Femal Sci-Fi/Fantasy Writer Meme
Jun. 5th, 2010 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatTrying to shop for a swimsuit on landsend - but getting frustrated. I think I'm a little afraid of doing it - I don't like to buy clothing that I haven't tried on first. Yeah, yeah I know I can always return it - but that requires reboxing and lugging to the UPS office ten-fifteen blocks away by foot. Which I wasn't good at doing when I drove a car and it was easy to do.
So procrastinating by doing a meme - this is the sci-fi books written by women meme, with my own twist on it. Because lists are boring.
Andre Norton
My introduction to science fiction was Andre Norton. Sure Anne McCaffrey wrote it - but she was more romantic, Norton was more literary or something. Or so I thought as a 11 year old girl in sixth grade who loved books, and wanted stories featuring women saving the day. I wish I remembered the titles...it was so long ago. Most were short stories, actually. She was great at short stories - which is a rare feat in sci-fi.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Adored the book she wrote about the Darkover verse - or Sharra. I can't remember the name of it. But I adored it. So much, I bought the one about the Ladies of King Arthur, Gwen, Mab,
and Nimu. I did not enjoy it. I don't know why.
Madeline L’Engle
I remember falling in love with L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time universe in my pre-teen years, those innocent years between 9-12, before the hormones kick in. She created heroines who I identified with - the older sister, struggling with her mixed feelings towards the brilliant but bratty younger brother, Charles Wallace. She disappointed me though. I did not like Swiftly Turning Planet and felt she lost her characters once they grew...they seemed to fade and fall away in the background, with religious themes taking center stage. Her earliest books, were by far her best.
Angela Carter
Read a short story by her that played with my brain and was later made into a movie starring Craig T. Nelson as the father, of all people. The story was called "The Company of Wolves" and I read it in my 20s. It is about sexuality, and what is forbidden. The dark corners of a woman's desires. And the dark corners of a man's. Twisty, it haunts. Told more like a prose poem than a fairy tale. I later bought a novel by her, but could never get into it - entitled "Sister Wolf". I don't really think of her so much as sci-fi as fantasy.
Ursula LeGuin
Another writer that I loved as a child. I think my first love affair with sci-fi was The Wizard of Earthsea books. I read them before CS Lewis or around the same time. Beautifully written and captivating, pulling you inside a complicated world that only LeQuin could imagine. Her adult novels - that I own - I have yet to read, famously The Left Hand of Darkness.
Anne McCaffrey
I think I consumed all of McCaffrey's novels as a teen. From the ages of 12-16, I read all the Dragonriders of Pern, Ship who Sang, Pegasus, Crystal Singer, Restoree, and numerous short stories. I adored her. It was not until later - that I realized some of the issues others had with her novels. She wrote erotic sci-fiction. It was unlike most of the other stories I'd read up to that point. My aunt, a sixth grade librarian in Las Vegas introduced me to McCaffrey.
(In Vegas they have a school that is only sixth grade.)
Diana Wynne Jones
Have yet to read her - but own Howl's Moving Castle - a novel that I keep meaning to read, just to see how it varies from the male Japanese anime adaptation.
Octavia E. Butler
If you read one sci-fi novel - it should be Kindred. It blew me away. It may be the best time-travel story that I have ever read. And is certainly amongst the best that I've read discussing the difficult issue of racism and slavery. The story is a brutal one, with characters who are brilliantly complex. It is about a black woman who gets yanked into the past to help an ancestor who is a brutal slave-owner, with whom she has an odd relationship.
C. J. Cherryh
I adore the Chanur books. Fell head over heels. These novels are about a female and feline space captain with a human male castaway. Cherryh creates a fascinating alien race - based on a species that evolved from feline DNA or Hani. Go here for more information on this amazing series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chanur_novels
I devoured them in a gulp. One of the toughest female heroines I've seen. And in a traditional male role. Yet also depicting gender politics in a new and innovative way. Cherryh is more of a science fiction writer than many on this list.
Joan D. Vinge*
The Snow Queen - where she creates a female detective/inspector that I have not forgotten. It's the old fairy tale but told from a science fiction angle with a murder mystery/political conspiracy at its core.
