As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF by clicking here.

Here are this month's conventions, just in case you need more info: Ikkicon,
Sac-Anime, Ichibancon, Anime Los Angles, Arisia, Setsucon, Emiko's Mini-Convention, SoDak Con, Ohayocon, Chibi Ushycon, Animation on Display, Las Cruces Anime Day and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival.

Got any cool events happening in February, or book releases you want to make sure we include? Write to calendar@io9.com.

Research by Cyriaque Lamar. Design and layout by Stephanie Fox.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF by clicking here.

Research by Cyriaque Lamar. Design and layout by Stephanie Fox.

Robinson, the author of the Mars trilogy, The Years Of Rice And Salt, the Three Californias trilogy and the Science In The Capitol series, has a new novel coming out in the U.S. next month: Gallileo's Dream, in which the pioneering astronomer receives a telescope that allows him to see Jupiter three thousand years from now, when our descendants live there. By all accounts, it's a fascinating look at the man who may have been the first real scientist.

And Robinson's following book, provisionally titled 2312, also sounds great. According to Tim Holman, Orbit VP and Publisher:

Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer who can make the future credible, no matter how incredible it might seem. 2312 will be set in our solar system three hundred years from now; a solar system in which mankind has left Earth and found new habitats. This will be a novel for anyone curious to see what our future looks like – a grand science-fictional adventure in every sense – and I'm thrilled that Orbit will be publishing it in both the US and the UK.

Top image of the Gallilean satellites from NASA. [Orbit Books]

Writes Martinez, who also wrote The Automatic Detective, over at Orbit Books:

A big reason I don't read much fantasy / sci fi is because I want the weirdness, the monsters, the inhuman, and for the most part, that stuff is shuffled to the side. Almost all fantasy / sci fi is from the human perspective because almost all of it is aimed at a human audience. (Very few dinosaurs buy books these days.) But I don't want to read about people. I know people. People are everywhere, and while they're generally pleasant and I have nothing against them (for the most part), I'd much rather read about the ogre than the knight, the robot than the astronaut. That probably goes a long way toward explaining why I write what I write.

It's really true. People are ass. (Or at least, a significant proportion of people is made out of ass. If you follow the rule of nines, we're about 18 percent buttocks and lower back.) We can't get away from them in reality, so all the more reason to banish them from the central place in fiction. There should be a literary movement, with a fancy name. Any ideas? [Orbit Books]

The hard science-fiction mastermind's descriptions of his next two books sound pretty intriguing, especially the second one:

Zendegi is set in Iran in the very near future; the first part of the novel takes place in 2012. The ultimate focus of the story involves brain mapping and virtual reality, but the backgrounds of all the characters are entwined with the Iranian pro-democracy movement in various ways. It's due to be published in mid-2010.

Orthogonal is a novel I'm working on right now; it's set in a universe with laws of physics that are different from our own. One small change in a fundamental equation - just turning a minus sign into a plus sign - leads to some incredibly rich variations in everything from the way biology works to the relativistic effects of space travel.

He also explains why we may not be as close to creating A.I. as you'd think, and why we should tread carefully:

I can't say I'm disappointed, or surprised, that we don't have artificial intelligence yet. I've written things where conscious software is created in the near future, but it's usually in the form of direct copies of human minds, so it's more a matter of us migrating from our bodies than creating a new form of intelligence from scratch.

At the moment we're so far away from creating any kind of conscious software that it's hard to know which prospects are realistic, and which are pure fantasy. When we do finally grope our way towards some tangible results, I hope we proceed slowly and carefully, because this has the potential to lead to a lot of suffering.

The present generation of humans emerged out of hundreds of millions of years of animals tearing each other's throats out, and tens of thousands of years of people being prey to famine and disease. We might aspire to do much better than that, but creating an entirely new kind of intelligence that's happy with its own place in the world is an incredibly daunting prospect.

Interestingly, he also says he thinks brain-mapping may be the most promising new technology being developed right now.

