Dreamsnake (Cover image via Jo Fletcher Books)
More than ever, women are important creators in the world of science fiction. Here are 20 of the best and most formidable female authors of sci-fi today.
Does it seem strange that, like LGBTQ people, women have routinely been left out of science fiction? How could a genre that’s dedicated to exploring the realms of the fantastic be so firmly mired in old gender norms? Especially in the early days of the science fiction genre, it seemed as if women were set only to be objects. Whether they were only objects to be saved or ones to be seduced hardly seemed to matter. Rare was the female character who had her own story. She definitely wasn’t allowed to be the hero of a story on a regular basis.
However, a few early exceptions prove that women were more than capable of standing as authors in their own right. They were among some of the earliest speculative fiction authors, including Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818) and Margaret Cavendish (The Blazing World, 1666).
As time went on, it became clear that science fiction was ripe for exploring women’s place in the world. Writers proposed radical futures where women were equals with men. Some, like Sheri S. Tepper, James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ, even wrote of societies where men lived apart from women or were absent entirely.
Complex protagonists and thorny questions
That’s not to say that these were simplistic tales of bad men and saintly women. Rather, the fictional women in many of these works are as complex and flawed as any male protagonist. They are rarely archetypes. Instead, they have as much humanity as real-life women, whether they do good, evil or something in between.
Though this following list only discusses 20 female authors, this is meant to be only a beginning. There are many more emerging and established women within the literary science fiction genre, all producing work that is challenging and exciting. If you’re intrigued, be sure to follow up with even more modern and historic female sci-fi writers.
Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell (Image via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
20. Mary Shelley
While this list as a whole isn’t meant to act as a chronology or ranking, we might as well start with the grandmama of all modern science fiction. No, I didn’t just say sci-fi by women. I meant the entire genre.
Like practically anything, this is up for debate. If you really want to get down to the nitty-gritty, there’s some merit to arguing that ancient works like the Epic of Gilgamesh have elements of sci-fi to them.
Still, Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, is one of the earliest works of literature that can be labeled “science fiction”. No matter how often you find it filed away with “horror”, you’ll find elements of sci-fi raising its head throughout her first novel. There’s speculative science, artificially created beings, and plenty of musing on the human condition that would fit right in with the genre.
Frankenstein follows young Victor Frankenstein, a mad scientist who creates life via discarded criminal body parts and galvanism. His unnamed monster is even a kind of alien, thus observing and critiquing human society and generally causing havoc in Frankenstein’s life.
The Last Man and Valperga
Though Frankenstein is by far her most famous work, Shelley would go on to write quite a few more novels. These include The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic tale published in 1826, and a more traditional gothic work, Valperga (which features a character named Countess Euthanasia).
Shelley herself had an interesting life story worthy of any author of the fantastic. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, herself a pioneering philosopher and feminist despite the handicap of living in 18th century Europe. Alas, she died giving birth to her daughter, Mary, in 1797. Though Mary Shelley never met her own mother, it’s easy to think that she was somehow haunted by Wollstonecraft throughout her life. After all, in Frankenstein, life, death, birth and the oftentimes grotesque mixing of the three are a major and often heartbreaking theme.
The Snow Queen (Cover image via Tor Books)
19. Joan D. Vinge
Joan D. Vinge is probably best-known for her 1980 novel The Snow Queen. It’s a Hans Christian Andersen-inspired work that won her a prestigious Hugo Award. The Snow Queen was followed by three sequels, all set in a futuristic world that deals with quasi-immortality, myth, and science. Vinge skillfully draws on the power and scope of folktales, pairing it beautifully with the tropes of high-flying space operas.