Ellen Kushner
Not really science-fiction so much as fantasy. Swords, horses and medieval times. Which I admittedly have grown tired of , read too much of it, - so haven't tried her books as of yet. I do own Privelege of the Sword - but you need to be in the mood to read these types of novels.
Connie Willis
Another writer who does a good job with Time Travel - The Doomsday Book is one of those few time travel novels that is about science and not romance. There are no romances in this novel - it is story depicting the differences between modern medicine and medieval medicine. The story is about two plagues - and how two different time periods handle them. It is also about the human spirit's struggle to survive. It takes place in the distant future and the distant past.
Another far lighter novel is Bellweather - about the difficult science of predicting the weather or anything else scientifically for that matter.
Sheri S. Tepper*
Grass - a brilliant novel about religion, inter-species communication, sexuality, gender, sexism, and racism, as well as colonialism. It is about a family that comes to a planet in an attempt to figure out why this particular planet is the root cause of a plague that is happening on earth, and killing off a large portion of the human race. It is in part a horror story. It did disturb me. I will never as long as I live forget the Hippae - a horse like species who fear the Foxen (a primate meets fox) species and fight to destroy them. I won't tell you why they fear them or what the Hippae are like - for that would give away one of the best plot-twists I've seen in science fiction.
Tepper delves into biological sci-fi and deals strongly with themes of gender in her novels, which at times can overtake the story, blotting out everything else. Grass is perhaps the only novel that this did not happen. I could not make it through Raising the Stones of The Family Tree (which is more horror fantasy than sci-fi anyhow).
Margaret Atwood
I've admittedly enjoyed her literary fiction more than her science fiction which tends to get a bit preachy and dense. I own The Blind Assassin.
Lois McMaster Bujold
I'm an oddity online about Bujold. I loved Cordelia's Honor and the novels that focused on Cordelia - a captain and smart strong woman, who ends up marrying the man who captures her during a peace initiative. Then has a child in a very strange and courageous manner.
I did not like the books about her son as much and lost the story thread after she left it.
From what I've read everyone online is the exact opposite. Own her fantasy novels, but have been unable to get into them.
At any rate - highly recommend Cordelia's Honor.
Elizabeth Hand*
Not really a sci-fi writer so much as a fantasy one, a dark fantasy writer. Waking the Moon is a huge cult novel apparently - which I loved in my twenties, but not so much now. Gave it away finally by leaving it out on the sidewalk. Waking the Moon is a story about the mother goddess, and the tension between patriarchial religion and matriarchial religion - which both, oddly, end with the death or sacrifice of a young man. It's one of those books that starts out rather brilliantly but sort of loses its way halfway through.
Elizabeth Moon*
Wrote some decent sci-fi with Anne McCaffrey.
Mary Doria Russell*
Possibly my favorite sci-fiction novelist - or amongst them. She only wrote two science fiction novels that I'm aware of. The Sparrow and Children of God, both like Tepper's novel are about inter-species relations and religion. Russel is a biological and cultural anthropologist, with a background in theology. The Sparrow is about a priest who is devout, an accomplished linguist, who loses his faith and his spirit on a venture to another world. It is a story about human arrogance, good intentions, racism, vegetarianism, colonialism and the misunderstandings
that occur. A novel that once read, is impossible to forget. Like Kindred - The Sparrow is one of those books that change you. You are not the same after reading it.
J. K. Rowling
Another fantasy novelist. This round for children. When I first read Rowlings, which was mostly out of curiousity - I thought, hmmm a female Ronald Dahl, except much lighter and far less misanthropic. Dahl has a wicked wit. Rowlings is well not as wicked. But it is there. And like Dahl - Rowlings, a former welfare mom, takes potshots at the British Cast System. Her stories worked for kids and adults. The devilish wit which went over many a youngster's head.
Mercedes Lacey
Fantasy Romance novelist - with some great novels about a Dragon King/Prince which are reminiscent of Anne McCaffrey.
Doris Lessing
Canopos in Argos: Archives - a science fiction novel - which is incredibly dense and I have yet to make it through.
