It seems to me that the 1940s must have been a terrific decade for the birth of SF writers. Another, born in the same decade as Sandra Miesel, Claudia Edwards, Ru Emerson and William Burkett, was David Palmer born in Chicago in 1941. His first book originally appeared, as a number of fine books have done, as a novella series in one of the pulp magazines. Analog’s January 1981 issue featured a novella titled Emergence. This was followed by a second novella entitled, Seeking, that appeared in Analog the following month. Both novellas won Reader’s Choice Awards, both were Hugo Award nominees, and when the book, Emergence – using the novellas as the first two sections of that – appeared, in 1984, it was also a Hugo nominee and won the Compton Crook award.
Emergence is a riveting book. It purports to be written by Candy Smith-Foster, a child genius who throughout the majority of the book writes in her own form of English, a telegram format that omits most link words such as “the, and, she/her/ his/he, I/me/mine” etc. This made the first few pages hard to get into but only initially. I then found that I was swept into the work by the character and her story and I stayed up all night finishing it. If Palmer has not been the only person to tell a port-holocaust tale using a child, he is certainly the very best. Candy’s adoptive father is an eminent pathologist, (and, unbeknown to Candy, a major figure as a government consultant) her adoptive mother died six years earlier. Her father, Doctor Foster, has a bomb shelter below the house in case the worst occurs, it does when he’s in Washington and Candy is alone – if you don’t count Terry, whom she introduces as her retarded twin-brother, he is in a way, but not at all the way you’d think. Virtually all the population is dead when Candy emerges three months later. How she copes, who isn’t dead and why, who she meets and what happens from those meetings, and where she goes from there is riveting. At least, it riveted me when I read it first and still holds my attention strongly each time I’ve read it thereafter.
Unhappily Palmer’s second book, Threshold, (published Bantam 1985 and said to be the first in a trilogy – To Halt Armageddon) I found to be nowhere near the quality of Emergence. This may have been because I wanted to read more of Candy, but I found the characters didn’t engage me, and I read the book once cursorily and discarded it. (My opinion appears to be shared by a number of other readers and critics.) Palmer is said to be still working on the next in this trilogy (Special Education). But on checking I discovered something I had not been aware of, that a sequel to Emergence (Tracking) was published in three parts in Analog over July/August, September, and October in 2008. I can only hope that this will be brought out as a book, since it’s the Palmer book that I have been waiting for since 1984. (And if not I must try to find copies of these three issues that I can buy, I’ve been dying to know for almost thirty years what happened to Candy after “Emergence.”) Palmer has a standalone novel, Schrodinger’s Frisbee completed – the blurb I’ve seen does sound interesting – and Wormhole Press was suggested as a publisher for this at some stage in the future along with indications that they would be publishing/republishing all of Palmer’s work. Unhappily this has not materialised and the publisher appears to have folded.
David Palmer has produced a very small body of work – two published books and three novellas, and two more books completed but as yet unpublished – since 1984, but I really recommend Emergence, and if the novellas in Analog’s 2008 issues are a sequel to Emergence then they are almost certainly worth a good look as well. Second-hand copies of Emergence are listed as available on Amazon as varying prices. And a final note: I loved the cover art on Emergence, this was from Jim Burns, and it conveyed the feel and theme of the novel in one sweeping look. More covers should be of this type and quality!
Bibliography
Novels
Emergence (1984)
Threshold (1985)
Short fiction
“Tracking – part 1”. Analog 128 (7&8). July/August 2008. 
“Tracking – part 2”. Analog 128 (9): 90–133. September 2008. 
“Tracking – part 3”. Analog 128 (10): 86–133. October 2008.

