[Nancy F Furner]

Varley writes women so well, I suspected that "John Varley" was a pseudonym for a woman writer for a long time. I was introduced to his work via an anthology of interconnected stories titled The Persistence of Vision. See also The Ophiuchi Hotline and Steel Beach.

Ursula K. LeGuin is a master who has authored some works now considered classics. I tend to think of her as a sociologist masquerading as a SF writer, but she's good, so who cares? A good work of hers to start with is The Left Hand of Darkness.

And long, long ago, I got hooked on SF as a teenager when I checked Andre Norton's novels out of the school library--now that was a pseudonym for a female author!