Of course, Vinge isn’t a one-hit-wonder sort of author. She’s also written the Heaven Chronicles series, starting with The Outcasts of Heaven’s Belt (1978). That series tells the story of a future where interstellar travel and interplanetary colonization is only just beginning. Of course, as humans tend to do, everyone makes war. As such the cast of characters are caught up in a grim space conflict. There, an egalitarian, feminist society must pit itself against a coalition of more patriarchal settlements in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
If you’d like something marginally more uplifting, you could also check out Vinge’s Cat series, which follows the title character, a half-alien cyberpunk orphan with psionic powers. It may not be quite as ground shaking at The Snow Queen, but it’s certainly a lot of fun.
The Sparrow (Cover image via Ballantine Readers Circle)
18. Mary Doria Russell
Mary Doria Russell’s work is well known for its fine-grained examination of relationships, history, and the future. That’s a broad description, to be sure, but then so is Russell’s work. She’s created some truly staggering science fiction. That’s along with a historical romance, a World War II thriller, and two novels focusing on the life of Doc Holliday. Oh, and she also has a Ph.D. in biological anthropology and has taught extensively at the university level.
For all of Russell’s numerous and impressive accomplishments, however, we’re here to talk science fiction. Two of her six novels have just that focus, though through an anthropological lens that is unique to the genre.
The first, The Sparrow (1996), centers on a Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat. SETI has received radio broadcasts of strange, alien music from the planet. Father Emilio Sandoz travels with other researchers to the planet in order to investigate. Without spoiling too much, the team discovers something far more intricate and wide-ranging than a series of songs. Its sequel, Children of God, followed in 1998.
Though some reviewers claim that it’s not fair to label The Sparrow and Children of God as science fiction novels, neither is it fair to deny the sci-fi elements in both. Can’t The Sparrow be a searing philosophical work that also contains also contains science fiction touchstones like aliens, starships, and Jesuits in space? You can have your science fiction cake and eat it, too.
The Sparrow raked in the rewards for Russell. It won the Best Novel Award from the British Science Fiction Association, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the gender-focused James Tiptree Jr. Award. She later won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, in 1998.
Dreamsnake (Cover image via Jo Fletcher Books)
17. Vonda N. McIntyre
Vonda N. McIntyre was only the fourth woman to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel (after two wins by Ursula K. Le Guin and one by Kate Wilhelm). That makes it all the more refreshing to think of the many female winners at the 2017 Hugos.
McIntyre’s win is thanks to her 1979 novel, Dreamsnake. It’s a tale that blends both science fiction and fantasy in a world set long after an apocalypse. It follows Snake, a young healer that travels through this hostile world. She can heal thanks to her snake companions and their painkilling, sedating and hallucinogenic venom. When her precious and incredibly rare dreamsnake, Grass, is accidentally killed, Snake is devastated. She sets out on a quest to redeem herself and find a replacement.
McIntyre has also established herself as a well-known Star Trek author. She’s written some of the more well-known books in the literary world of the series. These include The Entropy Effect, which gave both Hikaru Sulu and Nyota Uhura their canon first names. McIntyre also wrote the novelizations for the movies Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III, and Star Trek IV.
While taking part in a sci-fi convention panel, McIntyre became so annoyed with another panelist’s attitude towards sci-fi television that she invented a fictional show on the spot. She claimed that this amazing (and thoroughly nonexistent) series, Starfarers, was only so little-known because of network scheduling woes. Upon reflection, McIntyre liked her made-up television show so much that she decided to turn it into a four-novel series.
The Long Tomorrow (Cover image via Phoenix Pick)
16. Leigh Brackett
When you get to the point where your peers refer to you as the “Queen of the Space Opera”, you must be doing pretty well. Sure, a few rather snooty people sometimes meant it as an insult, but that just means they can’t have fun.
Leigh Brackett certainly didn’t get to that point by being a slouch. She published her first short story in 1940, in Astounding Science Fiction. Thereafter, Brackett continued writing, publishing, and editing until her death in 1978. She was especially devoted to a sub-genre known as “science fantasy”, which blends elements of both science fiction and fantasy.