Egan also explains why he didn't write any books for four years (he was working to help refugees in Australia), why he doesn't allow any photos of himself on the internet, and why he avoids science-fiction conventions. [Keeping The Door]

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF by clicking here.

This time around, we're not sticking an hyperlinks in the PDF version of this calendar, because that makes it way harder to make corrections to the calendar when people point out problems. Instead, here's a list of all the conventions in November, with URLs:

Friday the 6th:
Aki Con
Neko Con (thru Sun) Convention
Pacific Media Expo

Saturday the 7th:
Zenkaikon
King Con Brooklyn
Cincinnati Comic and Anime Convention

Sunday the 8th:
Seattle ComiCard Convention
Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention

Friday the 13th:
Dotcon
Izumicon
New England Fan Experience
Windycon

Friday the 20th:
Anime Crossroads
Anime USA
Another Anime Convention
Bishie Con
Daisho Con
Yule Con
Philcon
Zona Con

Saturday the 21st.:
Boston Super Megafest
Virginia Comic-Con

Friday the 27th.:

Tomodachi Fest
OryCon
Chicago Tardis 2009

Saturday the 28th.:
Atlanta Anime Day

Research by Cyriaque Lamar. Design by Stephanie Fox.

Sorry it took us so long to get a corrected version up — Stephanie is on the road, and I was too swamped this week to sit down and go through the calendar before it went up, as much as I shoudl have. Next month's calendar should go much, much more smoothly. We think.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here.

Research by Alexis Brown. Design by Stephanie Fox.

In addition to these author portraits, Hey Oscar Wilde! includes renderings of science fiction characters, including Barbarella, Paul Atreides, Robert Neville, and Big Brother.

[Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!!! via Neatorama]

Isaac Asimov by Jason Armstrong
Mike Mignola by Scott Mills
Cormac McCarthy by Jamie Tolagson
William Gibson by Pia Guerra
Arthur C. Clark by Jeff Lemire
Douglas Adams by Tom Fowler
Michael Moorcock and J.R.R.Tolkien by Walt Simonson
Rod Serling by Scott Campbell
Neil Gaiman by Leigh Gallagher
HP Lovecraft by Bruce Timm
Samuel R. Delany by Mark Badger
Margaret Atwood by Andi Watson
Ray Bradbury by Val Mayerik
JK Rowling by Terry Moore
Kurt Vonnegut by D'Israeli
Aldous Huxley by Brian Ashmore
Alan Moore by Frazer Irving
HP Lovecraft by Saverio Tenuta
Edward Gorey by Troy Nixey
HG Wells by Charlie Adlard
Neal Stephenson by Matthew Clark
Jules Verne by Ted McKeever
Robert A. Heinlein by John K. Snyder III
Anne Rice by Craig Hamilton

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here.

Research by Alexis Brown. Design by Stephanie Fox.

Cassidy says the project was inspired by a visit to a Hugo Award-winning author's house, where he began to wonder about the connection between a writer's work and their environment:

I spend a lot of time thinking about people's environments — the places they build around themselves, the things they choose to live with. Is there a connection, I started to wonder if there was a connection between the places that writers work and their work itself.

Cassidy plans to collect these and additional photos — including the Neil Gaiman and Lois McMaster Bujold's workspaces — with interviews from the authors into a full-length book.

[Where I Write via Metafilter]

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here. And I'll be making changes to it on the fly, so if there are any inaccuracies or omissions, please comment or ping me via email.

Research by Alexis Brown. Design by Stephanie Fox.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here. And welcome back Stephanie Fox on calendar design duties!

Research by Alexis Brown. Design by Stephanie Fox.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here.

Research by Alasdair Wilkins. Design by Stephanie Fox. Layout by Charlie Jane Anders.

There's always an element of time travel involved in the io9 calendar - we're bringing you the future of science fiction entertainment! - but this time around, you'll have to travel back in time to late April, when this calendar should have gone up. Blame computer problems that turned my Apple computer into an expensive brick, and left me having to reinstall every piece of software from scratch.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - now with hyperlinks for books and conventions - by clicking here.

Research by Alasdair Wilkins. Design by Stephanie Fox. Layout by Charlie Jane Anders.

