While one would think that worm riding chosen ones, planet hopping astronauts, or stargazing astronomers would be composed of all genders, much of the sci-fi canon is about a small subsection of the human genome: a bunch of guys. Looking for sci-fi novels with female protagonists that give the boys a run for their rocket fuel? While sci-fi books with female leads are as significant, and often unfortunately as rare as the next big deep space discovery, these 10 books orbit around women who are quasar bright, neutron star tough, and radiate with the glory of a thousand suns.
Gideon The Ninth
Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon The Ninth is a necromantic space goth opera about lesbians and murder mysteries- what more could you need? Set in a Dune-like star system ruled by nine houses that compete for the favor of an immortal Emperor, the novel orbits around a wise-crackin’, sword-swinging, mystery solving warrior named Gideon. Gideon is indentured to the shadowy Ninth House, and serves its Hot Topic-stylish heir Harrowhark Nonagesimus, an equally tough cookie with a penchant for skeleton-making magic. While the two begin the novel hating one another’s guts, they grow together after being chosen to take part in a series of necromantic trials to ascend to undead godhood in the Emperor’s service. Nearly being murdered by gigantic flesh/bone constructs made by long dead space wizards really has a way of bringing two people together.
Binti
Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti is the story of a young woman going through a youth rite of passage: college. Unlike your boring, earthbound alma mater, hers is located on the other side of the Galaxy! In order to make to Oomza University, Binti hitches a ride on a transport ship headed for school – only for her academic hopes to be derailed by an alien attack. The vessel comes under fire from the Meduse, a species of jellyfish horrors straight out of a Lovecraftian nightmare. While Binti first learns to fear the the invaders, she begins to understand them after striking up a relationship (platonic, for all the reasons) with a Meduse that opens her eyes to hidden truth and understanding. Much like many of the native tribes of the world were wronged by colonial artifact theft under the academic guise of “anthropology”, Binti discovers that the human beings of the future haven’t changed much. They still steal stuff, this time from aliens, and Binti has to convince mankind to give back what it took
Escaping Exodus
Nicky Drayden’s Escaping Exodus is the story of a young woman with a lot on her plate. Seske Kaleigh has been served a heaping helping of responsibility after being informed that she’s going to inherit command of a city sized starship… that just so happens to be located in the belly of a beast. That’s not a metaphor, Seske’s metropolitan home is literally located within the hollowed out bowels of a gargantuan space monster, whose bodily functions are used to power the city’s life support functions. While humanity has always had a morally complicated relationship with that civilizational pillar that is animal husbandry, the ethical ambiguity has now reached orbital heights. Despite society’s best attempts to convince her otherwise, Binti has reason to believe that her animal home is not only suffering due to its human parasites, but potentially aware of that suffering with a sentience previously unrecognized. It’s not just a big dumb space cow, it’s a big SMART space cow with a human-caused tummy ache, and Seske is the protagonistic Pepto-Bismol this beast desperately needs.
Kindred
Octavia Butler’s Kindred is the story of a modern Black woman named Dana who is inexplicably ripped away from her California home, thrown through time into the bleakest days of American history. Dana returns to reality in antebellum Maryland, where she is accosted by a plantation owner living in the area. While Dana’s first trip into the terrible days of yesteryear is over nearly as quickly as it began, she’s horrified to discover that her journey is far from over. As the novel progresses, Dana is dragged back to the past for increasingly periods of time, and learns more about the plantation’s sordid history – including how it overlaps with her own ancestry.
Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation takes a page out of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out Of Space to dig deep into a narrative about ecological horror. Like some kind of bizarre fungus that you wouldn’t wanna find on the bottom of your foot, an ecological anomaly is spreading across an undisclosed stretch of the world’s wilderness – and the top secret Southern Reach facility tasked with containing it failing spectacularity. How does Southern Reach combat the ecological menace? Like any scientist would – by throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. The “stuff” in question are teams of highly trained personnel – who have a habit of coming back across the anomaly’s border irrevocably changed, if at all. The newest team of unfortunates are a group of women of different academic skillsets, tasked with uncovering the truth of the encroaching anomaly. Alas, the only thing that they’ll unearth in this strange new land is madness.
The Book of The Unnamed Midwife
After a plague decimates the human population and makes childbirth nearly impossible to survive, a titular birth-assister has come to deliver some hope, no pun intended. Meg Elison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife centers around healer who wanders broken world dressed as a man in order to remain safe from those who her as a commodity. Lucky for the broken world, the midwife lends her medical talents to anyone in need – particularly the few surviving women struggling with now almost always fatal pregnancies. It’s essentially Children of Men but doesn’t center around a sadsack bureaucrat guy with zero useful skills, rather a medically trained tough cookie with the healing experience this sick world so desperately needs.
A Memory Called Empire
Diplomacy… IN SPACE! A Memory Called Empire Arkady Martine is the story of Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, a representative of a small mining station tasked to schmooze with an interplanetary empire. The shmoozin’ don’t come easy, as the aggressively expanding Teixcalaan empire has little time to waste on a newcomer from some random spacerock. In order to gain some intellectual purchase on a culture so alien from her own, Mahit strikes up a diplomatic relationship with a local government official, which soon expands into a romantic relationship as the novel progresses *gasp* political scandal! It’s a story of two women bringing space-nations together under the light of understanding, a light that goes from white dwarf dim to quasar bright by story’s end.
The Fifth Season
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jamison is a sci-fi/fantasy epic about one very angry planet. A planet so angry, that every century or so, it decides to ecologically punch itself in the face with a series of cataclysmic climate disasters known as fifth seasons. And yet, the latest fifth season was spurred on not by an atmospheric anomaly, but by a human one. The supercontinent called The Stillness is populated by an energy manipulating minority called orogenes, who are hated and feared by the rest of society for their supernatural abilities. After a particularly powerful oregene chefs up a particularly spicy fifth season that The Stillness is forced to swallow, the novel follows three orogene women experiencing the symptoms resulting societal indigestion. Ancient technologies and equally old magic combine to make a stunning, female focused sci-fi epic that will go down easy for any reader.
An Unkindness of Ghosts
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon is the story of Aster, an ostracized passenger on the HSS Matilda – generation ship deeply divided by racial lines. Confined to the lower decks due to her dark skin, Aster attempts to serve her futuristically antebellum society by healing those it most oppresses. After the Matilda is rocked by the unexpected death of its ruler – an authoritarian who promised to deliver humanity to a, well, Promised Land – Aster uses the resulting social unrest to spark the seeds of a civil war. You know what they say, history repeats itself, and Aster and her ilk strive to be on the right side of it.
This Is How You Lose The Time War
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an enemies to lovers epic about time traveling sapphics on opposite sides of a temporal war. Red and Blue are agents of two belligerent factions, tasked to vault through history in order to secure future victory for their respective side. As the pair continually thwart one another’s strategic plans, they begin a sort of correspondence. It starts with taunts, then evolves into to casual conversation, and then blooms an epistolary romance that burns brighter than J0529-4351: brightest single quasar ever to be observed in the universe, 500 trillion times more luminous than the sun. Nothing but a wet match in a dark cave when compared to the radiance of time traveling lesbian love.
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