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Not much. I have been reading s-f & fantasy since the 1950s, and many of the stories have featured unicorns, usually as minor background characters. There is "The Silken-Swift" by Theodore Sturgeon, "The Well of the Unicorn" by George U. Fletcher (Fletcher Pratt), and I think there was a unicorn in "Three Hearts and Three Lions" by Poul Anderson. (Ooops -- no; "The Well of the Unicorn" was the name of a magic well; there is no actual unicorn in the story. I highly recommend it as a fantasy adventure novel anyway. Not anthropomorphic, though.) The unicorn was usually such a minor character that its sex was not mentioned. "The Last Unicorn" was different in that it was the first novel to make the unicorn its protagonist, and to make her clearly a female, but I just took this as Peter Beagle being very imaginative; not as revolutionizing the standard image of unicorns. There have been other stories since with female unicorns, like "The Unicorn Girl" by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball, but I have not thought of them as particularly influenced by "The Last Unicorn".

Fred Patten

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