Clare Winger Harris

Cover of the April 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, which featured Clare Winger Harris's classic short story "The Miracle of the Lily."

Clare Winger Harris (January 18, 1891 – October 26, 1968 ) was an American science fiction writer whose short stories were published during the 1920s. She is credited as the first woman to publish stories under her own name in science fiction magazines. Harris began publishing stories in 1926 and soon became popular with readers, with most of her fiction appearing in the influential magazine Amazing Stories. Her father, Frank Stover Winger, was an electrical contractor who also wrote science fiction; in 1917, he published a novel called The Wizard of the Island; or, The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger. Her mother, May Stover, was the daughter of D. C. Stover, founder of the Stover Manufacturing and Engine Company and the richest man in Freeport. Her husband was an architect and engineer who later became president of the American Monorail Company of Cleveland, Ohio.

After marrying, Harris and her husband spent several years in Greece and Palestine, where Harris researched for her book Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece. Harris gave birth to three sons (Clyde Winger, born 1915; Donald Stover, born 1916; and Lynn Thackrey, born 1918) Her absence from the pulps was noted: a fan wrote in to Amazing Stories in late 1930 to ask, “What happened to Clare Winger Harris? I’ve missed her ...”.

Harris self-published a collection of her stories titled Away from Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science in 1947, which collected all of her short stories except "The Vibrometer". The collection received an award from the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society.

Harris also wrote one of the first attempts to classify science fiction when, in the August 1931 issue of Wonder Stories, she listed 16 basic science fiction themes, including "interplanetary space travel," "adventures on other worlds," and "the creation of synthetic life."

Harris's writing has been described as being "fascinated by paradoxes of time, space travel, the possibility of inhabiting other worlds (in particular, the planet Mars), modern technology as it might be applied to humanity ... and how humanity might evolve or perhaps be supplanted by other species." and featured strong female characters who were equal to men, such as with the character of Sylvia, an airplane mechanic and pilot in her story "The Ape Cycle."

Critical view and influence

Described as a "pioneering" science fiction author, Harris was the first female SF author to consistently write under her own name Harris's stories appeared in the world's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, less than a year after the magazine was founded. She was popular enough with fans of the time for "her name to be splashed on future covers to attract readers."

As Jane Donawerth wrote in Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, among the important aspects of Harris's contributions is that "she was a woman writer in a genre generally written by men, she wrote stories that included portraits of feminine strength, and she offered visions of a science that was not solely the province of privileged white men."

Even though Harris published only a handful of stories, almost all of them have been reprinted over the years. Of these, "The Miracle of the Lily" has been reprinted the most, appearing in anthologies such as The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin released by the Library of America in 2018 and Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, released in 2021 by the British Library. The story has also been praised by many critics, with Forrest J Ackerman calling it a "classic" and Richard Lupoff saying it would have "won the Hugo Award for best short story, if the award had existed then." Lupoff also wrote that "hile today's reader may find her prose creaky and old-fashioned, the stories positively teem with still-fresh and provocative ideas.

Harris's stories have also been reprinted in a number of other anthologies in recent decades, including two books from Wesleyan University Press: 2016's Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction and 2006's Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the 20th Century, with the later including a critical essay about Harris. and Gosh Wow! Sense of Wonder Science Fiction.

In 2018, her work was featured at the Pasadena History Museum as part of an exhibit titled "Dreaming the Universe: The Intersection of Science, Fiction, & Southern California."