Kim Harrison
Rachel Morgan novels - about a world where a virus was mutated and infected the human population through tomatoes, and the supernatural world - witches, elves, who had always been in the background come out into the open to more or less save the world order. Harrison's novels take place at least 30 years after The Turn. And unlike most fantasy novels, including Butcher's Dresden books - there's a lot of science here or biology. The lead character's ability to kindle magic has a lot to do with how her genes were biologically manipulated in the past - in order to save her from a disease. These are complex novels.
Charlian Harris
Equally delves into both fantasy and science fiction, while not as good as the ladies above,
she did come up with a rather cool idea - about what would happen if a synthetic blood was developed. Her novels have since been turned into the popular HBO series True Blood.
Elizabeth Bear
Writes both science fiction and fantasy novels much like McCaffrey. And I have similar issues with them. The writing in some respects is also similar, although I think McCaffrey may be a better writer or rather a cleaner one. Bear tries too hard to be literary. I feel her working and there's a certain arrogance and defensiveness that comes through as a result - that may unfortunately turn off readers who would read her otherwise.
Catherynne Valente
Is more fantasy than Sci-Fi as far as I can tell. I've read bits and pieces of The Girl Who Circumvented Fairyland, not enough to comment fully. And own the beautifully illustrated In the Cities of Coin and Spice. I find her difficult to get into right now. But she's won all these awards now...so. And it is more than possible that this is a mood thing - I spend all day reading dense items regarding construction specs, legal contracts and analyzing numbers, then writing about them. So brain is weary and not up to curlicues of beautiful and poetic literary prose, describing in detail a fairy that has purple shoes. I want to scream - get to the point! At any rate, she is the type of writer you will either love to pieces or just can't read depending most likely on what you have to do for a living. Which unfortunately is true of most, if not all of the writers in the fantasy and science fiction genre, as well as the literary genre.
Zelphia Keatly Snyder
Witches of Worm is a book I won't forget. It is a horror/fantasy novel. And haunting.
About a girl's love/hate relationship with a mysterious and ugly cat named worm. It speaks to adolescence and the pangs of friendship, loniliness, and fitting in - better than most books.
I feel sometimes like I've forgotten more books than I care to think about it. Also, I really wish I had more female science fiction writers listed and less female fantasy novelists. It's a weird thing about this genre - more women write fantasy than sci-fi. Why is that?
So procrastinating by doing a meme - this is the sci-fi books written by women meme, with my own twist on it. Because lists are boring.
Andre Norton
My introduction to science fiction was Andre Norton. Sure Anne McCaffrey wrote it - but she was more romantic, Norton was more literary or something. Or so I thought as a 11 year old girl in sixth grade who loved books, and wanted stories featuring women saving the day. I wish I remembered the titles...it was so long ago. Most were short stories, actually. She was great at short stories - which is a rare feat in sci-fi.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Adored the book she wrote about the Darkover verse - or Sharra. I can't remember the name of it. But I adored it. So much, I bought the one about the Ladies of King Arthur, Gwen, Mab,
and Nimu. I did not enjoy it. I don't know why.
Madeline L’Engle
I remember falling in love with L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time universe in my pre-teen years, those innocent years between 9-12, before the hormones kick in. She created heroines who I identified with - the older sister, struggling with her mixed feelings towards the brilliant but bratty younger brother, Charles Wallace. She disappointed me though. I did not like Swiftly Turning Planet and felt she lost her characters once they grew...they seemed to fade and fall away in the background, with religious themes taking center stage. Her earliest books, were by far her best.
Angela Carter
Read a short story by her that played with my brain and was later made into a movie starring Craig T. Nelson as the father, of all people. The story was called "The Company of Wolves" and I read it in my 20s. It is about sexuality, and what is forbidden. The dark corners of a woman's desires. And the dark corners of a man's. Twisty, it haunts. Told more like a prose poem than a fairy tale. I later bought a novel by her, but could never get into it - entitled "Sister Wolf". I don't really think of her so much as sci-fi as fantasy.
Ursula LeGuin
Another writer that I loved as a child. I think my first love affair with sci-fi was The Wizard of Earthsea books. I read them before CS Lewis or around the same time. Beautifully written and captivating, pulling you inside a complicated world that only LeQuin could imagine. Her adult novels - that I own - I have yet to read, famously The Left Hand of Darkness.
