The Artificial Man by Clare Winger Harris

Before David’s startled gaze the newcomer placed his right hand to his left shoulder and removed the left arm. He then proceeded to dismember himself until only a torso, head and one arm remained. The Artificial Man by Clare Winger Harris. That’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.

A new debut on the podcast today: the first woman to publish science fiction stories under her own name in the pulp magazines. While Francis Stevens—born Gertrude Barrows Bennett—was a trailblazer often credited as the first female science fiction writer, she published under the ambiguous name “G. M. Barrows,” using initials that concealed her gender.

Clare Winger Harris didn’t hide hers. When her first short story, The Runaway World, appeared in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales, it was credited openly to Mrs. F. C. Harris.

Born in Freeport, Illinois in 1891, Clare came from a distinguished background. Her mother, Mary Stover Winger, was the daughter of D. C. Stover, the town’s wealthiest man, a renowned inventor and industrialist. Her father, Frank S. Winger, was an electrical contractor and a science fiction writer himself, having published The Wizard of the Island; or, The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger in 1917.

Between 1926 and 1933, Harris wrote a dozen science fiction short stories and one novel. In the late 1930s, she moved to Pasadena, California, where she lived modestly and sometimes worked as a switchboard operator to make ends meet.

Remarkably, just a year before her death in 1968, she inherited a quarter of her grandfather’s estate—valued at over two million dollars. Though he had passed away in 1908, the estate had been tied up in court battles for nearly sixty years.

We will find today’s story in the very first issue of Science Wonder Quarterly in the fall of 1929, on page 78, The Artificial Man by Clare Winger Harris…

Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, When a skeptical professor steps into the mind of a former student’s fiancée, he discovers a surreal landscape shaped by vanity, obsession, and alarming emptiness. A sharp and unsettling exploration of how our inner worlds reveal far more than we intend. The Shoddy Lands by C. S. Lewis.

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