Harder sci fi from female authors?

[RX-79G]

Reflecting on the equitable and other recent threads, can anyone recommend some novels written by women that are less "soft" explorations of society, gender, etc and more space ships, big events or hard science?

Who would be a good equivalent to Banks, Reynolds, Corey, Niven or Hamilton?

 

[J-Sun]

Well, that's exactly the problem for me. It's hard to come up with many. For instance, Katherine MacLean is a writer who began in the 50s and published happily in Astounding and everywhere. Although "Missing Man" (the novella version of which won a Nebula and the fixup of which is almost good) is pretty psi and social, the stories collected in The Diploids are often very science-oriented.

Jeez. Almost forgot. James Tiptree, Jr. was often social/gender but she also drew on her lab experience and wrote some reasonably hard stuff, too. Again, whatever she was writing, she was one of the best although I like her later stuff less than her earlier.

Oh. Really almost forgot: C.J. Cherryh is often social but somehow not in the same way as many other "social" authors and she can also be quite hard. Gritty, realistic-seeming. Particularly in the Heavy Time/Hellburner duo.

For some irony, Pat Murphy actually co-writes the science articles in F&SF but usually writes more fantastic or fantasy stories with a gender component. But she can be pretty hard, as in her recent excellent story ("Cold Comfort") in the latest installment of Strahan's "Infinity" series. That was written with her science article co-writer. She's usually very good, whatever she's doing. I just wish she'd put more science into the fiction sometimes.

Other newer folks who are more sfnal include Nancy Kress and Linda Nagata. Nancy Kress was married to Charles Sheffield who was one of the better, harder SF writers. Whether that was an actual direct influence (Kress' earlier stuff was more fantasy or fantastic) she's written some harder stuff later. Linda Nagata has written some nanotech stuff and some military SF (not in the science fantasy space opera sense, but in the harder, nearer future sense). I have to confess though that their work (other than individual excellent short stories by each) hasn't appealed to me as much as, say, MacLean or Murphy or "softer" women, so to speak.

I'll see if I can't dredge up some more. But I await contributions to this thread eagerly. I'm always eager to try the good stuff, whoever's writing it.

Oh, and I've read good science fiction stories by J.M. Sidorova and Vina Jie-Min Prasad recently, but I don't think they have books out yet. And N.J. Schrock but I'm not sure if that's a man or woman [did some checking and Schrock is a woman]. Caroline Yoachim wrote a really good "gee whiz" kind of super-science tale but I don't think that's her usual forte. Seems like I've read a lot of other softer (often good) stuff by her. I don't know what any of these authors will end up focusing on.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Time for an obscure one.

Way back in 1974 and 1975 when I was regularly reading Analog, there was an author named Brenda Pearce who had a couple of very "hard" stories in the magazine. She actually got the cover art for both of her stories. As far as I can tell, these were her first publications (according to ISFDB.) Both "Hot Spot" and "Crazy Oil" impressed me as Hal Clement style, scientifically oriented stories of other planets in the solar system. (If memory serves, the first was on Mercury and the second on Venus.) As far as ISFDB knows, she then published one more story in an anthology of Campbell Award nominees (along with other newbies like John Varley,) a couple of novels in British hardcover only, then nothing else. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls her novels "routine but enjoyable space opera tales" with "technical and technological matters." Sounds "hard" to me. She is British, born in 1935, but I can find out nothing else about her life. I found one review of one of her novels and the writer says it is "hard SF, not space opera."

 

[RX-79G]

From what I recall and have read, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Pat Cadigan and Ann Leckie might also fit the bill.

 

[J-Sun]

From what I recall and have read, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Pat Cadigan and Ann Leckie might also fit the bill.

Yeah, Pat Cadigan is one of my favorites but I didn't think of her. Her novels tend to be cyberpunk/VR stuff which can often be taken for a form of hard SF but aren't so much, really. Her stories cover a very broad range but aren't usually anywhere near wiring diagrams, at least.

Based on Leckie's debut novel (only one I've read) I wouldn't say she would at all. (Not my bill, anyway.) She's all about "degendering" and social stuff in a New Wavy semi-space opera package.

Don't know Goonan well enough to say. She wrote the Queen City Jazz thing which is also a nanotech book? Might have either or both of that wrong. I've probably read at least a story or two, but can't recall anything.

Brenda Pearce

That is obscure. Thanks for the tease. Now I'm very interested but don't see how to scratch the itch without paying what's likely more than I want to on a flyer. Even the titles sound Clementy. He did write "Hot Planet."

