[Salt-Man Z]

Given the current political climate, I have a made a resolution to purposefully read only female and/or minority authors for the rest of the year. I will likely continue into next year as well. So I'm looking for recommendations. Also curious if anyone else wants to join me in this endeavor.

Identifying female authors is relatively easy, and I've already got a shortlist of some ladies' works I need to get to:

Charlie Jane Anders: All the Birds in the Sky
Lisa Carey: The Stolen Child
Seanan McGuire: Every Heart a Doorway
C. J. Cherryh: Cloud's Rider
C. L. Moore
Andre Norton
Octavia Butler

Minority authors are a little harder to identify right off the bat, though...

Links to my library (on LibraryThing) are here, filtered to show only unread books:
physical books
e-books

[Salt-Man Z]

Down South, on 18 August 2017 - 08:42 PM, said:

Robin Hobb

Loved the Liveship Trilogy.

[Binder of Demons]

@ SMZ - You should check out THE COODE STREET PODCAST, as they have discussed this very topic in great detail over several episodes in the last year. And had interviews and discussions with female sic-fi and fantasy authors, as well as minorities. With a bit of picking and choosing, you could easily single out a few pertinent episodes.

As for your list, you already have Octavia Butler, who fits the female and minority description. Other ones which spring to mind (but I haven't read yet) are Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Nisi Shawl and Nnedi Okorafor

[Andorion]

Lots of female authors I can recommend:

Rachel Aaron - several very good series - Heartstrikers, Eli Monpress, also a sci fi series under the name Rachel Bach

Leigh Bardugo - Six of Crows

Elizabeth Bear

Amanda Downum - Drowned City

Kate Elliott - I know you have read a few of her books, but you really really need to read Black Wolves

Kate Griffin aka Catherine Webb aka Claire North - everything by North, and you must read the Matthew Swift books

Tanya Huff - I recommend the scifi, heard that her urban fantasy is very strange, but good

N K Jemisin is of course a must read

Rosemary Kirstein - try the Steerswoman books

Stina Leicht - Cold Iron - very promising

Naomi Novik - Napoleonic draconic warfare! Also Uprooted

Courtney Schafer - Shattered Sigil - Surprisingly good

Sherwood Smith -Inda

Natural History of Dragons

Michelle West

Janny Wurts

Also

KM MCkinley - Iron Ship.

Elizabeth Wein - Code Name Verity (not fantasy, but highly recommended)

Barbara Hambly

Becky Chambers

Lila Bowen

Jen Williams.


Afraid I can't help much with minority authors,

but check out:

The Devourers - Indra Das - have not read this, heard great things about it.

Saladin Ahmed

Samit Basu - a take on a Pratchettian world mixed with Indian myths.

[JPK]

Ando already posted most of the ones I'd suggest, but there are still two I can throw up for consideration.

Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel books are great if you're ok with sex scenes. Her Sundering duology is good as well, picture tLotR ad written by one of Sauron's Lieutenants.

Carol Berg! Her covers are terrible, but her stories are amazing. I suggest either her Rai-Kirah trilogy or Lighthouse Duology as good launch points.

[polishgenius]

Andorion, on 19 August 2017 - 01:33 AM, said:

Samit Basu - a take on a Pratchettian world mixed with Indian myths.

I tried that but didn't get too into it (now I can't finish it coz it's no longer available on Kobo). On the other hand, Turbulence and Resistance, his superhero books, are absolutely brilliant.


Nnedi Okorafor is a must-read, particularly Who Fears Death.


I've not read Octavia Butler (well, I started Kindred, but at the time I did I wasn't really in the mood for something as intense as it was proving- I'll get back to it), but she is a legend of the field.

Both Butler and Okorafor are obviously women but also minorities whose fiction is at least some of the time explicitly about that.

[Andorion]

polishgenius, on 19 August 2017 - 07:45 AM, said:

Andorion, on 19 August 2017 - 01:33 AM, said:

Samit Basu - a take on a Pratchettian world mixed with Indian myths.

I tried that but didn't get too into it (now I can't finish it coz it's no longer available on Kobo). On the other hand, Turbulence and Resistance, his superhero books, are absolutely brilliant.


Nnedi Okorafor is a must-read, particularly Who Fears Death.

Samit basu's books are available on Amazon, if that helps. I read them when they were only out in paperback.

Would you talk more about Okorafor?

[Puck]

If the minority authors don't also have to be female, check out Kai Ashante Wilson. The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps may be my favourote read of the year aside from the usual suspects.

Also, Aliette de Bodard is a female author of Vietnamese/French descent. Her Obsidian & Blood series is not everyone's thing, but I loved it, and she has a new one out I haven't read yet.

[Chance]

Lots of the above are good but Bodard and Claire North really are deserving of a second recommendation.

Here are some others.
C. J. Cherryh: Foreigner books are splendid.
CS Friedman both Coldfire and Magister are very nice.
Ann Leckie does a far better then average SF in Imperial Radch trilogy.
Steph Swainston is writing a fantastic weird fantasy series starting with The Year of Our War.

While thinking about this I started to realize that most of the female authors I would recommend write stuff a lot less orthodox and rarely anything I would recommend as entry material in either Fantasy or SF however good it is.

This post has been edited by Chance: 19 August 2017 - 11:53 AM

[Tiste Simeon]

Humble Bundle do periodic "10 books by awesome women for only £X" type deals keep your eyes open.

[polishgenius]

Andorion, on 19 August 2017 - 09:17 AM, said:

Samit basu's books are available on Amazon, if that helps. I read them when they were only out in paperback.

