Katherine MacLean
selected as
SFWA Author Emeritus

Nebula Awards 2003

April 18-20, 2003

Radisson Plaza — Warwick Hotel
Philadelphia, PA

I am extremely pleased to announce that Katherine MacLean will join us at the Philadelphia Nebula Awards® weekend as SFWA Author Emeritus.

One of the earliest women science fiction writers, Ms. MacLean saw her first story, "Defense Mechanism," published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1949. There followed a number of short stories, including "Pictures Don't Lie," "The Snowball Effect," the "Hills of Space" series, and 1971 Nebula Award® winner "The Missing Man."

Ms. MacLean's short stories have been collected in The Diploids and The Trouble with You Earth People. Her novels include Cosmic Checkmate, Missing Man, and Dark Wing.

SFWA began its Author Emeritus program in 1995 as a way of recognizing senior writers who have made significant contributions to our field. Previous recipients include Emil Petaja, Wilson "Bob" Tucker, Judith Merril, Nelson S. Bond, Philip Klass (William Tenn), Daniel Keyes, and Robert Sheckley.

— Sharon Lee
President

On meeting Katherine MacLean

I met Katherine McLean for the first time a few years ago at Wiscon. Seeing her sitting on a couch in the lobby, I cracked my reserve and went over and introduced myself as an admirer of her writing. We sat there and talked for several hours. She was fascinating, of course. Witty. Challenging. And not one to suffer adulation gladly.

Her novella "The Diploids," first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, in April 1953, reads like a noir-ish screwball comedy, toying with the tropes of genre SF at a time when genre was the whole ball of wax. I read it in the Sixties, at 17 or so, and re-read it, and re-read it again over the years. So when I met her that afternoon, I confessed that there was a passage in her work that had really tickled my fancy as a teenager.

"The part in 'The Diploids,' where Mart, the diploid, tells Nadine that if there were any other people with his intelligence and skills around, they'd be running things, and Nadine points out that the people who are running things on Earth are obviously neither skillful nor intelligent," I said. "That still amuses me."

She fixed me with glittering eye, and snorted politely. "The sort of cynical thing a teenager would like," she assessed. "No useful insights." My inner teenager was justly deflated. My outer middle-ager was delighted at seeing that a woman who has been writing since before I was born — and that's a loooong time ago — was taking no compliments, however heart-felt, for immature material.

The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy has been reprinted by Wildside Press , and there is a hilarious and completely fallacious review of it on Amazon.com that I suspect was written by Katie herself, although it's signed "A reader from Mycogen, Trantor." I'll quote the opening lines:

"Katherine MacLean was the first woman to write sf. Since her life story is so interesting and is necessary to understand her work, I'll mention some elements of it. As a nurse in the Civil War, she used her free time to write the first batch of her action stories…."

Katherine MacLean is a writer, an artist, a builder of stone walls, a fixer of barn roofs. I'm delighted that she has agreed to accept SFWA's Author Emeritus Award. I don't think she'll let it go to her head.

— Eileen Gunn

Bibliography: Katherine MacLean
(Courtesy of Locus Magazine)

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