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Old 05-05-2012, 01:48 AM   #29
Elfwreck
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"Sci-fi that appeals to women" is a drastically different category from "sci-fi that appeals to people who don't normally read sci-fi."

As a woman who grew up loving science fiction, I can't think of any I didn't like. Oh, there were occasional authors and certainly some individual books, but for the most part, I was happy to read anything with a "SCIENCE FICTION" label on the spine. The ones I didn't care for were matters of individual taste rather than genre conventions. I like military scifi, romantic scifi, alien anthropology stories (xenology stories?), short stories with moralistic overtones, high-tech retellings of fairy tales, cyberpunk, humans-vs-aliens struggles (regardless of the winner), post-apocalypse, dystopias, time travel, physics-puzzle stories, murder mysteries on space stations, Star Trek novels, golden-age adam-and-eve stories, and fake encyclopedia listings from a thousand years in the future. And I've suggested some of each of those to friends, including women, who also enjoy SF.

However, I wouldn't recommend all those to someone who doesn't normally care for science fiction, regardless of gender.

For a specific woman who hasn't read much SF but is willing to try some, I'd want to know her literary tastes--does she like romance? Try Bujold's Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Does she like horror? Ellison's Deathbird Stories might appeal. Reads fantasy normally? McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series are often considered fantasy, and might be a pleasant transition, possibly followed by her Ship Who Sang series. She watches soap operas diligently? Point her at Batman comics and fanfic; the Batfamily is possibly the most warped and dysfunctional family in modern science fiction.

... and so on. Women who like science fiction have been reading books written by & for men for a century or more. Aside from the obvious "find female authors because they are more likely to include details that men overlook" (like, the fact that women sometimes have conversations among themselves that aren't about men), there's not going to be a general list of "science fiction for women."
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