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Friday, September 15, 2006

Interesting List

List of books for feminist science fiction, fantasy

I had only read 5 from that long list:


Octavia Butler. Wild Seed.
Leonora Carrington. The Hearing Trumpet
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. "The Yellow Wallpaper"
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein
Sylvia Townsend Warner. Lolly Willowes, or, The Loving Huntsman (1925)

A number of the titles listed sounded quite interesting, a few were familiar, but most were absolutely new to me.

8 comments:

  1. I've read some Ursula K. Le Guin, but that's about it.
    There are quite a few female scifi authors that are on that list that I read though... just many, many more men. Not that men always write better scifi stories, but there's usually more action in them.. and less fluff.

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  2. Since I've read mostly male authors in this genre, I'm not qualified to say much about the female authors.

    Octavia Butler's Wild Seed I read years and years ago, but it made a deep impression. I thought it excellent.

    I remember very much liking the premise and the novel The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey and some of Sherri Tepper's novels.

    It really is a male dominated field, isn't it? At least, the most well-known names are male.

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  3. Another great female scifi author is Connie Willis. I've read Promised Land and Doomsday Book.. I loved both.
    I've also read a lot of S. L. Viehl, Star Doc series, etc. She's just too heavy on the medical jargon, as her background is in medicine.
    I've know of Anne McCaffrey, but I can't say I've ever read anything of hers.
    If we extend the genre of scifi to fantasy, there are definitely a lot more famous female authors!

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  4. The only thing I've read by Willis is To Say Nothing of the Dog - liked it a lot. I will be on the look out for the other two you mentioned.

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  5. I've never read Butler, and might give it a try one day -- she sounds interesting. Of your list, I know Gilman (calling her science fiction/fantasy seems a bit of a stretch -- I guess at the end of that story, there's some fantasy stuff going on) and Frankenstein. The Townsend Warner sounds interesting too.

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  6. Dorothy W. - Butler's Wild Seed had, at least at the time, a unique quality. It isn't typical science fiction fair; I enjoyed it very much.

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  7. Geeze, the only book on that whole list that I've read is "Frankenstein." There are also a few authors on there that I'm familiar with from having read other books of theirs, but not those exact books. I was surprised at that considering I've been a fan of the genre for 30 years! But as you say, it is a quite male-dominated area of fiction.

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  8. I'm a long time fan, too, Deb and had not realized that my reading had been of mostly male authors until looking at this list. There are some titles that I plan to look up and check out, though.

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