Best Sci-Fi Books for Women: Top 20 classic and current must-reads

By Zoe Assaf

Maybe it’s because I was destined from a young age to become a scientist, or maybe it’s that I was raised on my dad’s 16mm B-movies (giant monsters and mad scientists!), but I’ve been addicted to sci-fi/fantasy/horror since my preteen years. Whether it’s space opera, ghost stories, epic or trashy fantasy, I enjoy it all :) Lately I’ve been drawn to female and feminist authors, so here’s a list of my favorites. It includes classics and new works, with an emphasis on diverse genres in speculative fiction — enjoy!

Badass books from the last 20 years:

1. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003, biopunk) — One of my favorite dystopian novels. It is told by the last human being on a post-apocalyptic earth, recounting the story of a love-triangle and how runaway corporate genetic/ecological engineering destroyed humanity!

2. Fifth Season by NK Jemisin (2015, fantasy) — The novel takes place on an alternate earth in which extreme seismic events can hurl the planet into a ‘fifth’ season of catastrophic climate change. ‘Orogenes’ are a race of humans that harness geological power, and have been subjugated into a slave class by a cruel society. The story follows a woman who must hide her power while she pursues her kidnapped daughter during the start of an epic fifth season.

3. The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley (2017, space opera with horror elements) — This book takes place in a fleet of decaying organic world ships populated entirely by females who can give birth to materials needed for the ship’s ecosystem and function. The problem is that the fleet is dying, and the narrator Zan has perpetual amnesia caused by her failed attempts to board a ship containing the key to rescue. She gets banished to the bottom of a world ship, and in a sequence reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno has to travel through the different disturbing levels of the ship in order to save herself and the fleet!

4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2013, space opera) — The immediate mind-bending component of this work is that while the society has biological genders (male/female), the language of the society (and the book) does not. Everyone is referred to with the same pronoun, and it happens to be ‘she’ instead of ‘he’. The actual story is great too, taking place thousands of years in the future when an expansionist empire uses artificial intelligence (AIs) to control human bodies. The main character is a vengeful AI, who used to be a many-bodied human/ship entity and due to treachery was destroyed and is now just a single human body. She is on a mission to solve the mystery of her destruction and kill the one responsible.

5. & 6. Jacqueline Carey — I had trouble choosing between two of her books: Kushiel’s Dart (2001, fantasy/romance) and Banewreaker (2004, high fantasy).

Kushiel’s Dart is the more popular and addicting read — it has awesome political intrigue and espionage, with the added bonus of a sexy society (‘Love as thou wilt’ is dogma). The narrator, born into the life of a courtesan, also has a kinky twist that makes her an ideal spy.

Banewreaker is quite different — written with lush prose in an homage to Tolkein, it deconstructs LoTR-era myths of simple good and evil into an ambiguous gray area, and you end up loving both the heroes and demons.

7. City Of Brass by SA Chakraborty (2017, fantasy) — In a genre awash in wizards and Christian occult, it’s refreshing to read a book with a different magical heritage. The setting is 18th Century Cairo and the protagonist is Nahri, a con woman who takes pleasure in cheating Ottoman nobles. Then during one of her cons she accidentally summons a djinn warrior to her side and suddenly the two of them are forced to flee Cairo for their lives, taking the reader with them on a magical Middle Eastern odyssey to the City of Brass.

8. All Systems Red by Martha Wells (2017, sci-fi) — Winner of a Hugo, Nebula, *and* Locus, this addicting and playful novella follows a self-aware security android (‘murderbot’) who just wants to be left alone to watch soap operas but is instead stuck in the middle of a corporate space mining mishap.

Badass classics still worth reading:

9. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959, gothic horror) — This incredibly written book takes you into the story of a mousy, repressed young woman named Eleanor who, looking for an escape from her tedious life, volunteers to spend the summer in a haunted house with other curious individuals. Unfortunately for Eleanor the house takes a liking to her, and she identifies too strongly with the old home — it does not intend to let her escape with her sanity without a fight.

10. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Leguin (1969, space/culture sci-fi) — When this cerebral sci-fi classic came out it arguably launched the feminist sci-fi genre with its depictions of an ambisexual race on the planet Winter. The book builds a richly detailed world as it follows Genly Ai, an emissary sent to Winter to convince its inhabitants to join an intergalactic union. But Genly Ai is stymied by his inability to comprehend the culture, including his incessant labeling of the gender fluid locals into a binary male/female system. This novel is sci-fi at its best, a thought experiment deeply considered and expertly articulated.