Brackett certainly didn’t get paid well or received much acclaim for that focus, but it was clearly one near and dear to her. According to one anecdote, when an aunt asked why Brackett didn’t simply write something nice for the Ladies’ Home Journal, Brackett replied: “I wish I could, because they pay very well, but I can’t read the Ladies’ Home Journal, and I’m sure I couldn’t write for it”. There’s something to be said for sticking to your convictions, at least.
Brackett’s work on film
Not only did she dominate in the often hostile male-centric world of sci-fi, but she was also a renowned screenwriter. Along with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, she wrote the 1946 screenplay for The Big Sleep. She also co-wrote the script for Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1967) and The Long Goodbye (1973).
For all of the work, she may be best known for her role in writing an early script for 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. Though George Lucas later said that her first draft wasn’t quite what he wanted, you can argue that many of her story beats are what helped to make the second Star Wars film great. Though she died of cancer before she could complete rewrites or even see the finished film, her legacy remains alive today.
15. Marge Piercy
If you haven’t noticed by now, then it bears stating that genre is something of a false demarcation. Yes, sometimes it’s helpful from an organizational perspective, but it rarely goes beyond that. Perhaps readers, writers, and editors get a little too caught up in artificially-imposed elements of a genre, whether it’s the twee elements of a certain kind of romance or the tech-focused oddness of science fiction. Some of the best work in a given genre buck trends and turn a blind eye to the borders around their lands.
Marge Piercy is one of those writers who doesn’t appear to care especially for genre conventions. At any rate, her life speaks to the wide range of interests and causes that have shaped her. As the first person in her family to attend college, Piercy went on to earn an MA from Northwestern, all while becoming involved as an organizer for Marxist political movements and environmental causes. On top of that, she’s also an awarded novelist and poet.
Piercy’s political focus also frequently ties in with her feminism, both of which figure greatly into her fictional work. In Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), protagonist Connie deals with the dystopia of her present world, where she is unfairly committed to a mental institution against her will. However, because of Connie’s unique empathy and mental abilities, she can communicate with Luciente, who hails from the year 2137.
Luciente’s world sounds a fair sight better than Connie’s, considering her society has properly addressed issues like homelessness, sexism, racial inequality, classism, food insecurity and more. This inspires Connie to enact a revolution in her own time and bring about the accessible utopia of Luciente’s time, tying in neatly with Piercy’s Marxist and feminist ideals.
14. Charlie Jane Anders
Maybe it’s a little unfair to call a newer author a “master” of science fiction… except Charlie Jane Anders is seriously that good. No matter that her (so far) best novel, All the Birds in the Sky, was published in 2016. A quick side note for the skeptical, however: it did indeed win Best Novel at the 2017 Hugo Awards.
Anders published her first novel, Choir Boy, in 2005. Over her writing career, she’s also released over 100 short stories and made a name for herself as editor-in-chief of popular sci-fi website io9. Even more important than that, her work is in many ways forging a new path ahead for science fiction.
The genre-crossing All the Birds in the Sky follows Patricia and Laurence, a witch and a nonconformist inventor geek, respectively. In this near future time, the pair meet after each being ostracized at their school. All of this takes place in a world that is experiencing the “Unraveling” — a series of catastrophes, from massive storms to human-caused wars — that threatens to tear the Earth apart.
Patricia is accused of being a witch and subsequently runs away. She’s quickly found by her fellow witches and enrolled in a magical school. Laurence, meanwhile, is enrolled in and then escapes a military reform school. The pair meet a decade later and must learn to combine their abilities in order to prevent the Unraveling and the subsequent end of their species.
Ancillary Justice (Cover image via Orbit)
13. Ann Leckie
Women and non-gender-conforming people have perhaps more of a stake in issues of gender and sexuality, compared to men. After all, when you’ve got the short end of the stick, it often behooves you to examine it closely. How else can you escape a bad situation but study it?
