June 3rd, 2008
by
Naamenblog
So today I headed over to listserve to check out the Top 10 Obscure but Superb Science Fiction Novels and as I was reading it I was struck by the fact that not only were there no female/POC/queer (or any combination of the three) authors on the list there were also no books that had a main character that was anything other than a white man. Truly the list should have been called the Top 10 Obscure but Superb Science Fiction Novels by White Men about White Men.
So in reaction to that I believe we should come up with our own list of obscure but superb science fiction novels. Ones in which we can list authors and books that are by/about groups that are generally still ignored in Sci-Fi circles.
I’m thinking of this as a nomination post where every person gets to nominate F/SF novels that they feel are obscure or underrated from any time period and explain (as briefly or wordy as you like) why they belong on the list. It can be Urban Fantasy, Hard Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Military Sci-Fi, YA Fantasy… whatever sub-genre you want just make sure that it’s something that is obscure or underrated. It can be an obscure novel by a famous author or something by someone no ones ever heard of. It just cannot be a novel that’s won a major F/SF award or been a bestseller because that seems to defeat the purpose of the list. Other than that use your imagination and common sense.
I’ll leave the nominations open for a week, the cut-off being 12 midnight June 11th. If there’s enough interest I’ll make a poll (probably on survey-monkey or some other website, if you have a suggestion let me know that in comments as well) where people can see the list and vote for their favorites. The number of novels each person gets to vote for will depend on the amount of nominees.
Sound Good? Then spread this call far and wide we want to get as many diverse book nominees and people involved as possible!
Now go forth and comment with novels that fit the criteria and why you feel they should be on the Top Ten List (though the why is not required).
E.T.A. – J. Andrews made a good point in the comments on whether to consider the Tiptree & Carl Brandon awards as “major” F/SF awards. To me and most of our readers I think that they definitely are major awards and I was inclined to make an addendum saying not to nominate books that had won those awards. That is until I read this post by a man who is vowing to expand his horizons and read the Top 10 we come up with. It made me realize that to a majority of SF readers they aren’t considered major awards at all. This is all a longwinded way of saying that books that have won those awards are absolutely eligible for this Top 10 list!
I also want to remind people to spread this call for nominations far and wide. Tell any and all of your mailing lists and blogs, anyplace where people are interested in works that are like I said by/about/involve groups very rarely represented in “mainstream” SF -Feminist, People Of Color, Differently-Abled, Queer, Lower Socio-Economic Levels, Non-America/Euro -centric viewpoints, etc…
E.T.A. the Second! – Seeing the lists that people have popped out with and I know there are a bumch of people who’re feeling limited by the 5 book nomination limit, so I’ve decided to remove it altogether. From now on feel free to list as many books as you think deserve to be on the list, if you’ve already listed more than 5 all of them will go through to the voting stage. And as before link this far and wide!
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Let’s Make Our Own List – Addendum
Filed under Books & Literature, FSF, Sexuality & queerness, Women in Space, Writers & Artists, Young Adult, female characters, people of colour, women writers | Comments (53)
[...] In other news though I’ve posted a nominee post over at Feminist SF! – The Blog. Head over, re… [...]
the child garden by geoff ryman
the orphan’s tales by catherynne m. valente
swordspoint by elaine kushner
the chosen by ricardo pinto
My first thought, upon reading the list was “now there’s a reason why these are obscure.”
I don’t know how obscure it is, but I think we should have some Melisa Scott on the list
Also, for the second time today, I think a nod to Uhura’s Song would be kinda nifty
Sound Mind by Tricia Sullivan (white author, but the two main characters are both WOC). It’s a stunningly good picture of a world literally fractured into pieces by reason. It follows two different people through this world – a music theory student who finds that places she knows are vanishing, or being broken off into their own bubbles, and only she can travel between these places; and an ex-prisoner who travels to an alternate dimensions using her television set.
There are many things to love about Sullivan, but my favourite is that she uses hard sci-fi concepts and logic and applies them to the basic mundane stuff of our world – shopping, popular music, junk food, junk religion, TV, etc. I don’t know of any other writers who do that.
Another one I love is Prospero’s Children by Jan Siegel. It’s an Atlantis-themed fantasy story with a female lead, which could have simply been a nicely-penned example of the genre, but then went and swallowed its own tail in a head-killingly brilliant fashion.
