The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award is given to “a science fiction or fantasy writer whose work displays unusual originality, embodies the spirit of Cordwainer Smith’s fiction, and deserves renewed attention or ‘Rediscovery’.” The judges—the recently deceased Martin Harry Greenberg, Barry Malzberg, Mike Resnick, and Robert J. Sawyer—announced this year’s honoree at Readercon this past weekend. This year’s honoree is Katherine MacLean (born in New Jersey in 1925).
Her Wikipedia entry notes that she “concentrated on mathematics and science in high school. At the time her earliest stories were being published in 1949-50, she received a BA in economics from Barnard College (1950), followed by postgraduate studies in psychology at various universities.” She went on to teach literature at the University of Maine and creative writing at the Free University of Portland. Her writing career has continued at a slower pace over the years, while she worked in a wide variety of jobs, including book reviewer, economic graphanalyst, editor, EKG technician, food analyst, laboratory technician, nurse’s aide, office manager, payroll bookkeeper, photographer, pollster, and store detective.
She started writing in 1947, while working as a laboratory technician, and her first published story was “Defense Mechanism”, which appeared in Astounding in October 1949. Her novelette “Second Game” (co-written with Charles V. De Vet) was nominated for a Hugo in 1959. Her novella “The Missing Man” won the Nebula in 1972. Her novel Missing Man was nominated for the Nebula in 1976. In 2003, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named her their Author Emeritus.
MacLean’s ISFDB entry lists two solo novels (The Man in the Bird Cage [1971] and Missing Man [1975]) and three co-written novels (Cosmic Checkmate with Charles V. De Vet [1962], Dark Wing with Carl West [1979], and Second Game with De Vet [1981]). She also published two collections of short fiction: The Diploids (1962) and The Trouble With You Earth People (1980). The bulk of her short fiction appeared in the 1950s, but she continued to work sporadically up to her most recent known story, “Kiss Me”, which appeared in Analog in 1997.