At any rate, it’s a central tenet of science fiction to question some of your most basic assumptions. For example, who says that computers can’t become sentient, or that life couldn’t have arisen on another planet? Why not imagine that humans could escape their prison of Earth and make new lives on new worlds? In the face of giant, consciousness-shaking questions like those, it seems strange to get so worked up over someone’s gender or gender expression.
This isn’t to say that explorations of gender and science fiction don’t play well together. Look at Ann Leckie’s masterful debut novel, Ancillary Justice (2013). In this universe, thousands of years in the future, an intelligent AI called Breq must investigate the disappearance of an imperial starship, forming the basis for the first novel’s plot.
The importance of pronouns and language
While Ancillary Justice and its follow-up novels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, are compelling space operas, Leckie earns her spot on this list through her attention to gender. See, the people of the Radch empire do not distinguish one another by gender. Breq reverts to simply using the female pronoun for everyone, regardless of their biology or presentation.
It’s a brilliant move. For instance, while reading, you might sometimes be surprised to learn that a character is biologically male. Indeed, you might be forgiven if you at first think that everyone involved is biologically, culturally and personally female. And why shouldn’t “female” be a default, anyway? Think back on all of the literary presumptions of our own human cultures, which have historically assumed “male” to be the default when talking about groups or unknown individuals. With a relatively simple turn, Leckie opens up an entire universe of possibility and philosophical musing.
12. Kate Wilhelm
Kate Wilhelm may not have initially seemed like a budding science fiction writer. Born in 1928 in Toledo, Ohio, she first embarked on a series of jobs as a switchboard operator, sales clerk, and underwriter for an insurance company. When she first married in 1947, it may have seemed even to her (or at least the people around her) that Kate was destined to be another housewife and mother.
No disrespect to the hard work of parenting, but Kate Wilhelm clearly had a different plan. She first published a short story, “The Pint-Size Genie,” in the October 1956 issue of Fantastic. Since then, she’s published work in other major sci-fi magazines, including Locus, Amazing Stories, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Along with her second husband, Wilhelm helped establish the Clarion Writers Workshop and the Milford Writer’s Workshop, both major incubators for sci-fi writers.
As her career progressed, Wilhelm also began to write a mystery and thriller novels, including standalone books and long-running series. However, we’re here to focus on her science fiction work, including her Locus Award-winning 1977 novel, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.
How to survive the end of the world
Like so many sci-fi novels, this one begins with a post-apocalyptic setting. Pollution and environmental collapse have crippled humanity. However, survivors of the ongoing disasters soon learn that most, if not all, people are now infertile. One family resorts to cloning, in the hopes that future generations will be able to return to more traditional reproduction.
That would be all well and good if the clones themselves didn’t have other ideas. They’re not really into the idea of sexual reproduction and would much rather continue cloning one another.
Eventually, the clones begin to take over. They soon learn that groups of similarly cloned people are highly empathetic towards one another. If one is separated from their group for too long, they begin to experience intense psychological distress.
One clone, however, accidentally bucks this trend. Molly is separated from her clone-sisters while on a scavenging expedition. She learns to live as an individual but is kept apart from the rest of society for fear of her dangerous new ideas. When she conceives a child in the “traditional” way, she becomes even more of a divisive figure.
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang remains a fascinating take on gender and reproduction in a genre that, until recently, tended to ignore the subject.
The Gate to Womens Country (Cover image via Tor Books)
11. Sheri S. Tepper
Unlike other writers, Sheri S. Tepper began publishing her work fairly late in life. Her first novel came out when she was 54, in fact, though she had sporadically written poetry and children’s stories earlier. Before that, she had a life that included being a single mother of two and more than 20 years working for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (where she eventually became its executive director). It was only in retirement that she began her career as a novelist.
But previous life experience isn’t wasted or useless when someone switches careers. It certainly wasn’t for Tepper, who channeled her feminist ideals and strong environmental advocacy into her work.
