April 11th, 2007
by
Liz Henry
I was going on excitedly tonight about this book I’m reading by an author I’d never heard of – a good book, about a girl from a pioneer mining planet who gets sent on a scholarship to college on Earth, and she’s desperately trying to hide her learning disability. Seems she can only read at a regular pace and can’t take the magic super screen-readers that cram knowledge into your brain. She’s a brilliant scientist, detective, and “cultural engineer”. So not only is it hard SF, it’s a teenager solving mysteries AND a boarding school novel. The writing style is unusual – really in the voice of a smart teenager who hasn’t been exposed to a classy education, in present tense, with odd Capitalizations and conversational rather than formal grammar. I’ll review Unwillingly to Earth for real when I’m done, but during our conversation I went to look up the author on the Feminist SF wiki, and she wasn’t there. A broader search led me to some information and then a funny conversation with Lori Selke, who had come over for dinner:
Me: Hey, look! Pauline Ashwell, also Pauline Whitby, oh, writing as Paul Ash too, not just in the 90s, either… whoa! She was writing in 1958! Hey, in 1959, what looks like basically this novel with a different name, nominated for a Hugo…
Lori: Yeah. Back when they nominated women.
Me: Oh. What? But… What, did they… um? You mean, they used to… but…. really? more?!
Lori: *stares at me, deadpan*
Me: Oh!!
Lori: I was joking.
Me: Damn you!
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
Previous:
Cerise Magazine Submissions Reminder --- Next:
How to vote in the 2008 Hugos
Filed under Awards & Recognition, Writers & Artists, women writers | Comments (2)
That was in Analog, in 1958 or so. That is, the first quarter of it was, and I looked through all the back issues from then up to the 70s to find more by the same writer, but he-or-she just disappeared. I was delighted to find the book a few years ago, though I fear that the later sections don’t hold up as well as the first two. It really was a breath of fresh air.
I didn’t know about the pseudonyms. Thanks!
[...] a link back to an old post about four stories by Pauline Ashwell, collected in Unwillingly to [...]