird Tales in the 1940s, and Bea Mahaffey, at Other Worlds, Universe and others in the early 1950s, were the most notable before the great Cele Goldsmith Lalli, who took over two companion magazines in 1958 and edited them until 1965, publishing major early work by such writers as Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Disch. Name either of these two magazines, one of which still survives today, and which is famed as the first magazine devoted primarily to science fiction. 

AMAZING or FANTASTIC 

8.  Begum Rokeya Hossain, a Bengali Muslim woman, published which remarkable story in The Indian Ladies' Magazine in 1905? The story is a reverie about a future utopia, characterized by women in power, solar energy, world peace, and even flying cars (but not grapes or raisins).

"SULTANA'S DREAM"

9.  Name the writer, editor, critic, and anthologist whose first sale, "That Only a Mother" (1948) ended up in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I. Her most significant contributions to SF include an early and eclectic series of anthologies collecting the best short SF of the year. After moving to Canada in the late 1960s she had a profound effect on that country's SF scene, initiating the Tesseracts series of anthologies of Canadian SF, and donating her collection of SF-related material to the Toronto Public Library to establish a research library now named for her.

JUDITH MERRIL

10.  Margaret St. Clair, who also wrote as Idris Seabright, is in my opinion an underrated early master of modern science fiction. She began selling science fiction and detective fiction in 1946, and her work includes brilliant short fiction like "Short in the Chest", "An Egg a Month from All Over", and "The Sacred Martian Pig", as well as novels including Sign of the Labrys. She was a relatively early convert to which modern religion? Her beliefs are reflected in much of her later work. This religion was recently removed from the US Department of Defense list of accepted faiths.

WICCA

11.  Now for a fictional character, who qualifies as a pioneering woman as she was one of the first female superheroes in the comics, debuting in 1941. The character was created by psychiatrist William Marston, and was influenced, he sometimes suggested, by his two polyamorous wives*, Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, and perhaps also by Olive's aunt, the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. (*Holloway was Marston's legal wife, but it seems that all three regarded themselves as part of the marriage.) Who was this superhero?

WONDER WOMAN

12.  Leigh Brackett sold her first story in 1940, and went on to have a brilliant multi-faceted career, including science fiction novels like The Sword of Rhiannon and The Long Tomorrow (first novel by a woman to be shortlisted for the Hugo Award), crime fiction such as No Good From a Corpse, and writing for films (she collaborated with William Faulkner on the screenplay for The Big Sleep.) Shortly before her death in 1978 she turned in the first draft of the screenplay for which blockbuster science fiction movie?

STAR WARS EPISODE V: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

13. Some important science fiction was produced by women outside the science fiction genre. What Not is a satirical novel published just as the first World War was ending, about a future in which war is outlawed and breeding is controlled on strictly eugenic grounds (by a Ministry of Brains!). Who was this author, a committed pacifist who published many other novels, gaining greatest success with her last, The Towers of Trebizond (1956).

ROSE MACAULAY

14. The first woman writer to publish original fiction under her own name in the science fiction magazines was Clare Winger Harris, who placed a dozen stories in magazines such as Science Wonder Stories between 1926 and 1933, including "The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily". She was posthumously given which award in 2024, given annually to an unfairly neglected science fiction writer.

CORDWAINER SMITH REDISCOVERY AWARD

15. Thea von Harbou wrote the novel and co-wrote the screenplay for which classic 1927 science fiction film, directed by her husband Fritz Lang. Von Harbou pulled the same trick for another Lang-directed science fiction film, Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon (1928)). Alas, her marriage and collaboration with Lang collapsed in part because of mutual infidelity but also due to von Harbou's involvement with the Nazi party.

METROPOLIS

When the quiz was played on Learned League, the hardest question was Margaret Brundage, and the second hardest was "Sultana's Dream". If it had been a live question, I imagine Rose Macaulay would have been hard as well. (What Not is available from my publisher (of my upcoming anthology of philosophical science fiction, that will include "Sultana's Dream" as well as an excerpt from Frankenstein): MIT Presss, as part of their "Radium Era SF" series -- the cover is shown at the top of this post.) The easiest questions were Star Trek and The Empire Strikes Back.