I’ll be back later if I think of any more. :D
Margaret Elphinstone’s novels of post-Catastrophe Scotland, The Incomer (and the sequel, A Sparrow’s Flight).
Jody Scott’s Passing For Human (in this case I think the first novel is markedly better than the sequel I, Vampire – with Elphinstone’s novels I’m really not able to choose).
Gerd Brantenberg’s Daughters of Egalia.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.
Esme Dodderidge’s New Gulliver: or, the Adventures of Lemuel Gulliver in Capovolta
Ellen Galford’s The Dyke and the Dybbuk (also, The Fires of Bride, which – like Margaret Elphinstone’s novels – is a lovely example of genuinely Scottish fantasy)
That’s six, isn’t it? Okay. I could go on…
I vote for Herland too. Although it was taught on my utopia and dystopias module at uni, (Thank you UEA!) and would probably be reocgnised by people in the know about these things, I don’t think most of the sci-fi/fantasy reading public will have heard of it. And getting hold of the sequel, With Her in Ourland, is a nightmare.
I also vote for The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea. A Yound Adult/kids book set in Ireland about two kids going on off a quest to save the world. It’s a mix of the mundane and Irish mythology and it’s quite simply one of the best books I have ever read. It is still my comfort read when I’m low. I’ve included it because no one else I’ve spoken to has ever heard of it much less read it. I will rectify this when my friends have kids as they will all be given a copy when they get to a suitable age.
And if we can add comics then I say the Power Pack run from the 1980s. But I expect that’s not acceptable.
I’ll come back if I think of more.
The Fortunate Fall, by Raphael Carter, is a beautifully crafted cyberpunk novel. It has some of the most vivid and improbable images I’ve ever encountered in a book, but it all makes sense. As someone who works in high tech, I felt this was actually one of the most technically solid novels in the genre; I just had a lot of “why didn’t I think of that before?” moments, some of them quite scary. Another real strength of the novel is the characters. I read it when it came out, over ten years ago, and they’re still on my mind.
God Stalk by P.C. Hodgell. Such a good book.
For obscure but superb Melissa Scott, I’d have to go with Shadow Man. It was even snubbed by a Tiptree jury — maybe they thought it was trying too hard in the “explore and expand gender roles” category. Anyway, it really is superb. The complexity of the gender roles, and the contrast of a dynamic main character against a rigid society reminded me of Vance. The setting is strongly realized, with a palpable sense of place. There were also some wonderful light touches to the story, including subtly snarky references to cyberpunk tropes that Scott is often associated with.
I would personally be inclined to count the Tiptree and maybe even the Carl Brandon awards as ‘major awards’ for the purposes of this, but maybe that’s taking ‘obscure to those reading this blog’ as the definition rather than ‘obscure to the general sf/f reading public’.
Anyway, my suggestion is the Starbridge series by A. C. Crispin. Most (all?) of the main characters are female, as I recall, and a couple of the books feature a Deaf woman.
great idea naamen!
nalo hopkinson MIDNIGHT ROBBER
ellen kushner THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD
laurie j. marks FIRE LOGIC
minister faust COYOTE KINGS OF THE SPACE AGE BACHELOR PAD
ernest hogan HIGH AZTECH
[...] but great science fiction, feminist style”;One of the blogs I read, Feminist S.F., is currently looking for obscure but superb speculative fiction that features groups that are still generally ign…. In other words, the protagonists are women, black, Hispanic, gay, etc. After seeing a list of Top [...]
ZAHRAH THE WINDSEEKER – Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu. Yay kickass girl protagonist of color in YA sf/f! Also at last year’s WisCon I went to the Entering the Labyrinth panel & realized how much this book subverts what some of the panelists & audience said were tropes for the “young girl in labyrinth/Wonderland”-type stories. I was annoyed that no one on the panel seemed to have heard of the book when I mentioned it.
laurie j. marks FIRE LOGIC
…I thought this was appallingly dull. It seemed to be full of examples of “tell, don’t show”.
I don’t think I ever finished it.
[...] Feminist SF: let’s make our own list! Obscure novels by authors of diverse backgrounds. [...]
This is all very contradictory — if the purpose of this endeavour is to gather a list of 10 obscure works from and about underrepresented people, the criteria for “obscurity” that could apply to readers who are, say, familiar with the Tiptree Award and the ones that would apply to those that haven’t even got a clue about the women who’ve won more “mainstream” SF recognition (Bujold, etc.), are at opposite ends of the spectrum of “obscurity”.
