50 Books Challenge Part Three

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2024, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

If possible, please can you embolden your titles and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track, especially when the threads move quickly at this time of the year.

The first thread is here and the second one here.

Fine. So which woman author writes exceptional SF? I read Margaret Atwood's short stories which were meh. Emily St John Mandel's Station 11 was silly. Who are the worthy women SF authors I'm missing?

Bringing over my list:

1. Rooftoppers, Katherine Rundell
2. The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Marion Turner
3. Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett
4. Angel, Elizabeth Taylor
5. The Wife of Willesden, Zadie Smith
6. Black and British: A Forgotten History, David Olusoga
7. The Darkest Evening, Ann Cleeves
8. Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer : Contes vrais de mon enfance [Tales from the Heart : True Stories from My Childhood], Maryse Condé

New reviews. All very good reads and yet I decided not to bold any of them for some reason, maybe only because my own mood at the moment is a bit bleak and ungenerous. (Sorry authors! Not that they will mind!)

1. The Wool-Pack, Cynthia Harnett 4/5

A lovely children’s book, set in 15th c. England, that won the Carnegie Medal in 1951. The historical research seems detailed and impeccable. I enjoyed the careful descriptions of place: the Cotswolds, the New Forest, Southampton. Also the comically sneaky Italian merchants, who are thwarted by the earnest English children. I don’t think I can get my 12 year old DS to read this unfortunately, but I will definitely be reading Harnett’s other books! I’d never heard of Harnett until people started talking about it on these threads: once again the 50-books threads prove to be gold!

10. Soldier Sailor, Clare Kilroy 4/5
    This is a brilliantly written account of motherhood; for me, it brought back vivid memories of the baby/toddler days, when I couldn’t bear to be separated from my children and yet was also absolutely desperate to escape and have a break from them. This book was painful for me to read though, as the husband/father figure was such a dick. In that sense the book becomes a powerful feminist manifesto, but it’s still not easy to read about a father behaving so badly.

11. Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell 4/5
    A beautifully crafted biography of John Donne. I did feel at times that Rundell’s language was so rich, I was reading an account of Rundell’s mind as well as / rather than Donne’s. That’s OK though because Rundell’s mind is a fantastic place to be. The account of prosecution of the Catholics at the beginning of the book, including Donne’s own family members, is chilling. I still can’t quite get my head round Donne converting to Anglicanism and becoming one of the most powerful churchmen of his day.

12. Rizzio, Denise Mina 4/5
    Read and reviewed by loads of others already. A gripping novella, grisly and full of impact. I like the way Mina portrayed Mary Stuart in particular.

Would you count Ursula Le Guin as SF, Cote? Or would you class her as fantasy?

There's also Mary Shelley, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, just off the top of my head.

I'm no authority on SF, it just seems harsh to me to dismiss the entire female sex as bad writers of a genre 😂

I wouldn't call Mary Shelley sci-fi, and I found Octavia Butler very much not my cup of tea. Must admit, I think I might be with @CoteDAzur on this one.

What about Ursula le Guin, @CoteDAzur ? Not all her books are amazing (fair enough, she wrote a lot over a long life!), but I'd say her Hainish novels - particularly Left Hand of Darkness & The Dispossessed - are widely recognised as classics of SF.

Just thinking of a few others (& ignoring more recent authors like Ann Leckie & Ada Palmer), Elizabeth Moon's military SF / space opera is very readable (much better than her fantasy IMO), Suzette Haden Elgin turned out trash magazine SF stories to pay the bills, but also the Native Tongue series.

Personally I'd say there's plenty of dreadful women SF writers, but also plenty of good ones, just the same as men!

I've hated all 3 PD James I've tried across 3 genres (crime, SF, litfic or whateverTF Death At Pemberley was supposed to be) so the idea of treating her as representative of anything is dispiriting 🤷🏻‍♀️
One of the Harnett lovers, glad you liked @cassandre ! Agree with your review of Super-Infinite too -- I enjoyed it as its own thing, and for Rundell's verbal hijinks, rather than any insight into Donne himself (esp. as theologian vs. poet)

Thanks HenryTilney, it's interesting that you felt similarly about Super-Infinite. I almost felt bad not bolding it, because some of my friends and colleagues loved it so much, but one of my criteria for a bold is, would I want to go back and reread the book one day? And I'm not sure I would. I know very little about Donne, so I don't know if more knowledge of Donne would have made me appreciate Rundell's book less or more.

