Wednesday Women Writers: year’s roundup

So yeah, I didn’t really keep up with this series, did I? But now that I finally remembered to do this on a Wednesday, I would like to look back on the past year and give a shout out to a few of the new female science fiction writers I first read this year. My science fiction reading has been majority female this year and I’ve set out to try and find more new female writers, if only to balance out my gender stats at LibraryThing. The results so far have been good; the occasional dud, but the majority of writers I tried, I liked.

The discovery of the year for me was Elizabeth Bear, who has been writing for a long time but who I only started reading this May. Everything I’ve read of her so far has been excellent and I especially liked Hammered and sequels, especially the humanity of its protagonist:

while the setting might be cyberpunk, Jenny Casey’s life lacks the glamour a heroine in a Gibson story would’ve had. Her metal arm suffers from phantom pains, fucks up her shoulder and back where it attaches to the rest of her and while her artificial eye is an advantage in a low light situation, it’s a pain most of the rest of the time. She has had to live with her cybernetic implants, not just the arm and eye but also the enhanced nervous system that can make her reaction speed inhumanly fast when needed, for some twentyfive years and now that she’s pushing fifty, she’s suffering for it.

Another veteran writer was Linda Nagata, whose Vast I’ve just reviewed. Brenda Cooper, who I only knew from a collaboration with Larry Niven is another one; her The Silver Ship and the Sea was another good read.

Of newer writers, Kameron Hurley impressed me even though God’s War had serious flaws. I still bought the sequels. Other new writers that impressed me were M. J. Locke, whose Up Against it was old fashioned hard science fiction and Ann Leckie, with Ancillary Justice, far future space opera.

Finally there was also Margaret Atwood, who’s not a science fiction writer, but could’ve fooled me with The Handmaid’s Tale, which was much better than I expected.

So that’s half a dozen new, impressive female sf writers found so far this year. Any suggestions for next year?