It stops being “our” own list when we’re compiling it for somebody that is definitely outside of the group doing the compiling.
Ide:
The point of this for me was to compile a Top 10 list that did not exclude those not white and male. The idea of it being “our” list was in the sense of a list compiled by those not usually consulted, who read a different type of sci-fi. I was a bit confusing in my original post as to whether I was discussing works that they were obscure to us or to the mainstream, that was part of the reason for the ETA notice but most folks seemed to cotton to what I was saying right away, which was books that are obscure to the mainstream in the style of the original list.
I want to create a list that we can put out there as books that are obscure but should not be. Something that can be posted and read far and wide. As for the idea that creating a list with knowledge that it will be read by the mainstream meaning that it ceases to be our list I would disagree. There are plenty of books, articles, lists created by othered groups specifically for the education/perusal of the dominant group and I don’t believe that that robs the original authors of their agency or effort in creating something based on their likes/dislikes, experiences and habits.
That being said if you want to put out a different call and create a Top 10 list of books that are obscure to the readers of this blog I think that would be great and would help in any way possible.
It’s hard to figure out who’s “obscure” to who. So for example I didn’t expect Zahrah the Windseeker to be obscure at WisCon, but while people had generally heard of the book most had not read it yet. So I’d include that for whoever you think “us” is *and* whoever y’all think “not us” is. We don’t have to define all that super closely in order to end up with a fabulous and useful list.
I’ll speak up for some more kids’ books. How about
Static Shock
and
Zapt – great, funny graphic novels/comic books. You really can’t beat a book that stars the Pan-galactic Order Of Police (POOP).
More as I think of them! Also, I’ll repost this around on various blogs later tonight — great idea!
Once again I have to chime in with Illicit Passage by Alice Nunn. I’m boring on this one, I know. Revolutionary, amazing stuff.
Yonmei, I also loved Ellen Galford, and have read every piece of fiction by her I can find! They’re certainly obscure to a SF audience because they weren’t marketed that way at all as far as I know. Queendom Come was really weird & highly enjoyable. But since you picked Galford she’s not my nominee.
I’m not sure that Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman is actually obscure, but it’s obscurer than it should be.
Bertha Harris’ Lover. Fabulous surreal radicalism. Squeezes into SF through its surrealism.
Jewelle Gomez’ The Gilda Stories – I truly adore this novel/series of short stories and wish that everyone had read them.
Anna Livia’s Minimax – a lesbian vampire story that is an entirely different take than Jewelle Gomez’. Bulldozer Rising about a geriatric crone revolution.
Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (Le cornet acoustique in the original) – another amazing surrealistic novel, about a crazed old lady.
Marci Blackman’s ”Po Man's Child and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night are both very heavy about abuse and trauma, but beautiful and deep and far too little read. And I confess that they are kind of a reach for SF, but I swear they both do have minor elements of supernatural/ magical realism. Or hints of it. Anyway they’re underrecognized and they should be read.
Oh god. Stella Atrium’s The Goulep. Nobody has ever heard of this one. But I loved it for its deep examination of colonialism.
So out of these that I submit for consideration I will pick as my five for obscure-needing-recognition, in no particular order:
(1) Illicit Passage / Nunn – very small press, very SF
(2) The Goulep / Atrium – very small press, very SF
(3) Lover / Harris – forgotten 70s radicalism, awesome
(4) Gilda Stories / Gomez – probably the least obscure of my list but far too obscure! everyone should read.
(5) ah pain: Mootoo or Livia or Carrington? how to choose? livia & carrington, both somewhat surreal, which is already represented by harris … so fine. Mootoo / Cereus Blooms at Night is my fifth & final recommendation.
Damn I want to go back and re-read each of these books right now.
Thanks for posting this! I read that top ten list and thought ‘wow this is a straight white male list!” so I’m glad to see this happening.
I don’t have any contributions at the moment, but I hope some will occur to me.
Repost b/c the original comment got eaten:
Ide:
The point of this for me was to compile a Top 10 list that did not exclude those not white and male. The idea of it being “our” list was in the sense of a list compiled by those not usually consulted, who read a different type of sci-fi. I was a bit confusing in my original post as to whether I was discussing works that they were obscure to us or to the mainstream, that was part of the reason for the ETA notice but most folks seemed to cotton to what I was saying right away, which was books that are obscure to the mainstream in the style of the original list.
