|
I am also a woman and I love science fiction including hard science fiction. What I don't like, though, are books where the characters are solely there to bring the ideas across.
Connie Willis has already been mentioned on this thread, and I heartily second this recommendation. Her stories tend to focus on characters, not ideas. My favorites are her Oxford time travel novels.
I can also recommend Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. It's technically science fiction in my opinion because of the time travel element, but there's no science in it, it's all about the characters dealing with the situation. And I think it wasn't marketed as science fiction, just like Margaret Atwood's books.
Another favorite of mine is Kage Baker's Company series, starting with In the Garden of Iden. It's mandatory to start with this one, I think. It has cyborgs and time travel, but whole stretches of it read like a historical novel.
I would also like to recommend Robert J. Sawyer's WWW trilogy, starting with Wake. It has some science in it, but it focuses on philosophical questions. Frameshift by the same author would be another recommendation. It's a science fiction/murder mystery crossover and also focuses on the characters rather than on ideas.
And for something entirely different: Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series. I know they were marketed as high fantasy, at least the first three or four, but they are definitely science fiction. They have great characters and not much science.
|