Best Science Fiction With a Female Protagonist
Top 10 Best Science Fiction With a Female Protagonist
: The Handmaid's Tale, On Basilisk Station, Shards of Honour, Parable of the Sower, Dragonflight, The Angel Experiment, Doomsday Book, Dragonsong, Grimspace, Barrayar
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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | James Patterson |
| ISBN | 0446617792 |
Now this is a terrible book.
Written with all the wit and grace of a one-legged puppy, Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment reveals its intentions within the first chapter alone. This is not a book of striking prose or even serviceable but entertaining MOR lit. It is merely a cash cow, another mindless...
| 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...
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 | 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 | 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 | 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 |
| 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 | 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 | Brian K. Vaughan |
| ISBN | 1607066017 |
When two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war fall in love, they risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous old universe.
From bestselling writer Brian K. Vaughan, Saga is the sweeping tale of one young family fighting to find their place in the worlds....
| 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 | 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 | 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...
| 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...
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
| 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 | Sheri S. Tepper |
| ISBN | 1857987985 |
Generations ago, humans fled to the cosmic anomaly known as Grass. But before humanity arrived, another species had already claimed Grass for its own. It too had developed a culture......
Now a deadly plague is spreading across the stars, leaving no planet untouched, save for Grass. But the...
| Author | Tanya Huff |
| ISBN | 0756403995 |
As military SF, maybe 4 stars. Better than most.
But I'm starting to think that military fiction has become so rigid that it's almost an automatic minus when you judge it just as SF.
Military SF checklist:
* Protagonist is a hard-boiled NCO - check (but a point for her being female)
*...
| Author | Mira Grant |
| ISBN | 0316081051 |
The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop.
The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED. Now, twenty years after the Rising,...
| Author | Susan Beth Pfeffer |
| ISBN | 0152061548 |
Miranda’s disbelief turns to fear in a split second when a meteor knocks the moon closer to the earth. How should her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis wipe out the coasts, earthquakes rock the continents, and volcanic ash blocks out the sun? As summer turns to Arctic winter, Miranda,...
An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post-apocalyptic Africa.
In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate...
| 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 | Ann Aguirre |
| ISBN | 0312650086 |
New York City has been decimated by war and plague, and most of civilization has migrated to underground enclaves, where life expectancy is no more than the early 20's. When Deuce turns 15, she takes on her role as a Huntress, and is paired with Fade, a teenage Hunter who lived Topside as a young boy. When...
| Author | Vernor Vinge |
| ISBN | 0812515285 |
Alternate Cover Edition can be found here.
A Fire upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.
Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined...
| 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 | 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 | 0893662135 |
The beautiful planet Pern seemed a paradise to its new colonists - until unimaginable terror turned it into hell. Suddenly deadly spores were falling like silver threads from the sky, devouring everything - and everyone - in their path. It began to look as if the colony, cut off from Earth and lacking...
| 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 | 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...
Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
An air of pleasant anticipation hung so thickly over the Halls, Holds, and Weyrs of Pern that it had affected even the businesslike ways of Moreta, the Weyrwoman of Fort Weyr. Her dragon, Queen Orlith, would soon clutch; spring had made a glorious debut; the Gather at Ruatha Hold was extremely merry;...
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 | Connie Willis |
| ISBN | 0553562967 |
Pop culture, chaos theory and matters of the heart collide in this unique novella from the Hugo and Nebula winning author of Doomsday Book.
Sandra Foster studies fads and their meanings for the HiTek corporation. Bennet O'Reilly works with monkey group behavior and chaos theory for the same...
| 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 | 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 | Nicola Griffith |
| ISBN | 0345452380 |
Change or die. These are the only options available on the planet Jeep. Centuries earlier, a deadly virus shattered the original colony, killing the men and forever altering the few surviving women. Now, generations after the colony has lost touch with the rest of humanity, a company arrives to exploit...
| Author | Kate Elliott |
| ISBN | 0756400953 |
The first book of Kate Elliott’s epic Novels of the Jaran, set in an alien-controlled galaxy where a young woman seeks to find her own life and love, but is tied to her brother’s revolutionary fate
In the future, Earth is just one of the planets ruled by the vast Chapalii empire. The volatility...
| Author | Kage Baker |
| ISBN | 0765314576 |
This is the first novel in what has become one of the most popular series in contemporary SF, now back in print from Tor. In the 24th century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them...
| 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 | Alastair Reynolds |
| ISBN | 0441014011 |
2057. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclearpowered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. But when Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, inexplicably leaves its natural orbit and heads out of the solar system at high speed, Bella is ordered to shadow it for the few vital days before it falls forever...
| 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 | 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 | Joanna Russ |
| ISBN | 0807063134 |
I've seen people argue, both here and elsewhere, that this book is outdated and no longer topical.
I'm really confused what rose-colored glasses they're wearing, because as far as I can tell, the majority of this book is still far too true. I've been in these places far, far too often to write...
| Author | David Weber |
| ISBN | 0743435745 |
HONOR BETRAYED
The People's Republic of Haven's sneak attack on the Kingdom of Manticore has failed. The Peeps are in disarray, their leaders fighting for power in bloody revolution, and the Royal Manticoran Navy stands victorious.
But Manticore has domestic problems of its...
| Author | Elizabeth Bear |
| ISBN | 0553587501 |
Once Jenny Casey was somebody’s daughter. Once she was somebody’s enemy. Now the former Canadian special forces warrior lives on the hellish streets of Hartford, Connecticut, in the year 2062. Racked with pain, hiding from the government she served, running with a crime lord so she can save a life...
| 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 | Samuel R. Delany |
| ISBN | 0839823282 |
Babel-17 is all about the power of language. Humanity, which has spread throughout the universe, is involved in a war with the Invaders, who have been covertly assassinating officials and sabotaging spaceships. The only clues humanity has to go on are strange alien messages that have been intercepted...
| Author | Anne McCaffrey |
| ISBN | 0552083445 |
There was a sudden stench of a dead sea creature. There was the sudden horror of a huge black shape closing over her. There was nothing...
Then there were pieces of memory, isolated fragments that were so horrible her mind refused to accept them. Intense heat and shivering cold; excruciating...
| 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,...