Claudia J(ane) Edwards was born in 1943 and died (so at least one site claims) six months after the release of her fourth book. I can find almost nothing on her either as a person or an author save that she was married to Tex Hill. What I do know is that she produced a very small body of work over a handful of years, four books, no short stories I can trace, and she wrote no more after the fourth book, which had been intended/announced as the first in a series.
But the books she did produce were quality. I can well believe that she did die after the fourth. All four books received a large number of very favorable reviews, all four, considering that, should have sold very well, and it is unlikely that any publisher with an author who is selling well, would have arbitrarily cancelled a new series that readers were buying in numbers.
I purchased Edwards’ first book, TAMING THE FOREST KING, at the time it appeared in 1986. This is Military fantasy, a very solid story of Tevra, Colonel in the Light Cavalry, and her Second-in-Command, Hetwith. They are sent to the Forest province of their kingdom to sort out the depredations of the Governor there. Tevra finds that he’s been bleeding the province dry through huge and illegal taxation, half the population is starving, and the other half, weakened by hunger, has died of plagues over the previous winter.
Tevra hangs the governor, sets out to settle the bandit problem, the attacks by supernaturals, and deal with the Lords who don’t like soldiers in their province, don’t like being ruled from afar, don’t like women soldiers, and would rather be left alone. To help her she finds a secretary, Dard, originally heir to the province, trained to be its king, and possibly the basis of provincial rebellion against the kingdom. How Tevra handles everything is a great read. I’ve had the book for over twenty years, read it six or seven times, the most recent time being April last year, and it holds up as well as ever.
Edwards did have a basic theme. All of her books show a woman in a world where for one reason or another she has problems, some of which are based on a woman’s problems differing from those of the average male, yet these aren’t ‘feminist’ books. The thread through FOREST KING is not that she is resented because she is female, but that as a woman who is also a ranking soldier, she is determined not use her rank to obtain personal desires – and that she is, through most of the book, uncertain of what those desires are. In the third book, BRIGHT AND SHINING TIGER, the thread is that Runa, who has lived alone so long, has now found herself responsible for a small castle full of people, and must learn to cohabit with them and the stranger she has married for their sake, to accept love, and to deal with her enemies rather than simply moving on again as she has always done before.
In all of the books the heroine is skilled with, and knowledgeable about, horses. It was clear to me that Edwards really knew what she was talking about there – something that, as someone who rode for much of my own life, I increasingly notice isn’t always so in fantasy books. Again it’s a great pity that this author didn’t write more, she had the plots, the characters, and the background knowledge to produce terrific work, and judging from reviews, a very large number of readers were looking forward to her new series continuing. Secondhand copies of Edwards’ book are readily available and I recommend the first and third on the list below in particular.

Bibliography
Novels:

Taming the Forest King [Warner Books, 1986; Headline, 1987;
Popular Library/Questar, 1986]

A Horsewoman in Godsland [Warner Books, 1987; Headline, 1988;
Popular Library/Questar, 1987]

Bright and Shining Tiger [Warner Books, 1988; Headline, 1988;
Popular Library/Questar, 1988]

the “Bastard Princess” series:
* Eldrie the Healer [Pageant Books, 1989]

Keith(John Kingston)Roberts was born 20th September 1935 and died October 5th 2000. His first work appeared as short stories in Science Fantasy magazine in 1964. He is known mainly for two novels, The Furies, (1966) and Pavane (1968), although he continued to write into the late 1980s. Roberts also worked as an illustrator and his work includes covers and inside illustrations for New Worlds and Science Fantasy (a.k.a. Impulse.)
Keith Roberts was a talented and able writer but he was also a difficult personality and his disputes with just about everyone in the field were well known during the period of his work. He died of complications from the multiple sclerosis that he’d been battling for the last ten years of his life and I am happy to note that his earlier work is being republished by Wildside Press and others.
Roberts liked the ‘disaster’ field of novels, his first book, The Furies, deals with strange beings like giant wasps that invade England. But in a very minor key it also showed Robert’s disinclination to produce work on a specific theme without deviation. At the time a number of authors were writing fairly straight ‘post-holocaust’ books. The Furies was a post-holocaust’ of a sort, certainly there was a self-caused holocaust involved, but it was compounded by the Furies appearance, and it’s clear from the book’s opening and closing paragraphs that they were originally a form of non-material extraterrestrial although he also seems to be suggesting that they coalesced from a combination of ‘the keepers’ wishes, and our own fears.
His second novel, Pavane, the one for which he is most praised, is actually a series of interlinked stories which a number of reviewers do not appear to have quite understood. In fact an almost throwaway paragraph in the book makes it clear that this is actually a history of our world tens of thousands of years after our current civilization collapsed. It could, I suppose, be described as an alternate history, in that this civilization has castles, similar names, and the Catholic Church. But, to my mind, Robert’s reference to the previous civilization that is clearly intended to be ours in the current era, negates this. But the work is brilliant, and if you only read one of Robert’s works, read this one.
Many of his books are available at reasonable prices as secondhand copies on Amazon and other secondhand book sites.

Partial bibliography
Novels
The Furies (1966)
Pavane (1968)
Anita (1970) – linked short fiction
The Inner Wheel (1970)
The Boat of Fate (1971) – a historical novel set in Britain at the end of the Roman Empire’s power.
The Chalk Giants (1974) – arguably also a collection of linked
short stories
Molly Zero (1980)
Kiteworld (1985) – originally published as linked short stories
Kaeti & Company (1986) – linked short fiction
Gráinne (1987) – BSFA award winner, 1987
The Road to Paradise (1988) – a thriller, without fantastic elements
Kaeti On Tour (1992) – linked short fiction

Collections
Machines and Men (1973)
The Grain Kings (1976)
The Passing of the Dragons (1977)
Ladies from Hell (1979)
The Lordly Ones (1986)
A Heron Caught in Weeds (1987)
Winterwood and Other Hauntings (1989)