Pratchett has been experimenting with a helmet, designed by Dr. Gordon Dougal, which directs brief bursts of infrared light into the brain. Infrared light is thought to stimulate cell growth in tissues, and encourage them to repair themselves. Dougal believes the helmet can reverse symptoms of dementia, including memory loss as well as anxiety, within four weeks.

Pratchett used the helmet daily for about three months, and noticed a slight improvement in his faculties, according to his agent and Dr. Dougal. To ensure the helmet fit properly, a friend of Sir Terry's created a cast of his head. And then the helmet was clamped to the back of a chair at his cottage home. [Daily Mail]

Some of these day jobs are just your standard drudge work, some are bizarre and colorful, and a few are especially awful. Just remember — as annoying as your brain-grinding day job is, it could always be worse!

Iain M. Banks was a non-destructive testing technician at the Nigg Bay oil rig for British Steel. The claustrophobic, isolated setting inspired the "pyrotechnic sadism" of his first published novel, The Wasp Factory.

Douglas Adams was "moon-lighting as a hotel security guard" in London when he came up with the idea for Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy. The job, which paid him to sit and watch the hotel elevators for hours, gave him time to brainstorm and come up with bizarre ideas... like the useless security guards of Golgafrincham, for example. Phil Darnowsky also claims Adams worked as a chicken-coop cleaner, and bodyguard to a Qatari sheik, thanks to his immense bulk.

Jack Cady was a truck driver, auctioneer, landscaper, gardener, warehouse worker and refrigerator repairman. While a truck driver, he had an old typewriter balanced on the seat and typed his stories (while he drove, I think.) Said Cady: "My first novel (though not the first published one) was rough drafted on an old Royal typewriter that sat on the seat of a 750 Ford." Eventually, he sold one of his stories to the Atlantic Monthly, and later won the Nebula, Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy and Stoker Awards.

Octavia Butler swept floors and worked as a telemarketer.

Theodore Sturgeon's day jobs included "door-to-door refrigerator salesman, circus roustabout, resort hotel manager (in Jamaica), bulldozer driver (Puerto Rico), and gas station operator and a tractor lubrication center operator for the Army."

It's not really such a terrible job, but it's hard to imagine — Kurt Vonnegut had his own Saab dealership in the 1960s, after he'd already published Player Piano. Imagine buying a car from Kurt Vonnegut!

Jack McDevitt held a host of unsavory jobs — including motivational speaker. And worst of all, Philadelphia taxi driver.

Philip Jose Farmer spent a dozen years working for the Keystone Steel & Wire Company.

Pat Murphy worked for years as a guide and producer at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, which she described as "an enclave of artists and oddballs and renegade scientists." She created weird science exhibits and demonstrations by day, and wrote even weird science fiction in her spare time.

Nancy Kress worked for an ad agency, writing training manuals for Xerox, until she finally became a full-time author and writing teacher.

Thomas M. Disch was the night watchman at a funeral parlor — which would creep me out, I have to say. He also carried a spear for the Metropolitan Opera.

David Drake was a bus driver as well as a lawyer and a Vietnam veteran.

H. Beam Piper was a laborer and night watchman for the Pennsylania Railroad's Altoona Yards.

Frederik Pohl was a literary agent, whose clients included Isaac Asimov as well as half the genre's other writers at the time — but he couldn't make a living at it.

L.E. Modesitt, Jr. was a real estate agent, a lifeguard and a disk jockey, as well as working for the EPA and a congressman.

Richard K. Morgan taught English as a second language in Istanbul for ages before he finally sold Altered Carbon.

Holly Lisle has sung in restaurants, taught guitar lessons, flipped burgers at McDonald's and worked as a registered nurse.

Several science fiction writers made money writing porn — back in the days when porn was still a source of income, in the days before alt.sex.stories and such. One of my friends whom I asked for suggestions mentioned Robert Silverberg — who supposedly wrote a porno book every two weeks, under pseudonyms like Don Elliott. Also, Rina Weisman quotes Barry N. Maltzberg as saying one porn book paid for his house.