 

[RX-79G]

You've got the right Goonen. I'll cross Leckie off the list. Thanks.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Do you have the courage to read Escape Plans by Gwyneth Jones?

 

[RX-79G]

Do you have the courage to read Escape Plans by Gwyneth Jones?

I've read White Queen. Is there some reason that Escape Plans requires courage?

Does an author known for "strong themes of gender and feminism" fit the bill?

Reflecting on the equitable and other recent threads, can anyone recommend some novels written by women that are less "soft" explorations of society, gender, etc and more space ships, big events or hard science?

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Escape Plans is a challenging read - but well worth it!

 

[J-Sun]

I couldn't find a good review (probably should have tried with more search engines) but I did find this. (Bold and underlines mine, of course.)

To VENTUR the Subs were a nuisance. The underworld's billions were fed and housed: under the stern but loving care of the great machine systems. True, they had to live in packed hives underground, to preserve the unique beauty of the only living world in the known universe. But their cultures were respected, their welfare was assured, and a minority even had meaningful work to do. There was no cause for complaint. Only the Subs, the "numbers" of the former Indian Sub-Continent, refused to be grateful and humble... ALIC was an innocent tourist, a retired games conceiver, drawn to the old home planet, and to the restive "Subcontinent" in the hopes of a little old-fashioned excitement. Then she met Millie, who invited her to play a game that would be like no other. And ALIC fell into the depths, into the churning, peopled void. Her whole existence became a frantic series of escape attempts; while around her a proud, ancient culture surged toward violent revolt against the all-powerful Space Habitats.​

Escape Plans (1986), was acclaimed and reviled at its first publication, as an uncompromising vision of a world where humans live in total fusion with the digital machinery. It has since been recognised as a significant and highly original feminist "Cyberpunk" work. For lovers of hard radical science fiction, this new e-edition offers a challenging read, full of dizzying speculation, that also packs a big emotional punch.
​

Sounds like a "feminist" talking about "culture" whose gimmick is "The Great Computer" and doesn't sound like "hard radical SF" to me. I have read some Jones stories and some were pretty good, though her Mars has ghosts and such like. She has appeared in space opera books, etc. And this might be excellent or interesting in general but it doesn't sound like it fits the bill for me.

(Again, just in case people come in mid-thread and misunderstand, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are from a "feminist" talking about "culture" and Pat Cadigan talks about "great machines" after a fashion (and takes a back seat to no man, either). This is a fine thing. It's just that I feel like RX (and certainly I) are looking for something else to add to those.)

 

[RX-79G]

I'm happy reading lots of different kinds of fiction, but since I suggested in the Equitable thread that perhaps women authors aren't actually writing much mainline sci fi, I thought I would try and find some to read. And if it proves difficult, it may reflect why there is disparity in female author SF publishing and sales.

I've read several opinion pieces on the subject, and there seem to be two somewhat polar viewpoints:
1. SF readers and publishers are arbitrarily and unfairly biased against women authors.
2. Traditional SF is a "male" product, and SF readers are cavemen who prefer soulless, mechanistic fiction to the (superior?) feminine exploration of gender and social issues through the transformation of the protagonist.

So, depending on who's perspective you take, either female authored SF is the same as male authored SF, or it is essentially a different genre. While neither is 100% true, I think that there must be some truth to the latter, because both people dismissive and complimentary of female authored voice in SF are essentially claiming the same thing, just with different opinions about their relative value to the genre.

(A separate question would be if the difference in focus between male and female SF authors is a choice or something innate to the cognitive differences between the genders. I don't think anyone could ever nail this down, but it is certainly possible that the different genders, on average, see the problems of change in different ways and are unlikely to approach SF story construction in the same way. Dunno.)

I recall a discussion with my father awhile back where he expressed his enjoyment of a lady authors book, an occurrence which he found to be slightly atypical to his experience. (Which wasn't as much a value statement as an expression of his taste.) I remember agreeing, but now neither of us can remember the book or author, just that it was the kind of SF we both tend to enjoy.

