Best Sci Fi Books with Female Main Characters

Author	David Weber
ISBN	1416509372

Honor Harrington in trouble: Having made him look the fool, she's been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her. Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out-of-the-way picket station. The aborigines of the system's only...

Author

Margaret Atwood

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...

Author	Ann Aguirre
ISBN	0441015999

As the carrier of a rare gene, Sirantha Jax has the ability to jump ships through grimspace-a talent which makes her a highly prized navigator for the Corp. Then a crash landing kills everyone on board, leaving Jax in a jail cell with no memory of the crash. But her fun's not over. A group of rogue fighters...

Author	Elizabeth Moon
ISBN	0345447611

Kylara Vatta is the only daughter in a family full of sons, and her father’s only child to buck tradition by choosing a military career instead of joining the family business. For Ky, it’s no contest: Even running the prestigious Vatta Transport Ltd. shipping concern can’t hold a candle to shipping...

Author	Anne McCaffrey
ISBN	0345327861

I read this book as a youth and loved it, but reading it now at age 45 it does not quite hold the same appeal. I see a woman that is hell-bent on remaining without attachments. She is very bright and talented, but remains aloof emotionally (the come-and-go sexual relationships), socially, psychologically...

Author	Tanya Huff
ISBN	0886778964

In the distant future, humans and several other races have been granted membership in the Confederation - at a price. They must act as soldier/protectors of the far more civilized races who have long since turned away from war... — Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr was a battle-hardened professional. So...

Author	Anne McCaffrey
ISBN	0345484266

HOW CAN ONE GIRL SAVE AN ENTIRE WORLD?

To the nobles who live in Benden Weyr, Lessa is nothing but a ragged kitchen girl. For most of her life she has survived by serving those who betrayed her father and took over his lands. Now the time has come for Lessa to shed her disguise—and take back her stolen...

Author	Lois McMaster Bujold
ISBN	0743468422

An all-time SF favorite! Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:

Shards of Honor (often packaged with Barrayar and sold as Cordelia's Honor) is one of those SF space opera books that I love beyond reason and pull off my bookshelf every few years to reread, contentedly immersing myself...

Author	Anne McCaffrey
ISBN	0345334310

It was Thanksgiving, I was out of town, had just gotten ready to head out for dinner when I heard that Anne McCaffrey had passed. It hit me like a punch in the gut. I couldn't quite shake it all evening. What was going on? Sure, I've read her books but she has never been on a list of favorite authors, why was I so...

Author

Anne McCaffrey

A book doesn't have to be Great Literature or even particularly good to appear on my "formative fiction" shelf, it just has to be a book with a meaning that changed me or helped me to understand myself and the world in a new way. Fortunately, Dragonsong is also a very good book of its type.

The best...

Author	Alan Moore
ISBN	1401207928

"Remember, remember the fifth of November..."

A frightening and powerful tale of the loss of freedom and identity in a chillingly believable totalitarian world, V for Vendetta stands as one of the highest achievements of the comics medium and a defining work for creators Alan Moore and David...

Author	Neal Stephenson
ISBN	0553380966

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes...

Author	S.L. Viehl
ISBN	0451457730

Dr. Cherijo Grey Veil leaves Earth and accepts a position as a physician at Kevarzanga-2's FreeClinic. Her surgical skills are desperately needed on a hostile frontier world with over 200 sentient species--and her understanding of alien physiology is nothing short of miraculous. But the truth behind...

Author	Connie Willis
ISBN	0553562738

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking...

Author	Rachel Bach
ISBN	0316221112

Devi Morris isn't your average mercenary. She has plans. Big ones. And a ton of ambition. It's a combination that's going to get her killed one day - but not just yet.
That is, until she just gets a job on a tiny trade ship with a nasty reputation for surprises. The Glorious Fool isn't misnamed: it likes...

Author	Elizabeth Moon
ISBN	0345491599

With the Vatta's War series, award-winning author Elizabeth Moon has claimed a place alongside such preeminent writers of military science fiction as David Weber and Lois McMaster Bujold. Now Moon is back and so is her butt-kicking, take-no-prisoners heroine, Kylara Vatta. Once the black-sheep...

Author	Octavia E. Butler
ISBN	0446675504

In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.

Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s...

Author	Joan D. Vinge
ISBN	0446676640

This reissue of a modern classic of science fiction, the Hugo and Locus Award-winning and Nebula-nominated The Snow Queen, marks the first time the book has been reprinted in fifteen years.The imperious Winter colonists have ruled the planet Tiamat for 150 years, deriving wealth from the slaughter...

Author

Anne McCaffrey

OLD ENOUGH TO BE USED, YOUNG ENOUGH TO BE BROKEN

Sassinak was twelve when the raiders came. That made her just the right age: old enough to be used, young enough to be broken. Or so the slavers thought. But Sassy turned out to be a little different from your typical slave girl. Maybe it was her unusual...