So whom did I leave out?

When we spoke to NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty about the project, he mentioned that 27 novels composed during NaNoWriMo have been published in print. James Strickland’s first published novel was his NaNoWriMo cyberpunk novel Looking Glass, which he followed up this year with Irreconcilable Differences. Simon Haynes (who answered questions via email) also published his NaNoWriMo novel Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch, the fourth installment of his Hal Spacejock series. We spoke with both authors about how they approach novel-writing, their experiences with NaNoWriMo, and their advice for aspiring novelists who find themselves in a creative jam.

What made you decide to participate in NaNoWriMo and try to write a novel in this way?

James Strickland: Well this is actually, I think, the sixth time I’ve done it, I’d have to check. But I did 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006. So it’d actually be the fifth time. And actually, what happened was in 2002, I’d been playing online role playing games a lot typing a lot, and I finally reached a point where I was starting to pull back from that. And I wanted to create some characters and had some interesting things that directly involved a role playing game. Plus, you know, I had a degree in writing and it always annoyed me that it had never actually earned me a dime. So I signed up for NaNoWriMo as soon as I heard about it and gave me a shot.

Simon Haynes: Initially it was the challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month. I'm a procrastinator, and even with a publishing contract under my belt and a publisher keen for more of my novels, I still find it hard to settle down to write. This is because I'd rather settle down and tinker with all my software programs.

Initially it was the challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month. I'm a procrastinator, and even with a publishing contract under my belt and a publisher keen for more of my novels, I still find it hard to settle down to write. This is because I'd rather settle down and tinker with all my software programs.

Do you go into NaNoWriMo with any sort of set plan or do you tend to go in cold?

James Strickland: No, I’m one of those writers who jumped in cold, basically starts writing and gets the narrator – I write in the first person almost exclusively – so I jump in get the narrator to talk to me. Normally for NaNo I wait until about a week in and I start writing an aimless roadmap of where I want the plot to go so I don’t get myself into corners. But no, normally I start with a blank page and somebody talking to me.

Is it easier for you to work with that deadline?

James Strickland: Yeah, it’s easier to bash the content out. Now, whether you’re going to get good content out is another matter. The NaNo novel that I’ve published took about another four or five months of work to polish it up and make it really sellable, because you know, it’s only half the length of a normal novel when you come out of NaNo, and there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s just…you’re in a hurry.

But do you come out with a better sense of where the story is going?

James Strickland: Yeah, as a first draft it’s great. It gives, at least for me, by the time I’m done with the NaNo novel, I’ve met all or most of my characters, have a general idea of the plot, a general idea of the emotional ebb and flow of the story, and it also nails down the world a great deal for me.

(To Simon Haynes) Your published NaNoWriMo novel features Hal Spacejock, a character from your previous books. Did you find that having that deadline changed the way you wrote about him? Did it change his world in any way? Was it more difficult to write a Hal Spacejock book with a 30-day deadline?

Simon Haynes: I'd say it's easier to get started, because I don't have to worry about the first chapter or so. My plot outline for chapters one and two can usually be described as 'Hal or Clunk makes a trivial mistake, with huge consequences' Then I spent the rest of the book torturing them with the consequences.

However, each Hal Spacejock novel is about 2/3 Hal and Clunk, and 1/3 someone else entirely. That someone else might be the antagonist who is trying to achieve some plan of their own, which inevitable leads to their crossing swords with our hero, or sometimes the other 1/3 of the book is written from the POV of another character with a major problem.

I believe that's what keeps the Hal books fresh. It's not just Hal-Hal-Hal…sometimes he's just background material for the real plot.

How long was the process from finishing the NaNoWriMo draft to publication?

Simon Haynes: Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch (released in June this year) was the first novel based on my NanoWrimo efforts. My novels evolve as I write them, so I can't point to Hal 4 and say 'I remember writing that section during November 2006' because it's likely only traces of DNA remain. I can say that I wrote and edited the novel between November 2006 and October 2007. (Yes, I handed it in last year and three days later I started on NanoWrimo again!)

