Science fiction that would appeal to women

[5thWiggle]

Why expect flack? My wife liked the Burroughs' Mars books as well. Now if you had professed a love of John Norman's Gor series...

Karma for mentioning the Girl Genius comic. Love it! Just waiting for my daughters to get a little bit older before introducing it to them.

[Quelle]

I will pass along as a suggestion my sister's favorite SF read: Conscience Place by Joyce Thompson.

[SchalaZeal]

Two simple words. Sirantha Jax. ^_^ The six-book series is written by Ann Aguirre, who's popular in urban fantasy and paranormal romance genres. Fabulous, highly accessible, complex but not overly complicated. I often say that Aguirre writes science fiction for those not used to reading science fiction. HIGHLY recommend this for your friend.

The Sirantha Jax series:

Grimspace
Wanderlust
Doubleblind
Killbox
Aftermath
Engame


A different suggestion:

If she's coming from literary fiction, then Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale is a classic and great place to start. Meaty, but not so deeply sci-fi that it would lose a reader not used to the genre.

And one more for kicks: The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
by Neal Stephenson. Because it has a female protagonist and tackles some fascinating issues. All while being entertaining.

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by SchalaZeal

Two simple words. Sirantha Jax. ^_^ The six-book series is written by Ann Aguirre, who's popular in urban fantasy and paranormal romance genres. Fabulous, highly accessible, complex but not overly complicated. I often say that Aguirre writes science fiction for those not used to reading science fiction. HIGHLY recommend this for your friend.

The Sirantha Jax series:

Grimspace
Wanderlust
Doubleblind
Killbox
Aftermath
Engame


A different suggestion:

If she's coming from literary fiction, then Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale is a classic and great place to start. Meaty, but not so deeply sci-fi that it would lose a reader not used to the genre.

And one more for kicks: The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
by Neal Stephenson. Because it has a female protagonist and tackles some fascinating issues. All while being entertaining.

I second the Margaret Atwood suggestion. I will also add "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood", also by Margaret Atwood, and perhaps even "The Blind Assassin" as well, which is not a sci-fi book by itself but contains a sci-fi story within a story, and is a pleasure to read.

[Joshua.P]

I would recommend just regular sci-fi. I don't think it's exactly gender specific, unless you're looking for romance or something.

[ApK]

Duplicate post.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Joshua.P

I would recommend just regular sci-fi. I don't think it's exactly gender specific, unless you're looking for romance or something.

So your response to:
"Recommend science fiction novels that would appeal to women/someone who doesn't normally read sci-fi."

is

"sci-fi"?

That may be technically accurate but it's not very helpful.
Do you perhaps work writing Microsoft knowledge-base articles?

I'm here all week.

I crack me up.

[MicheleA]

As a female reader, the disposable woman trope makes me grumpy, so I tend to steer away from books where it happens a little too often to shrug off. That's usually more of a problem in military sci-fi, and I don't read a lot in that subgenre.

Here's a list of sci-fi books I've read over the last year or so and liked:

* Elizabeth Bear's Jennny Casey Trilogy: Hammered, Scardown, Worldwired (cyberpunk; heroine is in her 50s)

* Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood (social sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, with 'helpful' aliens)

* Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Diving into the Wreck (sci-fi wreck exploring and salvaging, with a time warp subplot)

* Marianne de Pierres' Parrish Plessis series: Nylon Angel, Code Noir, Crash Deluxe (dystopian cyberpunk, quite dark)

* Chris Wooding's Tales of the Ketty Jay series: Retribution Falls, The Black Lung Captain, The Iron Jackal (lots of adventuring, also a little steampunk-ish)

* Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief (post-human themes, hard sci-fi)

* James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes (space opera, with a biotechno-thriller mystery)

* Philip Palmer's Debatable Space (space opera; readers seem to either love it or hate it)

* Paul McAuley's Cowboy Angels (alternate universe shenanigans)

* Toby Frost's Chronicles of Isambard Smith Trilogy: Space Captain Smith, God Emperor of Didcot, Wrath of the Lemming Men (humor, parody of numerous beloved sci-fi movies, books, etc.)

And, despite being grumpy over the disposable woman thing, I have enjoyed David Gunn's Death's Head series (Death's Head, Death's Head: Maximum Offense, Death's Head: Day of the Damned.) They're really violent, though, and that might be a turn-off for some female readers.

[cpegg]

Originally Posted by charlesatan

What are the elements do you think would appeal to women SF readers? And how are they different from men (if any)?

Here's another woman who loves science fiction, and with a preference for hard SF at that. I suppose that a general statement could be thus: sci-fi that appeals to me, as a woman, is sci-fi which doesn't contain female characters who make me roll my eyes or, worse, huff in disgust and delete the sample. (I've got a number of other filters that are probably unrelated to gender, but that could be considered a rough starting point.)

There are exceptions to the eye-roll test, if the rest of the book is appealing enough. A recent example would be Poul Anderson's Tau Zero. I'd not bothered to look at the publication date before starting to read, but after a chapter or two I couldn't help but check. I wasn't surprised to see that it was 1970.

[cpegg]

Originally Posted by LadyCygnus

So (sigh - I'm so going to get flack for this), I really liked A Princess of Mars by Burroughs and a bunch of his other books.

I wouldn't give someone flack over matters of taste, but isn't there rather a large jump between this...

The women in his novels are helpless damsels in distress who do just about nothing to help themselves

and this?

modern women who abhor the idea of a man being able to do something they can't

[morantis]

I am not a woman, lol, but I remember I was reading a series of sci-fi novels and the girl I was dating at the time jumped on them quickly and read the entire series. It is a seven book series by Piers Anthony called the "Incarnations of Immortality." Basically each book places a mortal into a "job" of running the universe. The first five books are the jobs of Death, Fate, Time, Nature and War, not in that order. Those were followed by Evil and Good. All seven books involve the same story line from a different perspective and tie together in the end.

[kennyc]

Just ran across this, kinda fun:

Plug in the text and it tries to determine the gender of the writer:

http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

Plugging in several samples of my work I'm predominately female.

[Joshua.P]

Originally Posted by ApK

So your response to:
"Recommend science fiction novels that would appeal to women/someone who doesn't normally read sci-fi."

is

"sci-fi"?

That may be technically accurate but it's not very helpful.
Do you perhaps work writing Microsoft knowledge-base articles?

I'm here all week.

I crack me up.

Well my opinion is that sci-fi isn't at all gender specific. So I think my response would be considered very helpful. I recommend anything by Isaac Asimov and the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Joshua.P

Well my opinion is that sci-fi isn't at all gender specific. So I think my response would be considered very helpful. I recommend anything by Isaac Asimov and the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.

Actually the Asimov suggestion is interesting, because when I hear:

"Recommend science fiction novels that would appeal to women/someone who doesn't normally read sci-fi"

my initial interpretation is "they tried Asimov (or Clarke or Heinlein, which in my mind all blur together as "traditional sci-fi") and didn't like it, so what else you got?"

And judging by the absence of recommendations of 'Foundation' and the like so far, I'm guessing others had a similar interpretation.

But now that you mention it, I realize that's not necessarily the situation.

So maybe we should have asked up front, why doesn't the person in question normally read sci-fi?

Do they hate science?
Did they see a Paul Verhoeven movie and fear all SF was like that?
Is there in fact some gender bias on her part?
What?

ApK

[HappyMartin]

I am not a women but I do carry a bag so on that basis

Somewhere back in the distant mists of this thread someone reccomended Turing Evolved. Found it free on Amazon and it hooked me completely. I should be getting more sleep but perhaps later.