The 2024 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award honoree is Claire Winger Harris. The selection was announced this weekend at Readercon, held July 11-14, 2022, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
The 2024 jury consisted of Ann VanderMeer, Steven H Silver, and Rich Horton, who gave these reasons for their choice:
Clare Winger Harris (1891-1968) was a true pioneer of the field of genre science fiction, and was the first woman to write regularly for the early Science Fiction pulps such as Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories under her own name. She published a dozen stories between 1926 and 1933, and her work was characterized by a truly expansive and exotic imagination, and by an uncompromising devotion to the consequences of the unusual events she conceived. Her best work, such as “The Fate of the Poseidonia”, “The Miracle of the Lily”, “The Diabolical Drug”, and “The Artificial Man”, is rewarding reading to this day. Her sole novel, Persephone of Eleusis (1923), is historical fiction. It is unfortunate that she abandoned her writing career so soon, but we hope this award will focus attention on her early contributions.
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award has been given annually since 2001 by the Cordwainer Smith Foundation, preserving the memory of science-fiction writer Paul Linebarger, who wrote under that pen name. The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award honors under-read science fiction and fantasy authors with the intention of drawing renewed attention to the winners.
[Thanks to Rich Horton for the story.]
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I became aware of Clair Winger Harris around 1999 in a column by Mike Resnick on forgotten authors in an issue of F&SF, and I tracked down a copy of her collection Away From the Here and Now. It was reissued in a revised paperback edition a few years ago under the title The Artificial Man and Other Stories. I always find the Rediscovery Award winners to be worthwhile choices.
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