page_title: L. Taylor Hansen
section_title: Science fiction
hierarchical_section_title: L. Taylor Hansen / Science fiction
caption_attribution_description: English: Spurious image of L. Taylor Hansen, used to conceal that she was a female writer
context_page_description: L. Taylor Hansen was a writer of science fiction popular science articles and books who used a male writing persona for the early part of her career. She is the author of eight short stories, nearly sixty nonfiction articles popularizing anthropology and geology, and three nonfiction books.
context_section_description: Hansen's science fiction career was brief, but she is notable for being an early woman in the genre who concealed her sex. Her first story, "What the Sodium Lines Revealed," appeared in Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories Quarterly in the Winter 1929 issue. This story, while a Gernsback-era adventure, hinges upon scientific ideas in that a message is detected in a spectrograph by an amateur astronomer. That same year, her second story "The Undersea Tube," details an underground civilization that is uncovered while developing a pneumatic commuter train between New York and Liverpool.
  As asserted by Eric Leif Davin, of the women in the early science fiction magazines, only L. Taylor Hansen seems to have concealed her sex. The subterfuge was extensive. An illustration of a young man, purportedly Hansen, appeared with Hansen's fifth story, "The City on the Cloud." Hansen continued the subterfuge by asserting on the telephone to fan Forrest J. Ackerman that she was not the author of her stories but only handled them for her brother. Jane Donawerth suggests that Hansen's creation of a world-traveled, male brother was a "probably social crisis" in that she did not want to violate the convention of a male narrator in science fiction and so her persona allows her to "protect herself from social disapproval."
  However, as reported by Davin, the facts of the encounter between Ackerman and Hansen are somewhat contradictory. A letter from Hansen was titled "L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself" in the July 1943 issue of Amazing Stories, but Davin asserts this is because she was a private person and not because she was trying to maintain credibility. The editor, Raymond A. Palmer, had "little trouble working with women" as evinced by the many women who were published in Amazing during the 1940s.
caption: The image used to conceal Hansen's sex in Wonder Stories in 1930
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