Naomi Mitchison's literary career covers more than seventy years, with an output of almost one hundred titles, including plays, poetry, prose fiction, and political tracts. Her novels and short stories belong to a diversified array of genres, from fairy tales to historical fiction and from science fiction to fantasy, with settings ranging from faraway planets to southern Africa and from the Roman Empire to the Arthurian world. Her science-fiction production is relatively small, amounting to three novels and a handful of short stories (mostly reprinted in the 1990 collection A Girl Must Live: Stories and Poems, which also includes a few original tales); nevertheless, modern critics are more forcefully acknowledging her prominence in the landscape of contemporary British science fiction. With her first and most important science-fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), Mitchison "almost single-handedly invented feminist SF," as Patrick Parrinder wrote in 1990.

Mitchison was born Naomi Mary Margaret...