Author	Robert A. Heinlein
ISBN	0345414004

Friday is a secret courier. She is employed by a man known to her only as "Boss." Operating from and over a near-future Earth, in which North America has become Balkanized into dozens of independent states, where culture has become bizarrely vulgarized and chaos is the happy norm, she finds herself on...

Author	Anne McCaffrey
ISBN	0689860072

I won't go into depth as this is a book I've read several times since first encountering it as a teenager ages ago and there are literally hundreds of detailed reviews. One thing that inspires me about Dragonsinger, though, is that it doesn't follow the contemporary form of having everything go wrong...

Author	Elizabeth Moon
ISBN	0345447573

THIS RATING AND REVIEW ARE FOR THE AUDIO EDITION I (TRIED TO) LISTEN(ED) TO ONLY. I WILL MAKE A FEW COMMENTS ABOUT THE BOOK BUT THE RATING IS ABOUT THIS AUDIO VERSION.

Some of you may know that Elizabeth Moon wrote one of my all time favorite series including a trilogy I think of as one novel. So I hate...

Author	Anne McCaffrey
ISBN	0441003389

Kristin Bjornsen lived a normal life, right up until the day the spaceships floated into view above Denver. As human slaves were herded into the maw of a massive vessel, Kristin realized her normal life was over and her fight for freedom was just beginning…

The alien Catteni value strength...

Author	Elizabeth Moon
ISBN	0345491610

A vast and hostile force is attacking prosperous trade centres, destroying their space fleets then moving on, leaving death and chaos in their wake. Admiral Ky Vatta’s family was decimated by one such attack and Turek, the pirate force’s leader, will not escape her vengeance.

Ky has a...

Author	Nancy Kress
ISBN	0060733489

In this future, some people need no sleep at all. Leisha Camden was genetically modified at birth to require no sleep, and her normal twin Alice is the control. Problems and envy between the sisters mirror those in the larger world, as society struggles to adjust to a growing pool of people who not only...

Author	Ursula K. Le Guin
ISBN	1416509631

Years ago, they had escaped together from the sinister Tombs of Atuan—she, an isolated young priestess; he, a powerful wizard. Now she is a farmer's widow, having chosen for herself the simple pleasures of an ordinary life. And he is a broken old man, mourning the powers lost to him through no choice...

Author	Meljean Brook
ISBN	0425236676

After the Iron Duke freed England from Horde control, he instantly became a national hero. Now Rhys Trahaearn has built a merchant empire on the power - and fear - of his name. And when a dead body is dropped from an airship onto his doorstep, bringing Detective Inspector Mina Wentworth into his dangerous...

Author	Karen Traviss
ISBN	0060541695

Three separate alien societies have claims on Cavanagh's Star. But the new arrivals -- the gethes from Earth -- now threaten the tenuous balance of a coveted world.Environmental Hazard Enforcement officer Shan Frankland agreed to lead a mission to Cavanagh's Star, knowing that 150 years would elapse...

Author	Vonda N. McIntyre
ISBN	0553296590

While this book gets docked a point or two for the cheesy 70s cover and the title, it deserves a place among the classics of the genre. I first read the Nebula-winning novella "Of Mist, And Grass, And Sand," in middle school, but I never realized that McIntyre had expanded it to novel length. It's a thoughtful...

Author	C.J. Cherryh
ISBN	0886772923

No one at Meetpoint Station had ever seen a creature like the Outsider. Naked-hided, blunt toothed and blunt-fingered, Tully was the sole surviving member of his company -- a communicative, spacefaring species hitherto unknown -- and he was a prisoner of his discoverer/ captors the sadistic, treacherous...

Author

Madeleine L'Engle

Every time a star goes out, another Echthros has won a battle.

Just before Meg Murry's little brother, Charles Wallace, falls deathly ill, he sees dragons in the vegetable garden. The dragons turn out to be Proginoskes, a cherubim composed out wings and eyes, wind and flame. It is up to Meg and...

Author	Catherine Asaro
ISBN	0812550234

At the beginning of the year I decided to actively seek out and read SF&F written by women or with women occupying the titular roles. As you may imagine, when I first learned about Catherine Asaro , a female author who writes hard SF while reading the Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction, I was...

Author	Lois McMaster Bujold
ISBN	0743468414

4+ stars. Barrayar--a Hugo winner and Nebula nominee back in 1991--is a book that improved dramatically for me on reread. It's more interesting, subtle and complex than I initially gave it credit for. And it's fascinating to see the development of Cordelia and Aral's characters from their initial...

Author	Elizabeth Moon
ISBN	0613926234

In this quite entrancing space adventure, we have Esmay Suiza as the main character. Now, those like myself who read previous books by this author will have met Esmay as a side character in Winning Colors (The Serrano Legacy, #3) where she was a key factor in the resolution of that adventure. The first...

Author	Julie E. Czerneda
ISBN	0886777690

Sira is on the run. The mysterious Captain Morgan has a starship. But if she goes with him, who will be at risk? Meet the Clan, shadowy figures of unfathomable power. Meet Huido, the lobster-like restauranteur. Meet the Trade Pact Enforcers, who have their own intentions. For events are beginning to...

