Women Writing SF: Further Reading
There are a few more books in my reading project that I haven't written about, but as I have less to say about them I'll probably leave them for my next recent reading roundup. In the meantime I've gone back to my TBR stack with a slight feeling of letdown--there are a lot of books there I'd like to read, but I've enjoyed this project and the new vistas it's opened to me. For the rest of the year, then, here are some more science fiction books by female writers that I hope to get to (besides, that is, more of the four I've written about).
- Tricia Sullivan - If either Sullivan's Maul (which came second in Niall's best of the decade poll) or her most recent, and very well-received, Lightborn, had been available for the Kindle I would have added them to the reading project. As it is I hope to get my hands on copies, electronic or physical, in the near future.
- Zoo City by Lauren Beukes - Beukes's debut Moxyland was one of the books I read for this project, but I found myself, though impressed, with little to say about a book that seemed more like a demonstration of Beukes's talent and ideas than a complete work (Martin Lewis has a write-up for his reading project here, though). Her follow-up has garnered some ecstatic reviews, however, and I'm looking forward to reading it.
- Justina Robson - Along with Gwyneth Jones, Robson is probably the highest-profile female author of British SF, but none of her novels have ever called out to me. Her Natural History ranked third on Niall's top ten, which is reason enough to give it a look. Of the rest of her bibliography, Living Next Door to the God of Love seems to be well-regarded, and she's also got a short story collection, Heliotrope, coming from Ticonderoga Press this year.
- Nalo Hopkinson - I've basically been meaning to check out Nalo Hopkinson's writing since the mid-nineties and have somehow never gotten around to it. Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring seem to be the places to start.
- C.J. Cherryh - I seem to have made my opening forays into SF just a smidge too late for Cherryh, who peaked in the 80s with Hugo wins for Downbelow Station and Cyteen. Her 2009 novel Regenesis got a lot of fans talking about her in rapturous terms, so I think I'll look out for those two novels.
- Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge - Nic at Eve's Alexandria wrote a post about this book recently that intrigued me. It's just been rereleased, though again without a Kindle edition.
Comments
Kelley Eskridge's excellent collection, Dangerous Space, is available as an ebook from Aqueduct.
Regenesis is, as Ian said, a direct sequel to Cyteen. To an unusual degree, in fact: it's a direct continuation of the narrative, and although I was impressed Cherryh perfectly recaptured the feel and texture of a novel she wrote twenty years earlier, it struck me as curiously unambitious.
However, I just wanted to note that if you can a non-DRM copy of an ebook, most of the standard formats can be converted to MOBI format using Calibre [http://calibre-ebook.com], and Kindle reads MOBI just fine.
I've read Butler's Kindred but not anything else. She is certainly a writer that I should be more familiar with.
Athena:
I'm not familiar with Friedman. I do happen to have the reprint edition of Scott's Trouble and All Her Friend, though.
Tikitu:
My strategy with the Kindle has been to find out whether books I'm interested in have available editions, not look for cool stuff that's available for it. As you say, that way lies a lot of heartbreak, so maybe I should reverse my approach, but so far I don't have a list of cool finds.
Zvi:
Alas, that edition isn't available for purchase in my region. Amazon is better about restricting purchase outside the US than other online vendors (coughiTunescough), but there are still a lot of these frustrating lacunae.
Trouble and Her Friends is Scott's debut novel and is very good -- but she gets better. The two Dream- novels are about conscious AI, but very different from the quotidian cyberpunk; The Shadow Man is a sui generis meditation on biological and political gender.
While we're discussing Cherryh, Downbelow Station is hands down my favorite book of hers -- another outstanding space opera with a female Captain Nemo: Signy Mallory.
I second all those people who said Melissa Scott and Octavia Butler.
Natural History is foremost a "political" book about the human/non-human status of post-humans and the problematic notion that they are bound by a relation between their form an the function they were designed to fulfill. It's also a conceptually brilliant first contact story.
Living Next Door ... is a very strange coming-og-age story about identity, sexuality and love, against the bckdrop of multiple fantastic worlds shaped by the interaction of human minds with the alien "stuff" that creates realities from thoughts. Next to Delany's Dhalgren, it is my favourite sf novel in the "very strange/occassionally surreal" mode.
One reason I'm thrilled is that it is available in DRM-free editions from Weightless Books (including MOBI)to any reader in the world, no market restrictions. Apologies for touting my own stuff here, but I want to make sure to support DRM-free wherever I can. And Weightless has many, many good books available.
http://weightlessbooks.com/genre/fiction/solitaire-a-novel/
I think I was unclear about Cherryh. I'm planning to read Downbelow Station and Cyteen (the former first as I found it in a used bookstore the other day) as an introduction. Will decide about Regenesis, and other books, further down the line.
Martin:
To be honest, I'm not very well read in the Golden Age regardless of gender (though the authors I have read were, unsurprisingly, male). I suppose I tend to feel an additional barrier of stylistic convention and cultural assumptions (I'm basically a New Weird and onwards girl). But names like Brackett and Moore are definitely worth considering.
julianyap:
I wrote about my (somewhat ambivalent) reactions to The Left Hand of Darkness here. I am interested in reading more of Le Guin's short fiction, however.
Chuk:
I've not been impressed with Kress's Hugo-nominated short fiction in recent years. Are her novels better, or just different?
Kelley:
Thanks for commenting and for the pointer to Weightless Books. I'll definitely add Solitaire to my shopping cart.
[1] http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2009/06/steal_across_th-comments.shtml
Despite the pile-on by people who seemed not to understand what they were reading, Cherryh included something by Cross in one her anthologies.
Love, C.
I would definitely recommend Joan Slonczewski; her Elysium Cycle books are available as ebooks and I've just been reading my way through them.
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