Over her lifetime, Tepper published nearly 40 sci-fi and fantasy books, along with numerous short stories, poems, and other works. She might be best known for The Gate to Women’s Country, a standalone novel published in 1988. At the very least, it may be her most notorious, depending on who you ask. It focuses on a society of women who live in enclaves and interact with ultra-patriarchal groups of men living beyond their city walls. It’s later revealed that the women are enacting a kind of eugenics program. Sending warlike men to fight with other groups of men does tend to thin the numbers.
Few would have called Tepper’s work subtle, exactly. Take 1989’s Grass, the first book in a trilogy that sometimes feels like it’s hitting you over the head with an ecological message. But for all the obviousness that pops up in her work, the energy and conviction of Tepper’s writing is something to behold.
10. Madeleine L’Engle
If you’re an English-speaking kid of a certain age, then chances are good that you’ve encountered A Wrinkle in Time, the first book in the Time Quintet series. Even if you somehow managed to skip that experience, the impending release of the 2018 film adaptation of the book will put it on your radar soon.
Of course, you can’t fairly reduce author Madeleine L’Engle to a single book of hers. Neither is it entirely fair to call her a “fantasy” author. It’s not just that the books in the Time Quintet throw out scientific terms like “tesseract” or introduce characters like a brilliant family of scientists and heavy thinkers. L’Engle’s work also frequently qualifies to be “science fiction” thanks in large part to her willingness to put out grand ideas on a universal scale. Sure, there aren’t spaceships, exactly, but you’ll hardly notice between the alien planets and powerful cosmic beings.
L’Engle was another author whose personal religious views found their way into her writing. In particular, she was an Episcopalian who believed in universal salvation, essentially a doctrine positing that everyone will be saved regardless of what they did or believed in their mortal lives. Some of these views made their way into her works, though thankfully it’s subtle than something C.S. Lewis would have written for kids.
As you may guess, universal salvation is a contentious stance to take. It led to her works being banned from Christian schools and stores, while other critics thought she had injected too many of her religious views into an ostensibly secular work. Regardless of where you think you might fall, check out A Wrinkle in Time if nothing else. L’Engle has made her way into the young adult and science fiction canons for good reason.
9. Connie Willis
While the whole concept of creative arts awards and their attendant banquets and broadcasts is pretty suspect, when someone wins a whole bunch, it’s worth taking notice. Take Connie Willis. She’s won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards, more than any other writer. After a while, you sense that she’s the Meryl Streep of science fiction authors. Anyway, though there are sure to be many fine writers who escape notice each year, there’s something about Willis’ work that is consistently arresting.
Willis is also set to surprise you. Some of her work is funny, gentle and other life-affirming. Some, such as the short story “Blued Moon” and her novel To Say Nothing of the Dog are outright comedies.
Others, like her novel Doomsday Book, are fully tragic. Think about it: time travel is full of the potential for heartbreak. A time traveler might go back in time to save someone or avert disaster, only to fail. They might cause something worse to happen, or return to a world so utterly changed that their victory becomes hollow. Time is constantly moving and changing. As the living beings stuck in its grip, we are nothing more than ephemeral consciousnesses.
The problem with time travel
Certainly, that’s the case in Willis’ fictional world of Oxford, where scientists have invented true back-and-forth time travel. Historians have a field day with the technology, naturally. Of course, like any new development, there are some kinks to iron out and the inevitable chance of mistakes and misfortune.
In Doomsday Book, protagonist and medieval historian Kivrin is accidentally sent back to plague-ridden England, rather than a less diseased time period. A modern-day influenza epidemic in Oxford makes it all the more difficult for scientists to bring her back. In “Fire Watch”, another historian must think on his feet when he finds himself in The Blitz. Instead of studying kings and lords, he must avoid German bombs and evade detection.
Considering all that tragedy, maybe it’s best to test the waters with one of Willis’ more light works. Still, if you do decide to delve into Doomsday Book or the like, you’ll be presented with some truly masterful writing and sci-fi.
