I'm looking for Sci fi with good, well written female characters as either protagonists or at least central to the plot without just serving as love interests etc.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT
I don't necessarily want something that is feminist sci fi lit specifically. I love Octavia butler, Joanna russ, ursula le guin etc
BUT the themes in some of their those novels (sexual assault, misogyny etc) can be a heavy. I would like something that has good female characters without the whole novels central theme being about women's suffering and gender.
by Emmersynn
10 Comments
Shards of Honor by Lois Macmaster Bujold.
First book of the Vorkosigan Saga which has plenty of wonderful female characters.
Anne McCaffrey is the GOAT of well rounded, autonomous women in Sci-fi. I recently reread the Dragonriders of Pern series & they’ve held up remarkably well.
The Gaia Trilogy by John Varley.
The Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold (especially the first two books),
The Innkeeper series by Ilona Andrews.
Becky Chambers’ ***The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet*** has a woman running from her past. She hires on with a construction spaceship traveling across the galaxy to its next job. Most of the found-family plot consists of interactions between the multi-species crew and incidents that occur along the way.
John Scalzi’s *Interdependency* series is court politics and internecine battles taking place in an outer-space sci-fi setting. Most of its main characters are bad-ass women. The court politics doesn’t come off the periphery to take center stage until the second book.
The first book is ***The Collapsing Empire***.
Be aware it contains considerable expletive language.
Women are central characters in all the Becky Chambers novels I’ve read. A Closed and Common Orbit is probably my favorite.
The two main characters in Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky are female (though I thought one of them was male (maybe gay?) until about 3/4ths in haha).
Also Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is very female.
Becky Chambers is right up your alley. I love all the authors you mentioned and she’s great for a light read but with similar worldbuilding and writing style.
The Locked Tomb Series by Tamsyn Muir.
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
Animorphs is good, it has rotating povs from the different kids in the group, two of which are female.
It doesn’t have women’s issues as a theme. But it’s probably my favorite sci fi book. Then again I don’t read a lot of scifi books.
There’s lots of aliens staying hidden to most of the humans on earth, and mind control where any one of the people around you could be being piloted by an evil alien.
It’s a kids book but still violent / serious in places. With some overall dark things the kids have to deal with.
Planetfall by Emma Newman. I discovered her as the narrator of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Guns of the Dawn, which with her contribution may be his best book, and later found her name while browsing audible plus and learned she is an author as well.
Newman is special as both an author and a narrator, crafting the most *human* characters I’ve ever encountered.