11. Dawn by Octavia Butler (1987, sci-fi) The protagonist Lilith Iyapo wakes up in a spaceship full of creepy tentacled creatures who have saved planet Earth from imminent human destruction. They’ve also saved a few humans, and are willing to put them back on the restored planet, providing they promise to behave. Lilith doesn’t know whether she should fight them or trust them, and neither does the reader. Butler was the first sci-fi writer to win a MacArthur Genius Grant (along with Hugo and Nebula awards), so if you like this book then she has many more books to keep you busy reading.

12. Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice (1976, vampire horror) — This classic played a huge role in popularizing the sympathetic and sexy vampire, and in high school I devoured its drama. It is the story of Louis, a lonely and guilt-ridden man turned vampire against his will by the seductive Lestat, and the story of Claudia who is trapped in the body of a child for eternity (a character based on Anne Rice’s daughter who died at a young age). Addictive books do risk becoming dated as the decades go by, so you might need to be a bit patient with the slower pace relative to current vampire novels. But given the impact it’s had on the genre and the lush hypnotic prose, it’s definitely worth diving into.

13. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (1982, fantasy) — Before Wicked (a novel and now famous Broadway musical) there was Mists of Avalon, an addicting retelling of the legend of King Arthur from the perspective of a powerful female character. While King Arthur storylines usually have an evil seductress trope in Morgan le Fay, Mists of Avalon instead has Morgaine — a princess trying to save her Celtic pagan culture from being devoured by Christianity. It’s beautifully written and heart breaking, and well worth the read.

Runners Up

More favorites or books on my to-read list, ordered by year.

14. Autonomous by Annalee Newitz (2017, cyberpunk) — Famed author of Snow Crash Neal Stephenson says, “Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet.”

15. The Power by Naomi Alderman (2016, sci-fi/dystopia) — Everybody likes to imagine how much more peaceful and loving the world would be if it were run by women. But that’s sexist, isn’t it? Gender traits are socialized, not inherent. That’s the premise of this near-future dystopia where women gain physical superiority through rapid mutation and evolve to be just as corrupt, abusive, and power mad as men. Everybody who’s anybody loves this book — major news outlets named it one of the BEST of the year, it’s a favorite of Obama’s, and it’s recommended by reigning sci-fi queen Margaret Atwood.

16. Infomocracy by Malka Older (2016, cyberpunk) — A political thriller in a cyberpunk landscape. In the interests of my mental health, I may need to wait until after January 20, 2021 to read this story about an evil search engine monopoly that runs and ruins the world.

17. Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes (2014, urban horror). — A female detective finds a gruesome dead body: half human and half deer. As she finds more dead hybrids and tries to solve the mystery of who or what is creating and killing them, we come to care about a cast of other interesting characters including her reckless teenage daughter, a reporter after the story, and the father of a homeless family living in danger on the streets. Modern and scary.

18. Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (2010, fantasy) — This book is optioned by HBO with George R.R. Martin signed on to produce, so I’m guessing there’s something compelling in the story of a half-breed child born of rape who is pissed off and has magic. This author also has other great books, including Lagoon and the Binti series.

19. Cordelia’s Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold (1986, sci-fi) — You could call this a space opera because it focuses more on the characters than the sci-fi setting. Cordelia is the captain of a ship when she’s taken prisoner by her future husband. After a mutiny in his military, they become partners just trying to survive. Although they start out as aristocrats, they wind up as outcasts worrying about their war-damaged and disabled son. This is the first of the spellbinding Vorkosigan series, and it won a Hugo. One of the pleasures of reading it is the protagonist is an experienced, 30-year-old woman, not an ingenue, making her capable of uttering insightful lines like “He was too young to realize there is death after life.”

20. The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey (1969, sci-fi) I first came to love this author when I was a pre-teen reading her Dragonrider of Pern series. Based on the success of Game of Thrones, I’m guessing the human desire to befriend and ride dragons is still alive and well. Cyborgs are another popular and long-lasting human fantasy. McCaffrey takes it to the next level with this book, the first of her Brain Ship series, in which the protagonist lost her body but her brain was saved and installed in a spaceship — the ultimate human/machine pairing.

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