Author	Alan Dean Foster
ISBN	2290011150

Greatest book in the whole frickin' universe!!! (of course, having read it over 30 years ago this won't be a highly detailed review...)

Now,I was 11 years old when Alien came out. My mom wouldn't let me see R-rated flicks at the time and most older friends & cousins were afraid of my mother...

Author	Sharon Lee
ISBN	1439132879

Theo Waitley has lived all her young life on Delgado, a Safe World that is home to one of the galaxy's premier institutions of higher learning. Both Theo's mother, Kamele, and Kamele's onagrata Jen Sar Kiladi, are professors at the university, and they all live comfortably together, just like they...

Author	Octavia E. Butler
ISBN	0446696161

Fledgling, Octavia Butler's new novel after a seven year break, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly inhuman needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: She is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her...

Author

Elizabeth Moon

Kylara Vatta, risk-taking, rule-breaking, can-do heroine of Trading in Danger, is back in business–the kind that’s anything but usual–in the new military science fiction adventure by ace action storyteller Elizabeth Moon.

The exciting military career she hoped for never got off...

Author	Joan D. Vinge
ISBN	0765304465

Sequel To The Hugo Award-Winning Bestseller The Snow Queen

The Summer Queen is the extraordinary sequel to one of science fiction's most celebrated novels, The Snow Queen. Set in a fully realized universe of wonders, this spectacular space epic, itself a finalist for the Hugo Award, is one...

Author	Octavia E. Butler
ISBN	0446676101

Lilith Iyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is resurrected -- by miraculously powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irresistible need to heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging genetically with...

Author	Octavia E. Butler
ISBN	0446676977

“Recently, however, I began to suspect that calling myself a science fiction critic without having read anything by Octavia Butler bordered on the fraudulent.”
“Books to Look For” - Orson Scott Card

I have to thank OSC for the above-mentioned article (from 1990) which piqued...

Author	Sara Creasy
ISBN	0061934739

Trained since childhood in advanced biocyph seed technology by the all-powerful Crib empire, Edie's mission is to terraform alien worlds while her masters bleed the outlawed Fringe populations dry. When renegade mercenaries kidnap Edie, she's not entirely sure it's a bad thing . . . until they leash...

Author	Elizabeth Moon
ISBN	1857238826

When a treacherous superior officer forced Heris Serrano to resign her commission in the Regular Space Service, she thought she would simply be marking time captaining a rich lady’s interstellar yacht. But things seem to happen when Heris is around. During Lady Cecelia’s most recent pleasure...

Author	Julie E. Czerneda
ISBN	0756402611

Herself a biologist, Julie E. Czerneda has earned a reputation in science fiction circles for her ability to create beautifully crafted, imaginative, yet believably realized alien races. In Survival, the first novel in her new series, Species Imperative, she draws upon this talent to build races,...

Author	C.J. Cherryh
ISBN	0446671274

A brilliant young scientist rises to power on Cyteen, haunted by the knowledge that her predecessor and genetic duplicate died at the hands of one of her trusted advisors. Murder, politics, and genetic manipulation provide the framework for the latest Union-Alliance novel by the author of Downbelow...

Author	Scott Westerfeld
ISBN	1416971750

The behemoth is the fiercest creature in the British navy. It can swallow enemy battleships with one bite. The Darwinists will need it, now that they are at war with the Clanker powers.

Deryn is a girl posing as a boy in the British Air Service, and Alek is the heir to an empire posing as a commoner....

Author	Anne McCaffrey
ISBN	0345316002

At first Killashandra Ree's ambitions to become a Crystal Singer, get rich, and forget her past, were going just as she had hoped. But after she grew wealthy, a devastating storm turned her claim to useless rock. In short order she was broke, she had crystal sickness so bad she thought she was going to die,...

Author	Marge Piercy
ISBN	0449220605

In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up. There, she is welcomed by Malkah,...

Author	Nicola Griffith
ISBN	0345395379

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide.

Then out of the rain...

Author

Jean Johnson

Jean Johnson—the national bestselling author of the Sons of Destiny novels—returns to the world she introduced in A Soldier’s Duty with a terrible vision of the future...

Promoted in the field for courage and leadership under fire, Ia is now poised to become an officer in the Space Force...

Author	Sheri S. Tepper
ISBN	0006482708

Tepper's finest novel to date is set in a post-holocaust feminist dystopia that offers only two political alternatives: a repressive polygamist sect that is slowly self-destructing through inbreeding and the matriarchal dictatorship called Women's Country. Here, in a desperate effort to prevent...

Author	Anne McCaffrey
ISBN	0517086034

Told in the timeless style of Anne McCaffrey, The Rowan is the first installment in a wonderful trilogy. This is sci-fi at its best: a contemporary love story as well as an engrossing view of our world in the future.

The kinetically gifted, trained in mind/machine gestalt, are the most valued...