Anne McCaffrey
I think I consumed all of McCaffrey's novels as a teen. From the ages of 12-16, I read all the Dragonriders of Pern, Ship who Sang, Pegasus, Crystal Singer, Restoree, and numerous short stories. I adored her. It was not until later - that I realized some of the issues others had with her novels. She wrote erotic sci-fiction. It was unlike most of the other stories I'd read up to that point. My aunt, a sixth grade librarian in Las Vegas introduced me to McCaffrey.
(In Vegas they have a school that is only sixth grade.)
Diana Wynne Jones
Have yet to read her - but own Howl's Moving Castle - a novel that I keep meaning to read, just to see how it varies from the male Japanese anime adaptation.
Octavia E. Butler
If you read one sci-fi novel - it should be Kindred. It blew me away. It may be the best time-travel story that I have ever read. And is certainly amongst the best that I've read discussing the difficult issue of racism and slavery. The story is a brutal one, with characters who are brilliantly complex. It is about a black woman who gets yanked into the past to help an ancestor who is a brutal slave-owner, with whom she has an odd relationship.
C. J. Cherryh
I adore the Chanur books. Fell head over heels. These novels are about a female and feline space captain with a human male castaway. Cherryh creates a fascinating alien race - based on a species that evolved from feline DNA or Hani. Go here for more information on this amazing series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chanur_novels
I devoured them in a gulp. One of the toughest female heroines I've seen. And in a traditional male role. Yet also depicting gender politics in a new and innovative way. Cherryh is more of a science fiction writer than many on this list.
Joan D. Vinge*
The Snow Queen - where she creates a female detective/inspector that I have not forgotten. It's the old fairy tale but told from a science fiction angle with a murder mystery/political conspiracy at its core.
Ellen Kushner
Not really science-fiction so much as fantasy. Swords, horses and medieval times. Which I admittedly have grown tired of , read too much of it, - so haven't tried her books as of yet. I do own Privelege of the Sword - but you need to be in the mood to read these types of novels.
Connie Willis
Another writer who does a good job with Time Travel - The Doomsday Book is one of those few time travel novels that is about science and not romance. There are no romances in this novel - it is story depicting the differences between modern medicine and medieval medicine. The story is about two plagues - and how two different time periods handle them. It is also about the human spirit's struggle to survive. It takes place in the distant future and the distant past.
Another far lighter novel is Bellweather - about the difficult science of predicting the weather or anything else scientifically for that matter.
Sheri S. Tepper*
Grass - a brilliant novel about religion, inter-species communication, sexuality, gender, sexism, and racism, as well as colonialism. It is about a family that comes to a planet in an attempt to figure out why this particular planet is the root cause of a plague that is happening on earth, and killing off a large portion of the human race. It is in part a horror story. It did disturb me. I will never as long as I live forget the Hippae - a horse like species who fear the Foxen (a primate meets fox) species and fight to destroy them. I won't tell you why they fear them or what the Hippae are like - for that would give away one of the best plot-twists I've seen in science fiction.
Tepper delves into biological sci-fi and deals strongly with themes of gender in her novels, which at times can overtake the story, blotting out everything else. Grass is perhaps the only novel that this did not happen. I could not make it through Raising the Stones of The Family Tree (which is more horror fantasy than sci-fi anyhow).
Margaret Atwood
I've admittedly enjoyed her literary fiction more than her science fiction which tends to get a bit preachy and dense. I own The Blind Assassin.
Lois McMaster Bujold
I'm an oddity online about Bujold. I loved Cordelia's Honor and the novels that focused on Cordelia - a captain and smart strong woman, who ends up marrying the man who captures her during a peace initiative. Then has a child in a very strange and courageous manner.
I did not like the books about her son as much and lost the story thread after she left it.
From what I've read everyone online is the exact opposite. Own her fantasy novels, but have been unable to get into them.
At any rate - highly recommend Cordelia's Honor.
