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Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont, Judith Merril: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2012,239 pp, £32.50 pbk)
If, as Newell and Lamont claim, Judith Merril has been neglected, there may be a number of reasons. One may be Joanna Russ' dismissal of most female sf writers in her 1972 essay, 'The Image of Women in Science Fiction'. Newell and Jenea Tallentire, in Farah Mendlesohn's On Joanna Russ (2009), write of a failure of 'meeting of minds' between Merril and Russ which they argue affected the response of younger feminist writers and scholars influenced by Russ. Equally, Merril's status as a champion of a 'New Wave' of sf - certainly equal to Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison - is overlooked by many. The title of her anthology championing British New Wave - England Swings SF (1968) - may be to blame: many British fans of a certain age still cluck exasperatedly at it. With its desperate popart trendiness it achieves all the taboo-breaking heights of Roger Miller's 1965 song of the same name (which may have inspired the title), which ascribes the atmosphere of 'swinging' England to bobbies on bicycles, Westminster Abbey and rosy-cheeked children. But Merril's own series of 'Best SF' anthologies, scouring realms far outside the magazines for not only short stories but non-fiction and cartoons that showed an sf sensibility as a natural way of writing about the world, wears a lot better than Dangerous Visions in showing what sf was capable of.
Her own fiction certainly displays the clumsiness and domesticity of which she is sometimes accused: Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder (1967) lambasted her 1960 novel The Tomorrow People for, among other things, allowing one of her characters to flip around the moon in a helicopter. Her first and perhaps best novel, Shadows on the Hearth (1949) was criticised at the time for its housewifely concerns - a criticism Merril roundly rebutted in the March 1951 issue of Future, pointing out that the market comprising mothers-in-law, maiden aunts and housewives who listened to radio soap operas formed a large part of the population and, because of its size and because it was generally ill-informed on the issue of atomic war, it rather than the sf constituency was her prime target. (The novel...