What was it like to be a part of the burgeoning sff field through the 70s and 80s?
Well, I don’t know that it was ‘burgeoning’ so much. It was just…it had been big; it was an established field, and it was fun.
What made it so fun?
Writers are fun. Publishing is fun.
Did you take a particular interest in science fiction, or was it coincidental?
No. When Ace came along, in fact, I thought, “Hmm. How ‘bout this.” Because I hadn’t really done anything, and I looked at who I liked reading in the field—which I did—and the funny thing was, I mostly liked the women writers.
And did you find more female writers in sff?
No, not so many. Judith Merril was there, a wonderful anthologizer. Anne McCaffrey had some early stuff out, but a lot of the guys still had women characters who…who made coffee, you know. They weren’t very exciting. Well, I saw that on my own personal bookshelves, there were a number of people I liked, and I kind of, I guess with personal interest I sort of moseyed in from horror, just because I liked it.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.