SF

A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones
This is How you Lose the Time War - male
and female co authors
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke - not quite SF but certainly consistent world building

Ursula Le Guin - mix of hard and soft SF, agree on the Hainish novels
CJ Cherryh - more hard SF
Lois McMaster Bujold - space opera
Joan Vinge - more hard SF
Rosemary Kirsten - Steerswoman
Linda Nagata - Nanopunk
Pat Cadigan - Synners (cyberpunk)
Catherine Asaro
Nancy Kress
Yoon Ha Lee
Octavia Butler
Naomi Kritzer's So Much Cooking short story
Connie Willis - some brilliant, some terrible

These are varying degrees of hard/semi hard SF and space operas. Historically it was very difficult for women to get published in hard SF (which is why Alice Sheldon published as James Tiptree). Some of the best women writers in SFF in the last century ended up veering to soft SF and Fantasy - how much that was because it was so hard to get published I don't know.

One of the best books I've read this year, and possibly for a long time is SF by a female writer.
The Quelling by C.L Lauder.

Is Death at Pemberley the same as Death Comes To Pemberley?

Hunger Games another example of (dystopian) world building, of course

Super Infinite is on my TBR but a close friend hated it

@BlueFairyBugsBooks Sorry, Death Comes To Pemberley is the dreck book I meant. Posting while tipsy!

@cassandre I adore Donne's poetry and in fairness Rundell did make me run straight back to it. John Stubbs' is THE modern (traditional) biography though I found it a bit too churchy and prefer John Carey's older one. Your approach to bolding is exacting and v. different to mine 😁which is based entirely on The Feels after that particular read. I find it impossible to predict what I'll really want to reread (let alone whether things will hold up) esp when there's so much out there. Diving into @C8H10N4O2 's list now!

@BlueFairyBugsBooks

Yes, the latter is the correct title.

I think there are a couple of women writing excellent Sci Fi at the moment. Off the top of my head NK Jemisin Shattered Earth trilogy and Ann Leckie Ancillary Justice.

I don't really count the YA dystopia stuff but there is stacks of that out there too.

Yikes, that made me feel slightly faint

Could it be buried in the car boot behind something else? Or hanging on a peg under a coat?

I read some Ursula le Guin decades ago and remember being bored by the political (communist) angle in her stories. She belongs to an age in SF where outlandish stories of odd civilizations on the other side of the universe were the norm. Thankfully, SF made huge strides in 1990s, with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson among others ushering in the cyberpunk era.

Most of the rest are names I've never seen before. As a lifelong SF reader who has always been on the prowl for good authors and books in this genre, I sort of doubt that they are anywhere near the caliber of SF masters like Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick, Neal Stephenson, Adrian Tchaikovsky, or Liu Cixin.

I recently read and adored The Calculating Stars - Mary Robinette Kowal if anyone is looking for more female sci fi authors to try.

I ready Ancillary Justice. It was mediocre at best and didn't inspire me to read the sequels.

I had never heard of her, so looked her up: "Mary Robinette Kowal is an American author and puppeteer. Originally a puppeteer by primary trade after receiving a bachelor's degree in art education, she became art director for science fiction magazines"

With all due respect, a puppeteer of either sex who then became an art director isn't going to write the sort of SF I want to read. The best SF authors are scientists, engineers, computer programmers - people who know what they are talking about in every detail of a story when they write about a space station, relativistic speeds, or AI. This was true when Asimov and Arthur C Clarke were the kings of the genre, and it's still true today.

I've never heard of most of those names and I find it hard to believe that sexism is the only reason their books are not as successful as Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Snow Crash or The Three-Body Problem.

Still, if you choose one hard-sf book by one of those women authors, I'll try reading it.

If what you want is hard sci-fi then, no, it's probably not going to live up to your standards. There's no long descriptions of the construction of the moon base for example, though the depictions of flight are quite detailed. I don't think it suffers for that though.

As far as I can tell Kim Stanley Robinson has never done anything other than write, study (English) and be a SAHD and he's written some very detailed books.

Having been on these threads for a few years I believe @CoteDAzur isn't keen on female writers in any genre because of the feelings. In sci-fi that includes thread favourite Connie Willis who has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards which is more major SF awards than any other writer.

WRT Margaret Atwood, her science in the Oryx and Crake books is good (i.e. not annoying for me as a biochemist to read) but the books are not her best. And she uses the term 'speculative fiction' rather than sci-fi to describe her works in this area. Her father and her brother were biologists so no surprise she got the science right.

I think that Frankenstein is absolutely sci-fi and is widely considered to be the first sci-fi novel (there were earlier sci-fi stories so this designation is partly dependent on the western definition of a novel).

I see Frankenstein as gothic horror rather than sci-fi. It all takes place in the real world/real time and although there’s obviously some sort of scientific process involved in the creation, there’s no description of this.