Do you find that you get stuck while writing?

James Strickland: All the time. And I got a piece of advice from a panel that Connie Willis did once where she said, “Torture your characters.” If you find that you’re having a hard time going forward with a plot, torture the characters some more. Random bad things can always happen.

In my first novel, Looking Glass, I got stuck because I sent the character to California to resolve the story. She got there about halfway through the NaNo draft. If she got there and started resolving…first of all, I had no way to connect her to the plot there yet. I mean, she knew what was there, but she didn’t have any contacts there. And I also would have resolved the story in about the third week of November, which would have been way too soon, with too few words. So I had the nemesis of the thing, which she actually isn’t completely aware of yet, basically steal her identity. So it stole her identity when she’s on the train to California. So when she gets there and tries to use her credit cards, she gets arrested.

And that precipitated a whole other change in the story, because the only person she knew well enough in California to bail her out of jail was a character who didn’t even have a name. I mean, he was in the story from the beginning, but he didn’t have a name. He was just so-and-so’s boyfriend. But he’s the only person she knows who isn’t directly connected to the company that she’s trying to investigate/fight against. So she calls him, and they talk, and next thing I know they’re going to bed together. And I’m like, “Wait! Wait! What are you guys doing?” I mean, this is the kind of thing you get when you take every opportunity to twist the knife on your characters. I don’t like it much, but they do interesting things.

Simon Haynes: If I get stuck on a scene (or more likely, can't be bothered writing it) I just leave it blank and add a short description stating what the scene is supposed to cover. I use yWriter [a freeware novel writing tool which Haynes created] to manage my novels, which makes it much easier to skip ahead, backwards and sideways without losing sight of the whole.

Sometimes, if my manuscript is already 85000-95000 words, I never do end up writing those missing scenes. I just start the next one with 'After ...' followed by a brief description of the events. After all, if I can't drum up enough enthusiasm to write the scene, how interesting would it really be for the reader?

Do you always write in the science fiction genre? What do you particularly like about writing in the genre?

James Strickland: Always science fiction. Almost everything I’ve ever written, even going back to high school, I wrote science fiction.

What it lets you do is it lets you amplify things about modern societies that are otherwise hard to see. You can project the technology into the future and its effect on society. And you can then see that in sharp relief and you can play with it. The novel that I’m working on right now that isn’t part of NaNo, it’s the one I was working on before I started NaNo this year, you don’t really ever think too much about time, because we all go through time at the same speed: one second per second. But if you are dealing with a story with a time dilation, you travel through space and it’s a month for you and a hundred years around you, it changes your relationship with the people who you left behind and it changes your relationship with the society and it changes your relationship with technology. It affects a lot of things without that technological MacGuffin, if you like, of near light speed travel and time dilation. You don’t see it you don’t get a sharp relief of it, and writing science fiction let’s you do that.

Simon Haynes: I like to explore different genres within each novel, keeping them all within the future populated galaxy I've gradually outlined in the books.

For example, Hal 1 was a buddy movie book, with a fair bit of undergraduate humour. Hal 2 involved alien technology and immigration woes, Hal 3 was secret agents and conspiracies, and Hal 4 was equal parts (deep breath) police work, romance, horror, mystery and revenge. (I wasn't sure whether it was going to be the last one, so I really loaded 'er up.)

Is science fiction conducive to NaNoWriMo? Is it especially helpful for science fiction writers?

Simon Haynes: I think it can make things a little more difficult, because you have to invent an entire world, or galaxy, before you can write about it. Transport systems, communications, computers, etc, etc. You can't just write SF in a vacuum. (Hah!)

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? What are you working on?

