Celebrating the women authors who shaped science fiction and fantasy

Mercedes Lackey

Mercedes Lackey is about as prolific as authors come. Over the course of her career, she’s published more than 140 books, including the landmark Valdemar novels, a series of interconnected adult fantasy novels set in the magical world of Velgarth. Some are standalone works, others more traditional trilogies. Most of them take place in the titular nation of Valdemar and feature a wide range of characters, some human and some not.

The basic premise of Valdemar is that people are Chosen by magical horse companions; the bond between a person and their magical horse allows them access to specific magical Gifts, like talking to animals or telepathy. Among the many ways that the Valdemar books are kind of visionary is that these Chosen bonds between person and magical horse companion are important to how the government works. Once Chosen, a person and their companion ride around to upkeep the land, settle disputes, and all manner of other things.

One of Valdemar’s biggest claims to fame is that Lackey’s The Last Herald Mage trilogy featured an gay protagonists. The first novel, Magic’s Pawn, was published back in 1989, at a time when that kind of representation in fantasy was exceedingly rare.

Lackey currently serves as the Grandmaster of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), and has been an active contributor to the fantasy genre both through her incredible body of work and through supporting that community of writers.

C.J. Cherryh

Aside from the fact that she was actually one of Mercedes Lackey’s mentors, C.J. Cherryh had a massive effect on the science fiction space herself. She began publishing her Morgaine Stories in 1976, but her many books in the interconnected Foreigner Universe had the biggest impact.

Since 1994, Cherryh has written 20 novels in the Foreigner series, broken up into a number of trilogies. It’s one of the longest-running science fiction series out there by a single author, with deep worldbuilding and examinations of human and alien coexistence. Foreigner can be a bit dense, but there’s no denying the influence that Cherryh has had on the genre during the more than 50 years she’s been publishing novels. She is still publishing books today, with her latest Foreigner trilogy kicking off with the forthcoming novel Defiance.

Many science fiction novels explore what alien life might look like out in the universe, but the sheer scope of Cherryh’s novels has allowed her to really dig into the inner workings of her alien species in a way that few other sci-fi series can.

One fascinating factoid about C.J. Cherryh is how she came by her pen name. When C.J. Cherryh first began publishing back in the ’70s, she was advised by her editor to add a silent ‘h’ to the end of her name, as it was felt that her actual name, “Cherry,” sounded too much like a romance author. She also opted to use her initials instead of her full name in order to disguise the fact that she was a woman, due to the fact that so many more science fiction authors were men.

Thankfully, such measures are much less needed for women authors today.