Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson

Author:Becca Anderson [Anderson, Becca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642501230
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2020-02-09T13:23:36+00:00

JUDITH MERRIL ‘the strongest woman in science fiction’

Judith Merril (1923–1997) was an American-born Canadian science fiction editor, critic, and anthologist who left her mark on the genre. Born Josephine Juliet Grossman to Jewish parents in Boston, she lost her father to suicide in 1929. Her mother, who had been a suffragette, moved the family to the Bronx borough of New York City when Judith was in her mid-teens. Judith took an interest in politics while still in high school, studying Marxism, as well as Zionism, which her mother espoused. Judith graduated from high school in 1939 at only sixteen; she soon experienced a shift in political values due to events of the time and became interested in Trotskyist thought. At a Trotskyite picnic the next summer, she met Dan Zissman, and four months later, they married. In 1942, they had one daughter, Merril Zissman, but the marriage ended in 1945.

During these years, Judith became involved with a New York science fiction group, the Futurians, and in 1946, science fiction author Frederik Pohl, whom she had met in the group, came to live with her. In this period, she changed her last name to Merril. She married Pohl in late 1948 when her divorce was finalized, and they had a daughter, Ann Pohl, in 1950. This second marriage was short-lived as well; they divorced in 1952. As these events unfolded, Judith concurrently worked on science fiction fanzines and began to write professionally in other genres in 1945. Her first SF short story, “That Only a Mother,” a disturbing tale about nuclear radiation, was published in 1948 in Astounding. She followed it with her debut novel, Shadow on the Hearth (1950), an understated nuclear World War III story told from the viewpoint of a suburban housewife, which was later adapted for television under the title Atomic Attack.

Beginning in 1950, she edited anthologies of short science fiction, including the popular “Year’s Best” anthology from 1956 to 1967; she was one of a short list of people who brought greater professionalism and literary standards to the field. In total, she edited more than two dozen anthologies and published twenty-six original short stories of her own. She collaborated with fellow SF writer and Futurian C.M. Kornbluth on two novels published under the name ‘Cyril Judd,’ Outpost Mars (1951) and Gunner Cade (1952). Her 1960 novel The Tomorrow People melded suspenseful psychological mystery with science fiction; after that year, she did not publish much more fiction. Homecalling and Other Stories: The Complete Solo Fiction of Judith Merril was posthumously published in 2005.

Merril moved to the Canadian city of Toronto in 1968 in reaction to the US government’s suppression of citizen action against the Vietnam War; there she was one of the founding residents of the Rochdale College experiment in cooperative housing and education run by students themselves. She founded a wide-ranging collection of speculative fiction at the Toronto Public Library in 1970, donating the books and periodicals she had personally amassed to kick it off; later, in the 1990s, the library named the individually housed collection after her.

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