James Strickland: Yes. I’m working on a novel. It’s another science fiction novel. Almost everything I have published is cyberpunk, so it’s another cyberpunk novel. It’s set in the same world as my other two published novels. And as far as I can tell – I’m still figuring it’s out – it’s about a guy who works for the police in a fairly oppressive religious nation, where it’s a serious surveillance society. And he winds up with a case that someone’s thrown this light plane into a building and it’s his job to find out why and who. And as he starts digging then, of course, you run into – oh, here’s this huge conspiracy that is trying to cover up everything that’s involved with it. And they’re part of the government, but they’re at war with – I don’t know if you’ve read about this Anonymous that’s going after the Church of Scientology? This conspiracy organization is, in turn, having a war waged on them by an organization like that, except it’s not non-violent. So I went into the plot with the idea of I’d really like to see how this stand-alone complex would do against a classic Illuminati. But that’s the level I have the plot on. I didn’t know the characters until I started writing and I didn’t know how the plot was going to express. Now I’m starting to get a better idea.

Simon Haynes: Yes, I'm in there typing away. This time I'm writing Hal Spacejock book 5, which my publisher wants to release in November 2009. I'm hoping to get half the novel done this month (in a very basic first draft kind of way), and then finish it off over Jan-Mar next year.

So, would you recommend this process to others?

James Strickland: Yeah, I would recommend it a lot to people who say, “I want to write a novel someday.” It’s like, “Well, how does November strike you?” I would recommend it to people it like that. I would recommend it to people who are again caught editing a book forever. Do NaNo. Start over start a brand new book. Get your confidence back, because you really don’t have to sit, micromanage, edit. And one of the things I learned in writing class is that you don’t want to edit while you’re in the middle of creation, because you don’t want to stifle the creativity.

What advice would you give to folks who are stuck right now?

James Strickland: Torture the character. Find something bad that’s going to happen to them in the current circumstance and let them react to it. And that will usually get you going again. It may take the novel in places you didn’t plan, but if you have a roadmap you can then take it in a new direction that’s useful to you. But torture the characters. Any opportunity for bad things to happen with these people – killing them makes your story kind of short – is fine.

Simon Haynes: Easy. Write in 500 word chunks, one per hour. Don't sit down thinking 'I have to write 1800 words today to catch up', just sit and write 500 words. 15, 20, 30 minutes later, take the rest of the hour off. Then do another 500 words.

This year I'm trying to do 4 x 500 word chunks a day, which is three chunks for my word count and one extra for luck. I'm several thousand words ahead of my goal, and I don't feel like I've really sat down and written hard all month.

For more information on James Strickland and his novels, visit JamesRStrickland.com. For more information about Simon Haynes, yWriter, or Hal Spacejock, visit HalSpacejock.com.au.

James Tiptree Jr.
Given Name: Alice “Alli” Sheldon
Works: Numerous short stories, including “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
James Tiptree Jr. was an elusive figure, giving only one interview in “his” career, which was condcted by mail. He had a post office box and his own back account, but no one had ever met him in person. In 1976, they learned why: Tiptree was actually Alice Bradley, a one-time CIA agent who had adopted the Tiptree pseudonym while finishing her doctorate in psychology. Bradley said that when she started writing science fiction, she wanted to create a persona who would be sufficiently removed from her previous writing – which had focused largely on women and the nature of girlhood – and she wanted to submit her stories with a name that no editor would remember rejecting. She took the name “Tiptree” from a jam jar and the name “James” because male names were more common in science fiction than female ones.

When Tiptree was revealed as a woman, it caused quite a stir among the science fiction community. Tiptree’s followers recognized the name as a pseudonym, but Bradley’s frequent travels and intelligence background led many to believe he was a high-ranking government official, but few had considered he might be a woman. Sheldon would later say that she was “ashamed” of taking a male pseudonym because she had taken the easy path into the male-dominated field.

CJ Cherryh
Given Name: Carolyn Janice Cherry
Works: Over 60 novels and short story collections, including Downbelow Station, Cyteen, and Cuckoo’s Egg.
Carolyn Cherry submitted her first two novels, Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth to DAW Books in 1975. Donald Wollheim, DAW’s founder, purchased both manuscripts, but, for marketability, suggested she go with a different name. The initials CJ disguised the fact that she was a woman and adding an “h” to her last name made it look less like a romance novelist’s.