8. Andre Norton
It’s a common if an uncomfortable fact of creative work that some women have felt the pressure to conceal their gender. They choose gender neutral or masculine names to hide the fact that they are women. For some, it’s a way of avoiding discrimination and harassment. For others, it’s a way to boost sales and access markets that would be otherwise closed to them.
That was at least part of the case for Andre Norton, born Alice Mary Norton in Cleveland, Ohio. Born in 1912, Norton grew to maturity during the Great Depression. The economic disaster altered her plans to become a teacher and she eventually came to work for the Cleveland Library System. She continued to work there for 18 years, including a stint as a special librarian in the Library of Congress. Eventually, she was forced to retire from library work due to poor health.
That illness, however, paved the way for her career as a fiction writer. By the time of her retirement, she had already begun to write and publish some pieces. She had even legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton, taking on a pen name she had created to make her work more marketable to boys. She had been writing fantasy work, and publishers traditionally believed that girls and women wouldn’t touch the genre if given a chance.
Her work blended science fiction and fantasy and brought her recognition as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Her most longest-running series was Witch World, where protagonist Simon Tregarth is transported to a fantastical world where magic exists and powerful women fight against outside invaders.
7. Nnedi Okorafor
It’s a sad fact of science fiction history that the early and not-so-early years are practically devoid of people of color. That’s not to say that POC authors weren’t working in the genre, but that they did not receive the recognition that they deserved until shamefully late. Octavia E. Butler, who was often claimed as the first black sci-fi author to gain attention commensurate with her work, didn’t start receiving that attention until the 1970s.
Though modern science fiction still has quite a lot of work to do when it comes to recognizing POC authors, it’s a far sight better than the early days. Modern writers are now proving themselves to be formidable authors within the genre.
Take Nnedi Okorafor, for instance. After scoliosis surgery tanked her athletic career, Okorafor turned to writing and academia — as she mentioned on Twitter, she started writing in the hospital. However, she went on to graduate from the sci-fi Clarion Writers Workshop and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Now, she’s both a successful, sci-fi author and a full-time writing professor at SUNY Buffalo.
Though she gained attention and numerous awards for her short fiction and young adult books, Okorafor’s first adult novel has brought her even more attention. Who Fears Death was published in 2011 and subsequently won that year’s World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. It follows Onyesonwu (“Who Fears Death”) a girl born in a post-apocalyptic Africa with strange powers. Onyesonwu must learn how to harness her powers in order to stop the genocide of her people and bring peace to the land.
Ethan of Athos (Cover image via Baen Books)
6. Lois McMaster Bujold
We’ve actually discussed Lois McMaster Bujold’s work before, when we discussed gay characters in her 1986 novel, Ethan of Athos. As it turns out, Ethan of Athos is only one entry in Bujold’s massive oeuvre.
Bujold grew up under the shadow of her father, Robert Charles McMaster, a renowned engineer. She’s often speculated about being the child of a “great man”, though her work also reflects some of the technical aspects of her father and, eventually, brother’s engineering work.
Her science fiction career got off to, for the literary world, a decent start: her first novel was published after four rejections. To be fair, she had also written three novels by this point.
Bujold is best known for her sprawling Vorkosigan Saga, featuring protagonist Miles Vorkosigan. He lives about 1,000 years in the future and makes a living as a kind of interplanetary spy. He’s also a still-rare disabled sci-fi character. Essentially, a chemical attack on his pregnant mother leaves Miles with weak, easily broken bones and short stature.
Though his bones were exchanged for synthetic replacements in his twenties, Miles still has to deal with serious prejudice and discrimination. People around him mistake Miles for a mutant, a decidedly bad first impression, given historic prejudice against mutated people. Other books in the series feature the points of view of female protagonists, too.
Bujold has also written two other major series besides the Vorkosigan Saga: the Chalion Series and the Sharking Knife series. Both are fantasy series and thoroughly enjoyable. However, if you’re dead set on reading a science fiction series, you can’t really go wrong with the Vorkosigan Saga.
