![]() ![]() ![]() This paper analyzes a selection of Judith Merril’s post-WWII stories set in space, situating them in the context of space-frontier mythologies and gender ideologies of the 1950s and bringing useful attention to the fiction of a writer best known as a critic and anthologist. Merril departed from the conventions of space-travel narratives, however, by creating female-, family-, and generation-centered stories of space exploration. Like many sf writers, both men and women, Merril’s space-travel narratives borrowed familiar themes of exploration, adventure, conquest, and colonization from the popular American western. Judith Merril, who entered the sf field as a writer in the late 1940s, seized upon the occasion of major cultural debates in space travel and new narratives of frontier expansion that speculated about mythical futures and alternate presents, rather than idealizing a mythical past. Human space flight was already a well-established subject in American science fiction by the time it became a real possibility in the 1950s, but with the launching in 1957 by the Soviet Union of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, the re-opening of the frontier-famously declared closed by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893-seemed to the public no longer mere speculation. Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont Daughter of Earth: Judith Merril and the Intersections of Gender, Science Fiction, and Frontier Mythology ![]()
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