I want to create a list that we can put out there as books that are obscure but should not be. Something that can be posted and read far and wide. As for the idea that creating a list with knowledge that it will be read by the mainstream meaning that it ceases to be our list I would disagree. There are plenty of books, articles, lists created by othered groups specifically for the education/perusal of the dominant group and I don’t believe that that robs the original authors of their agency or effort in creating something based on their likes/dislikes, experiences and habits.
That being said if you want to put out a different call and create a Top 10 list of books that are obscure to the readers of this blog I think that would be great and would help in any way possible.
Addendum to original comment:
I agree with Liz that it’s very hard to even determine what would be obscure to a subset of sci-fi readers b/c I was shocked when some folks at this year’s WisCon had not even heard of The Orphan’s Tales: In The Night Garden which won the Tiptree last year!
Kelley Eskridge – Solitaire
and kudos to the person who nominated static shock. that one was awesome. :)
TEOT’S WAR and BLOODCHILD, by Heather Gladney. Long out of print, but brilliant — a fantasy world (with a whiff of sci fi) set in a culture vaguely resembling northern Africa. Naga Teot, a black warrior/mystic of a nearly extinct people, is sworn to serve the leader of a white minority that’s recently colonized the region. He fights an army to save the guy when a third culture (also black, more advanced than both) appears and threatens to conquer the known world. Teot is absolutely badass, a little crazy, and one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever seen. The friendship between him and the “Tanman” is also well-depicted; it’s very much a buddy story, with hints of homoerotic subtext (although both men are happily married; I suppose technically it’s bi-erotic subtext). Side-note: Teot’s eventual wife is a knife-dancer who can whoop his ass sideways, and he worships her for it.
SHADOWDANCE, by Robin Wayne Bailey. The protagonist is a paraplegic who is granted the ability to walk via magic — but with a terrible price attached. Every night he must dance, or lose the ability to walk. However, anyone who witnesses his dance is compelled to act on his/her most “Id”-ish impulses. So the protagonist and his male lover travel across the land in search of a cure for his curse. The gay relationship is handled very matter-of-factly and realistically, despite the fantastic setting. I have a vague memory of the protagonist being dark-skinned too, but it’s been a really long time since I read this so I’m not sure. Don’t think his race or appearance mattered in the story, though. As I recall, the core question of the story is whether it really is so terrible to be disabled, and whether love transcends ability. Beautifully written too.
THE PSALMS OF HEROD by Esther Friesner. This book creeped the bewhoozit out of me. It’s a feminist dystopian novel like THE HANDMAID’S TALE… on crack. Set in a postapocalyptic world in which food is scarce and the human race has mutated bizarrely, and a deeply-warped version of fundamentalist Christianity has become the dominant faith. Like animals, women are only capable of reproducing once a year or so, “in season” — if they have sex outside this time, they die horribly. Alpha males rule small homesteads in which they control the lives of their people utterly. Abortion is the highest sin possible — but unwanted babies are put out on a hillside to die of exposure. Women who refuse to obey are beaten or raped to death; men who show any hint of homosexuality (even if they’re raped) are stoned; people of color are killed on sight; and the most evil creature ever rumored to exist is the Jew.
The protagonist is a wee bit Mary Sueish, and I can’t recommend the followup novel, THE SWORD OF MARY, because it’s got a much more muddled plot. But the first book gave me chills. Good chills, but still.
EMERGENCE by David R. Palmer. Yeah, by a white guy, but the protagonist is an 11-year-old girl. In the aftermath of a bioengineered plague/war that wipes out most of humanity, this girl learns that she is part of a new species — homo post hominem, immune to the plague and poised to inherit the earth. The story is told in epistolic format via her “journals” as she journeys across America searching for others of her kind. The journals are both hilarious and bittersweet; Palmer must’ve been a girl in his former life, because he nails Candy’s voice so well I think he must’ve channeled it. I remain astounded that Heinlein’s crappy female protagonists are lauded while Palmer’s is virtually unknown.
More when I get home and can browse my bookshelf.
Pie:
Mmm, Solitaire. One of my favorite books.
All fabulous novels that more folks should read. And I am so checking out the ones noted above that I haven’t read yet. :-)
“God Stalk” by P.C. Hodgell, for sure.
