As reported by File 770, the winner of the 2024 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award is Clare Winger Harris, often called the first identifiable female sf author. Beamers will remember Ms. Harris as the lead author in our April 2024 selection, The Future is Female!, starting off our reading that month with her ironic ecological ‘first contact’ tale, “The Miracle of the Lily”. Comics fans will appreciate that Ms. Harris’s last published work was written for a fanzine published by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who later had some success with their own sf creation, Superman.
While we cheered the award at Readercon this past Saturday, it is a bit tricky to admit how many great writers we have not remembered. Well, the Beamers will get a chance to correct our mistake next month, August, when we recognize another Cordwainer Smith winner, Catherine Moore, who won in 2004 alongside her writing partner/husband, Henry Kuttner. Ms. Moore also came to our attention thanks to The Future is Female!, so we owe a debt to its curator, Lisa Yaszek.