 

[Parson]

This is an intriguing line of discussion. Women are some of the very best S.F. authors. I love C.J. Cheeryh and Octavia Butler and no one could say that they were writing light weight novels. On the contrary both are heavy weights, and I often have to work hard to deal with nuances that they bring up in the writing. But neither of them would really fit the Hard S.F. label. Their books (at least the ones I've read) are more about societies than they are about technology or science. I'd throw our own Jo Zebedee in that same category. They all write books well worth reading and possibly life altering, but the science, technology and military tactics are not things that make them want to write, and so don't put as much work into those. IMHO

 

[RX-79G]

This is an intriguing line of discussion. Women are some of the very best S.F. authors. I love C.J. Cheeryh and Octavia Butler and no one could say that they were writing light weight novels. On the contrary both are heavy weights, and I often have to work hard to deal with nuances that they bring up in the writing. But neither of them would really fit the Hard S.F. label. Their books (at least the ones I've read) are more about societies than they are about technology or science. I'd throw our own Jo Zebedee in that same category. They all write books well worth reading and possibly life altering, but the science, technology and military tactics are not things that make them want to write, and so don't put as much work into those. IMHO

The "hard vs. soft" paradigm is fairly abused, but it really isn't about anything being "lightweight". Hard science SF could be viewed as both the opposite of "space adventure", pulp type stories, but it is also considered the natural science opposite of "soft science", which is what sociology, gender studies and psychology fall into.

SF can and does explore hard and soft sciences, and I am certainly not claiming that one has more value than the other. However, the market in total of all SF readers may prefer their SF to tend toward hard science or physical adventure in preference to soft science and character transformation.

 

[tinkerdan]

I think: this is all personal thought, with the understanding that I might have few who agree. Hard science fiction and a definition of what constitutes hard science fiction is at best a slippery beast. But aside from that, trying to determine a prejudice against any group using hard science fiction is too narrow a view.

When I look at the shelves of Science fiction in the bookstores I see very few I could call Hard Science fiction for any authors so I find it difficult to believe the search for Hard Science fiction drives the current market for science fiction.

 

[RX-79G]

I think: this is all personal thought, with the understanding that I might have few who agree. Hard science fiction and a definition of what constitutes hard science fiction is at best a slippery beast. But aside from that, trying to determine a prejudice against any group using hard science fiction is too narrow a view.

When I look at the shelves of Science fiction in the bookstores I see very few I could call Hard Science fiction for any authors so I find it difficult to believe the search for Hard Science fiction drives the current market for science fiction.

I don't think hard science fiction drives the SF market either. But I do think that the elements of an SF novel are the products of either hard sciences (biology, spaceship engineering), or soft sciences (single gender societies, politics), and that was the line I was trying to delineate.


I could even imagine that a "hard SF" book could be completely about a social subject, but would be written in a way that rigorously holds to well established academic theories on the subject, rather than simply the author's ideas about how people relate to each other. Depends if you are taking the fiction of hard science view, or the hard sciences, science fiction perspective. Both are valid.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

This is an intriguing line of discussion. Women are some of the very best S.F. authors. I love C.J. Cheeryh and Octavia Butler and no one could say that they were writing light weight novels. On the contrary both are heavy weights, and I often have to work hard to deal with nuances that they bring up in the writing. But neither of them would really fit the Hard S.F. label. Their books (at least the ones I've read) are more about societies than they are about technology or science. I'd throw our own Jo Zebedee in that same category. They all write books well worth reading and possibly life altering, but the science, technology and military tactics are not things that make them want to write, and so don't put as much work into those. IMHO

Guilty as charged. I was quite surprised when people first told the that they didn't feel I wrote battle scenes - because from my perspective, I absolutely do. It's just that I write it in the character's head and my focus might well be less on who shot who but why it matters. But I've never claimed to be anything other than a soft sf writer and often use the sf elements as the point of conflict rather than exploring them in their own right.

I think: this is all personal thought, with the understanding that I might have few who agree. Hard science fiction and a definition of what constitutes hard science fiction is at best a slippery beast. But aside from that, trying to determine a prejudice against any group using hard science fiction is too narrow a view.

When I look at the shelves of Science fiction in the bookstores I see very few I could call Hard Science fiction for any authors so I find it difficult to believe the search for Hard Science fiction drives the current market for science fiction.

I agree with this to a large part. True hard sf is a narrow range of books and authors. Most of them are male (I don't read hard sf so I am not up for giving reccommends but I'd have thought Pat Cadigan would certainly skirt the hard sf category). But then again, most sf authors seem to be male, so there's not a huge surpise there. But moving away from that devil's advocate argument D) I'd accept that women often write with a different focus and it might well be that tech is not where the bulk of women put their emphasis.

But, I don't see that as a bad thing. Because in terms of asking different questions - in the same way that, perhaps, male writers ask questions around tech - the genre expands. And some of the questions we women ask are challenging in their own way and may well fall under extended genre definitions of hard sf (so, for instance, hard sf is the exploration of science as we know it, in many definitions - why can the explanation of that science's impact on people (without an in depth exploration of the tech itself) not form part of the hard sf classification. Does it have to be about how the tech or projected real-future works - or how people respond and cope with it? If the latter, then, for sure, Atwood and Cadigan are in that umbrella - dealing with projected futures but dealing with them from the societal perspective. I'm not sure that has less validity for hard science than anything else has.)

 

[RX-79G]

But, I don't see that as a bad thing.

It's only a bad thing when you look at relative sales numbers.

 

[tinkerdan]

There is some truth to that; but mostly in the way that no two writers write quite the same because we all think differently.

This is an intriguing line of discussion. Women are some of the very best S.F. authors. I love C.J. Cheeryh and Octavia Butler and no one could say that they were writing light weight novels. On the contrary both are heavy weights, and I often have to work hard to deal with nuances that they bring up in the writing. But neither of them would really fit the Hard S.F. label. Their books (at least the ones I've read) are more about societies than they are about technology or science. I'd throw our own Jo Zebedee in that same category. They all write books well worth reading and possibly life altering, but the science, technology and military tactics are not things that make them want to write, and so don't put as much work into those. IMHO

I wouldn't hold tightly to that notion of women not going into writing with goal of writing about technology and military tactics.
For example I found Elizabeth Moon's Heris Serano novels and Ky Vatta novels to contain enough of both to rival David Weber's Honor Harrington novels. And Susan R. Matthews has a whole Judiciary series that has some pretty gritty psychological Military aspects while Tara K Harper's Lightwing contains interesting technology and science while her Cataract and Cat Scratch Fever examine the specialized technology employed in a strange ecosystem. Even S.L. Viehl (who writes romance novels) has a whole series of Stardoc novels though she'd be the weakest in this batch I do think that she went into this considering the technology and science and military tactics and not so much the notion of making a romance novel that just happens to be in space.

Just because they write well and have interesting characters that overshadow the science and technology and military tactics does not mean that they exclude those. In fact for me they do a better job because they have believable characters in these situations and not some of those cardboard cutout characters that often show up in really top heavy science and military novels.

I never once thought I'd hear a discussion that included the how our brains work differently as an explanation as to why women appear to somehow be excluded from genre fiction. I used to work with an engineer who believed women didn't have the mind set to be engineers and whats mostly disheartening is watching budding engineers allow this type of mentality to steer them from that path.

Yes, everyone is going to bring something different to the table and we all have to face the reality of that slippery beast, that doesn't mean that any of us threw caution to the wind and decided to just exclude or ignore certain elements because we don't think the same.

When it comes down to it, when I read, I look for something that is well written and I think that holds true to most readers. Yes there will be some who only read specific levels of technological, scientific, and action and military tactics; but those need to be written well also.

 

[RX-79G]

I never once thought I'd hear a discussion that included the how our brains work differently as an explanation as to why women appear to somehow be excluded from genre fiction.

And you're not hearing it now. I wasn't suggesting that women can't write "mainstream" science fiction. I am trying to find out which female authors do, and stated that it would be impossible to figure out why so many female authors choose a notably different emphasis within the genre. But as a lot of critics seem to applaud that women do write different SF than men, that should be a fair question. None of us could possibly say for sure if that comes from an innate source or not, and that's was the base I was trying to cover. You seem to think women are "better" at some parts of writing, and that kind of good/bad judgement may be a little inappropriate.

For the record, I was a military pilot with nearly half of the wardroom female. A close friend was one of the first US female fighter pilots in combat. Even in that environment there was no suggestion, insinuation or theorizing that there was a performance gender issue of any kind - women make excellent pilots, as do men. But writing isn't flying a plane or designing bridges - it is an expressive art form, and it should be okay to talk about the difference in the way groups tend express themselves when there is no implicit value judgement.

In fact for me they do a better job because they have believable characters in these situations and not some of those cardboard cutout characters that often show up in really top heavy science and military novels.

I don't care for poorly written characters and military novels either. I don't think Iain Banks, Frank Herbert or William Gibson wrote stories about gear and battles at the deficit of character development or social impact, so there isn't a great male/female dichotomy in quality that you appear to be suggesting. It is more a question of choices in viewpoint and detail, as Jo's excellent post suggests.

 

[HareBrain]

It would indeed be rather odd to claim that women writers are excluded from publishing hard SF if it turned out that vanishingly few of them were inherently interested in writing it (i.e. taking out the possible influence on their writing of feeling they shouldn't, or that they wouldn't get anywhere if they did). I don't know if anyone has ever tried to find that out?

Another area that women writers don't seem to feature in is what we might call "epic", whether fantasy or SF. And I wonder if that's at least partly because women tend to not be as interested in scale for the sake of it.