5. Nalo Hopkinson
How can you possibly sum up the beautiful, strange and wide-ranging work of an author like Nalo Hopkinson? You honestly can’t, or at least not for someone who has never read her work. Still, we can do our best to give you an introduction. However, it’s for you to experience her writing yourself.
Hopkinson’s work draws deep from her Caribbean heritage, as well as the region’s history, folkways, and languages. She’s written while holding a variety of jobs, from cultural research officer, grants administrator, and library worker. She is now a professor at UC Riverside, though that position appeared only after years of ill health and dire financial straits. Thankfully, Hopkinson is now able to teach and publish her speculative fiction.
While it’s difficult to pick just one book to start, you would do well to begin with her 2000 novel, Midnight Robber. The story is set in a far future world, where people can travel not only amongst the planets but between dimensions. Tan-Tan, a young girl, grows up in this environment, first on the planet Toussaint, and then its alternate dimension counterpart, New Half-Way Tree.
Along the way, she deals with serious issues such as adultery, abuse, and unwanted pregnancy. She also interacts with the Douen, a group of alien people and an information system that lives in your bloodstream and talks to you in your head via quasi-mystical nanotechnology by the name of “Granny Nanny.”
Cover of James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips (Cover image via St. Martins Press)
4. James Tiptree Jr.
Some authors choose pseudonyms and then stick to them when it is most convenient, and no more. Editors and publishers know the author’s true name and persona, while some savvy readers can discover the truth with little effort. Other authors, however, take concealment far more seriously. To discover their actual identities can take a monumental effort and would likely breach that writer’s sense of artistry and even personal safety.
Usually, it’s an investigation that’s best left undone. However, sometimes pen names are revealed in ways that are important and potentially ground shaking, depending on where you stand.
From 1967 to 1977, many assumed that James Tiptree Jr. was a man. There was no reason to believe otherwise, given the name and the domination of male authors in the science fiction genre. Sure, Tiptree never made any public appearance, but he regularly wrote with fans and authors.
In letters to fellow writers like Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin, he said that he was a man with strong feminist views. Hence, stories with strong feminist messages like in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” or “The Screwfly Solution” (the latter of which was adapted for the Masters of Horror series).
Who was James Tiptree Jr.?
All well and good, except James Tiptree Jr. was not real. Rather, “he” was the female-identifying author Alice Sheldon. Readers eventually tracked down biographical similarities between “Tiptree’s” life and Sheldon’s in 1977. In a letter to Ursula K. Le Guin, who had since become a friend, Sheldon said that:
"I never wrote you anything but the exact truth, there was no calculation or intent to deceive, other than the signature which over 8 years became just another nickname; everything else is just plain me. The thing is, I am a 61-year-old woman named Alice Sheldon."
Regardless of the drama over pen names, Tiptree/Sheldon’s work is notable for its feminism, far-future views, and dark themes. Reading her work is not often uplifting, but it is fascinating.
The Female Man (Cover image via Beacon Press)
3. Joanna Russ
If you’re interested in explicitly feminist and queer science fiction, then it would be difficult to go wrong by reading Joanna Russ. Her work was oftentimes strongly debated, given its robust themes and Russ’ propensity to confront some of the darkest parts of human behavior. Her novels and short stories are sure to make you face some of your own most troubling fears, too.
Russ was especially unique for her time and place. She first began to write in the 1950s, though her more outright feminist themes did not become clear until a decade later. That was also when Russ finally came out as a lesbian.
Her sexual orientation, along with her outspoken politics and views on gender, certainly did not make it easy for her to progress in the traditionally masculine realms of sci-fi and literary academia. Yet, she did well, taking on serious teaching positions and publishing a myriad of fiction and nonfiction works until her death in 2011. She was noted for the far-reaching, revolutionary nature of her work, and of the flashes of rage and harshness that moved through her characters.