Would you talk more about Okorafor?

I don't do Amazon as a rule, but cheers.


Okorafor's Who Fears Death is a very weird, very angry post-apocalyptic Africa-set fairytale. It won't be for everyone because it deals openly and harshly with themes such as weaponised rape, genital mutilation, and genocide, but I found it to be utterly brilliant.

The Book of Phoenix is a sort-of prequel- that I don't think was initially conceived as a prequel and fixing its mythology to that of Who Fears Death hurts the themes of both books, but it is other than that a good novel too. More of an angrier X-Men vibe than the weirdness of Who Fears Death.

Lagoon is probably her most approachable (adult) work, a sort of magic/tech environmental-ish fable set in Nigeria.

[amphibian]

I spent about a year between 2015 and 2016 doing this exact women and minorities reading. It has been the most rewarding stretch of reading time I've ever had.

Many of the above recommendations are extremely good and changed me as a reader and a person.

I suggest Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History and Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem in addition to the others. You may also like Jhumpa Lahiri, Roxane Gay, and Charlotte Shane.

[Andorion]

polishgenius, on 20 August 2017 - 01:30 PM, said:

Andorion, on 19 August 2017 - 09:17 AM, said:

Samit basu's books are available on Amazon, if that helps. I read them when they were only out in paperback.

Would you talk more about Okorafor?

I don't do Amazon as a rule, but cheers.


Okorafor's Who Fears Death is a very weird, very angry post-apocalyptic Africa-set fairytale. It won't be for everyone because it deals openly and harshly with themes such as weaponised rape, genital mutilation, and genocide, but I found it to be utterly brilliant.

The Book of Phoenix is a sort-of prequel- that I don't think was initially conceived as a prequel and fixing its mythology to that of Who Fears Death hurts the themes of both books, but it is other than that a good novel too. More of an angrier X-Men vibe than the weirdness of Who Fears Death.

Lagoon is probably her most approachable (adult) work, a sort of magic/tech environmental-ish fable set in Nigeria.

Thanks. They sound very interesting, though not something I want to read right now. Having said that I will probably read Who Fears Death within the year.

[End of Disc One]

Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings is one of the best books I've read. Haven read book 2 yet or his short story collection The Paper Menagerie--which is on sale for Kindle right now.

[worry]

These aren't strict sci-fi/fantasy, sorry.

Toni Morrison - Beloved: kinda obvious I suppose, but for good reason. It's great. It pairs well with Butler's Kindred. A postbellum ghost story, heart-wrenching.

Sherman Alexie - Indian Killer: tensions rise in a city as a serial killer starts scalping white men.

Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine: this is one of those "short story cycle" novels where all the short stories are related, telling the story of a few interrelated Native American families over a few generations. A bit of magic realism.

If you don't mind throwing some "gay lit" into the mix:

Tom Spanbauer - The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon: one of my all-time favorite novels and authors. Mixed blood Native American kid works in an Old West brothel. There's more magic in this one than you'd get in something traditionally called 'magical realism', so I'm not sure how to genre-fy it. It's a Western of a sort too, but not like anything else in the genre.

Mark Merlis - An Arrow's Flight: tells the story of Achilles's son Pyrrhus/Neoptolemus except it blends the Trojan War era with the late 1970s and the start of the AIDS epidemic. Truly original.

[Binder of Demons]

For more female authors, in the sci-fi realm, you could try
LINDA NAGATA - Her early nano tech stuff was cool. THE BOHR MAKER was the first i think.

NANCY KRESS - Most famous for the Beggars in Spain/Beggars and Choosers novels

CONNIE WILLIS - I loved TO SAY NOTHING ABOUT THE DOG, and really enjoyed the DOOMSDAY BOOK, which both deal with time travel

JOAN D. VINGE - I really enjoyed her SNOW QUEEN series though it is years since I read them.

URSULA LE GUIN - You have THE EARTHSEA TRILOGY for fantasy, and several sci-fi books which deal with gender and society like THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

[RACHEL]

Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame trilogy has a kickass female bounty hunter and insect magic.

This post has been edited by RACHEL: 20 August 2017 - 11:06 PM

[LadyMTL]

Not necessarily fantasy but I'll suggest Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale is a good starting point, for obvious reasons, but her Oryx and Crake trilogy is some pretty decent post-apocalyptic stuff. Alias Grace is excellent too, a fictionalized account of a real-life murder that took place in Canada in the 1840's.

I also second the recommendation for Colleen McCullough, if you're into historical novels. The Masters of Rome series is brilliant.

This post has been edited by LadyMTL: 21 August 2017 - 11:58 AM

[Abyss]

Solid recos upthread.

I can add Celia /CS Friedman... her COLDFIRE trilo has timeless classic status in my eyes. I have pimped this series endlessly here and most (but not all) who read it enjoyed.

Despite the mess it became i still think that the first ten books of Laurell Hamlton's ANITA BLAKE series are pretty great. Interesting vamps and weres and other beasties, fun protagonist, utterly badass action scenes, cool magic... I just suggest stopping at OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY which is a perfectly acceptable endpoint that avoids the author's life-events-inspired swerve into bad supernatural pr0n and badder relationship issues.

If you're feeling seriously Olde Schoole, check out Andre Norton. She wrote some seminal sf back in the 50s+.

I recently read VE / Victoria Schwab's SHADES OF MAGIC trilo and utterly enjoyed it.

[Grief]

Not fantasy, but I highly recommend Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions.