Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

As soon as I started thinking about what made Elsie Lee stand out for me in the Gothic genre (capable heroines who are smarter and often more dangerous -- when they need to be -- than the b**tards who try to grind them down: illegitimii non carborundum, or however it's spelled!), I had to give credit to a male science fiction author who did the same thing, only more so, against all expectations in the 1950's and 60's: James H. Schmitz.

Like most of his more recent readers, I suspect, I first encountered Schmitz through a library copy of his best-known novel, The Witches of Karres (in which the protagonist is, most unusually for Schmitz, a male, but quickly gets paired up with a young female hero who's even more ready, willing, and able to save the day than he is, for most of the novel). Then I encountered the first of his Telzey Amberden stories in an anthology (long before there was Buffy, Telzey Amberden was the adolescent girl who got to save the world or worlds with surprising regularity), and I was hopelessly hooked and desperate for more (which, until the New England Science Fiction Society re-issued a fairly complete collection of his short stories in the 1990's and several collections of his stories and novels set in the same universe were re-issued within the last few years, was pretty hard to find).

It's late and I haven't eaten since breakfast (albeit a breakfast that was delayed into early afternoon, since I slept too late to eat before church and had errands to run thereafter), so I won't bother to run through the whole list of James H. Schmitz titles. But let me just say this: if you've never read his Demon Breed, you have a treat in store for you. I've re-read that novel at least every few years since I first encountered it, and I continue to get a major kick out of watching a lone, unarmed woman (albeit with the help of a couple of mutant sea otters) turn back an alien invasion through her intelligence and talent for psychological warfare.