The Female Man
Though Russ may not be immediately well known outside of sci-fi circles, we’ve actually talked about her work before: The Female Man. This 1975 novel focuses on four different women from separate realities.
Joanna, who lives in a reality similar to 1970s Earth, refers to herself as the “female man”, as she thinks that she must discard her femininity to succeed in a male-dominated world. However, she soon begins to rethink her position when she encounters the other three women, some of whom support a more militaristic reaction against the patriarchy.
If you’d like your introduction to Russ’ work to be a little pulpier, then check out The Adventures of Alyx. This short story collection features the eponymous Alyx, a time-traveling ancient woman who works as an assassin for some time. These stories still have Russ’ mark on them, especially with the angry, yet often realistic Alyx.
2. Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin may very well be one of the most intellectual writers in all of science fiction. That’s really saying something for a genre that frequently loves to ponder philosophical and moral issues for chapters at a time, if not for entire books and television shows.
Le Guin’s work is definitely of the “soft” sci-fi variety, with its focus on cultures and relationships between intelligent beings. She’s certainly qualified to do so. Her father was Alfred Kroeber, an esteemed American anthropologist who worked closely with the University of California, Berkeley and conducted research with the native peoples of the American West and Southwest. Her mother, Theodora, was also an accomplished social scientist and writer.
It’s easy enough to think that young Ursula, growing up around anthropologists and writers, was primed to create work that looked at human behavior with exquisite attention. That certainly seems to be the case when you read works like The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) or The Dispossessed (1974).
Sociology and anthropology aren’t the only themes in Le Guin’s writing, however. She also shows strong opinions on environmentalism, politics, gender, sexuality, and religion. In The Dispossessed, protagonist Shevek first lives on Anarres, a smaller planet in a double planetary system. Anarresti society is anarchist and generally egalitarian, a necessary development for the harsh planet on which it’s taken root.
However, Shevek, a brilliant mathematician, feels stifled by some of the tenets of his society. He essentially defects to Urras, the larger planet in the system. There, people work under a more familiar capitalistic and patriarchal societies. The tension between the two worlds and within Shevek himself forms the bulk of this thoughtful, arresting novel.
1. Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler was, in short, a revolutionary. However, she might not have described herself as such and might have preferred to get on with the work of writing and publishing. Still, her bibliography stands as some of the most striking and important work in the entire science fiction genre.
Butler recalled that she was only nine years old when she decided to become a science fiction writer, having decided that she could easily outwrite whoever had produced the script for the B-movie Devil Girl from Mars. That drive led to her becoming not just a major author, but the first prominent black female sci-fi writer and, so far, the only one to receive a MacArthur Fellowship (popularly called the “Genius Grant”).
Her earlier works include Patternmaster (1976) and Kindred (1979). The latter is a searing novel featuring Dana, a black woman who finds herself unwillingly pulled back from the modern day onto a 19th century Maryland plantation.
Xenogenesis
In the 1980s, Butler began publishing the Xenogenesis trilogy, now more often published as Lilith’s Brood. It follows what remains of humanity after a devastating nuclear war nearly kills our species. A few individuals are saved by the alien Oankali and revived after more than two centuries. However, their survival comes at a price: in order to continue the human species, they must merge with Oankali DNA.
Lilith, the protagonist of the first series book, Dawn, eventually agrees, though not without some serious soul-searching beforehand. However, the other humans in her group are far more hostile and provide significant resistance to the plan.
Next: 20 of the best LGBTQ works of science fiction
You may also want to read Parable of the Sower (1993). This is the first in a duology that focuses on Lauren Oya Olamina. Young Lauren becomes a religious figure, thanks to her hyper-empathy and the collapse of modern society. Her belief system, Earthseed, pushes humanity towards its ultimate destiny: interplanetary travel. Lauren and her fellow believers only have to force the human species into its “adulthood” amidst great pain and suffering.
Those are the 20 female masters of science fiction to read — but you might have a favorite, too. Post your recommendations below!