Vernon Lee
Given Name: Violet Paget
Works: Several ghost stories, notably “Oke of Okehurst: or the Phantom Lover”
Vernon Lee wrote not only supernatural fiction, but also papers the theory of philosopher and aesthetics, subjects women were not considered intellectually suited for. Lee herself once said, “I don’t care that Vernon Lee should be known to be myself or any other young woman, as I am sure no one reads a woman’s writings on art, history or aesthetics with anything but mitigated contempt.” But she quickly became known as one of the premiere scholars in aesthetics and her fiction continues to be republished today.

Paul Ash(well)
Given Name: Pauline Ashwell
Works: “Invasion from Venus,” “The Winds of a Bat,”
The short story “Invasion from Venus” appeared in Yankee Science Fiction in 1942 under the name “Paul Ashwell.” But the real author was a fourteen year-old girl by the name of Pauline Ashwell. John W. Campbell would eventually publish “Unwillingly to School,” Pauline’s “debut” (now under her real name) in Analog magazine in 1958. She would continue to publish stories from time to time under the truncated name “Paul Ash,” including the Nebula-nominated “Wings of a Bat.” In the 1990s, Ashwell would publish two novels, Unwillingly to Earth and Project Farcry.

CL Moore
Given Name: Catherine Lucille Moore
Works: Numerous short stories, including “The Code” “Promised Land,” and “Heir Apparent”
Although claims that CL Moore tried to conceal her gender are in dispute, Astounding editor and fellow scifi writer Frederik Pohl once said that Moore “felt a need to tinker with” her name to appeal to her overwhelmingly male readers. It apparently worked, as in 1936, Moore received a letter of admiration from science fiction writer Henry Kuttner, who believed Moore was a man. They married in 1940. The pair would go on to collaborate on many short stories, signing each work with a single pseudonym – one that was invariably male.

L. Taylor Hansen
Given Name: Lucile Taylor Hansen
Works: A handful of short stories and 57 science articles in Amazing Stories from 1941-1949.
L. Taylor Hansen, who was better known for her science articles than her fiction, didn’t merely attempt to obscure her gender; she denied it entirely. Hansen once titled a letter in Amazing “L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself” and once included a photo of a man with one of her stories, claiming it was a photo of herself.

Tarpé Mills
Given Name: June Mills
Works: Miss Fury
Comic book artist June Mills dropped her first name in favor of her more gender ambiguous middle name when she started making action comics. She created Miss Fury, one of the early female action characters in comics, and the first created by a woman. When Miss Fury proved a commercial success, she couldn’t hide her gender from interviewers, who realized that the comic creator was not only a woman, but bore a close resemblance to her character.

Andre Norton
Given Name: Alice Norton
Works: Over 300 titles, including Star Born, Merlin’s Mirror, and Star Man’s Son
Alice Mary Norton went beyond pseudonym to increase her marketability. The year she published her first short story, she legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton, figuring the male name would fit better with the boys her were her primary market. Over the years, she also published under the names Andrew North and Allen Weston.

Murray Constantine
Given Name: Katharine Burdekin
Works: The Devil, Poor Devil, Proud Man, Swastika Night, and Venus in Scorpio
Katharine Burdekin’s novels dealt primarily with fascist dystopias, and as her work grew more critical of fascism, she adopted a pseudonym to protect her family in the event of a German invasion of England. But her choice of a male pseudonym was likely linked to her feminist approach to the subject, and she frequently linked fascism to a “cult of masculinity” and “reduction of women.” Although the feminist overtones led many critics to believe that Constantine was a woman writing under a pseudonym, it wasn’t until two decades after her death that a scholar identified Constantine as Burdekin.

JK Rowling
Given Name: Joanne Rowling
Works: The Harry Potter Series
These days, people will wait in line hours to purchase something from Ms. Joanne Rowling. But when she first submitted her tale of a boy wizard to Bloomsbury, the publisher suggested that she use two initials instead of her first name, so as not to turn off the young boys (Rowling doesn’t actually have a middle name, and took the K for her grandmother, Kathleen). If children care that the creator of Hogwarts is a woman, it certainly doesn’t show.