Elizabeth Hand*
Not really a sci-fi writer so much as a fantasy one, a dark fantasy writer. Waking the Moon is a huge cult novel apparently - which I loved in my twenties, but not so much now. Gave it away finally by leaving it out on the sidewalk. Waking the Moon is a story about the mother goddess, and the tension between patriarchial religion and matriarchial religion - which both, oddly, end with the death or sacrifice of a young man. It's one of those books that starts out rather brilliantly but sort of loses its way halfway through.
Elizabeth Moon*
Wrote some decent sci-fi with Anne McCaffrey.
Mary Doria Russell*
Possibly my favorite sci-fiction novelist - or amongst them. She only wrote two science fiction novels that I'm aware of. The Sparrow and Children of God, both like Tepper's novel are about inter-species relations and religion. Russel is a biological and cultural anthropologist, with a background in theology. The Sparrow is about a priest who is devout, an accomplished linguist, who loses his faith and his spirit on a venture to another world. It is a story about human arrogance, good intentions, racism, vegetarianism, colonialism and the misunderstandings
that occur. A novel that once read, is impossible to forget. Like Kindred - The Sparrow is one of those books that change you. You are not the same after reading it.
J. K. Rowling
Another fantasy novelist. This round for children. When I first read Rowlings, which was mostly out of curiousity - I thought, hmmm a female Ronald Dahl, except much lighter and far less misanthropic. Dahl has a wicked wit. Rowlings is well not as wicked. But it is there. And like Dahl - Rowlings, a former welfare mom, takes potshots at the British Cast System. Her stories worked for kids and adults. The devilish wit which went over many a youngster's head.
Mercedes Lacey
Fantasy Romance novelist - with some great novels about a Dragon King/Prince which are reminiscent of Anne McCaffrey.
Doris Lessing
Canopos in Argos: Archives - a science fiction novel - which is incredibly dense and I have yet to make it through.
Kim Harrison
Rachel Morgan novels - about a world where a virus was mutated and infected the human population through tomatoes, and the supernatural world - witches, elves, who had always been in the background come out into the open to more or less save the world order. Harrison's novels take place at least 30 years after The Turn. And unlike most fantasy novels, including Butcher's Dresden books - there's a lot of science here or biology. The lead character's ability to kindle magic has a lot to do with how her genes were biologically manipulated in the past - in order to save her from a disease. These are complex novels.
Charlian Harris
Equally delves into both fantasy and science fiction, while not as good as the ladies above,
she did come up with a rather cool idea - about what would happen if a synthetic blood was developed. Her novels have since been turned into the popular HBO series True Blood.
Elizabeth Bear
Writes both science fiction and fantasy novels much like McCaffrey. And I have similar issues with them. The writing in some respects is also similar, although I think McCaffrey may be a better writer or rather a cleaner one. Bear tries too hard to be literary. I feel her working and there's a certain arrogance and defensiveness that comes through as a result - that may unfortunately turn off readers who would read her otherwise.
Catherynne Valente
Is more fantasy than Sci-Fi as far as I can tell. I've read bits and pieces of The Girl Who Circumvented Fairyland, not enough to comment fully. And own the beautifully illustrated In the Cities of Coin and Spice. I find her difficult to get into right now. But she's won all these awards now...so. And it is more than possible that this is a mood thing - I spend all day reading dense items regarding construction specs, legal contracts and analyzing numbers, then writing about them. So brain is weary and not up to curlicues of beautiful and poetic literary prose, describing in detail a fairy that has purple shoes. I want to scream - get to the point! At any rate, she is the type of writer you will either love to pieces or just can't read depending most likely on what you have to do for a living. Which unfortunately is true of most, if not all of the writers in the fantasy and science fiction genre, as well as the literary genre.
Zelphia Keatly Snyder
Witches of Worm is a book I won't forget. It is a horror/fantasy novel. And haunting.
About a girl's love/hate relationship with a mysterious and ugly cat named worm. It speaks to adolescence and the pangs of friendship, loniliness, and fitting in - better than most books.
I feel sometimes like I've forgotten more books than I care to think about it. Also, I really wish I had more female science fiction writers listed and less female fantasy novelists. It's a weird thing about this genre - more women write fantasy than sci-fi. Why is that?
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Date: 2010-06-06 05:42 am (UTC)