“Fool’s War” by Sarah Zettel
“The Sword of Winter” by Marta Randall
“Shadow Man” by Melissa Scott
“I, Vampire” by Jody Scott
“Temporary Agency” by Rachel Pollack
“Bone Dance” by Emma Bull
“Stranger at the Wedding” by Barbara Hambly
Shadow Bridge (it’s just out. Is that obscure?) by Gregory Frost
Racing The Dark by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Does Bridge Of Birds still count as obscure?
I’d name _Teot’s War_ by Gladney as well, as Nora has above, and for much the same reasons.
_Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue_ by Rosel George Brown is an engaging futuristic thriller written in the 60s, more police investigation than SF except for the space ships, aliens and weird fashions. *But* the lead detective cop is a single mother of a teenaged daughter, who handles her own problems and falls into the alpha male’s embrace only when it suits her, and not permanently. The background assumptions show mid-20th-century sexism to some degree, but Sibyl Sue, like Emma Peel, nearly makes up for it all in one place. She’s like a James Schmitz heroine in a Retief novel — good (if default-White) trashy fun.
_Sunburst_ by Phyllis Gottlieb, is a coming-of-age novel for 13-year-old Shandy Johnson, in what I recall as a post-apocalyptic small-town setting. There are bands of teenagers (not all white) with psi of various sorts. This is solid and vivid writing on some SF tropes that are well known, but not always this well done.
Does anything by Tanith Lee count as not well known? _Don’t Bite the Sun_ might be less obscure than most books here, especially since it and its sequel have been released in an omnibus volume. It’s a (mostly) female protag in a body- and gender-swapping society, where the essentialist gender dynamics are balanced by some less superficial observations about body as a personality trait, although this isn’t used as racial commentary that I recall. The narrative might even be taken as an extreme of shopping-and-fashions (as mentioned a post or two down) to the point of satirizing both, even from a female POV.
_The Healer’s War_ by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, follows a (white) Vietnam War nurse through various jungles. There’s a folk-magic twist in the plot, but the main impact of the book is of the lead, Kitty McCulley, lurching through the war with some Vietnamese characters who are more than set-dressing. Frightening, tragic, and memorable.
_Unwillingly to Earth_ by Pauline Ashwell shows obvious signs of joining a series of stories into a novel, and it’s the first two novellas in the series that I’d recommend most. Lizzie Lee, who is brought from an obscure interstellar mining colony to school on Earth, studies cultural engineering and solves various problems in inimitable first-person style. The first novella was published in _Analog_ in the 50s, and while there are definite signs of Boys’ Own SF in the setting and so on, it shows equals numbers of male and female students and mentions that they’re of all colors and backgrounds, and generally doesn’t regard women as exceptional or default-sexual. The last section of the novel unfortunately slides into romantic cliche, which is so pasted-on that 3/4 or more of the book is quite unmarred by any kind of romantic set-up at all.
Ide, I think any “list of 10″ is going to be odd and contradictory. But I like the idea of proposing a reading-list of novels that you yourself believe are “obscure” – that few people have read.
For me, I’d exclude any novel published in the past 5-10 years from this list: recent novels tend to be better-known than novels from longer ago, just by default – they’re more likely to be on display in bookshops, more likely to be on display in libraries (and if the library doesn’t have it, if it’s still in print/readily available they’re far more likely to buy it on a reader’s request): they’re currently being reviewed, they’re present in a way that older novels aren’t.
Novels published any time in the last two years absolutely should not be on the list: many people may not have read them, but that would be because (as we’ve discussed) getting hold of new books is expensive.
What we’re looking (I think) is novels that feminist-sf fans would enjoy, published more than 10 years ago, that aren’t on the big reading lists.
I named Ellen Galford and Margaret Elphinstone as two writers of Scottish fantasy that doesn’t look anything like the American appropriation of Scottish fantasy (which appropriation probably merits a separate blogpost) and Jody Scott, who said explicitly – I attended a reading back when Passing for Human was published – that she wrote science-fiction because she wanted to be able to shake up her readers’ preconceptions of how the universe worked. (Her favourite Le Guin short story was “Direction of the Road”.)
And a small batch of women-dominant utopias that do not fit into the patriarchal paradigm of how women “really” are, which I’ve been planning to write a blog post on sometime…
Kit Reed’s Weird Women, Wired Women is a collection of some of her best work.
I had always considered her to be a pretty well known author until I realized about a year ago that some of the most prolific readers in my local SF club had never heard of her.
And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ.
While Russ certainly wouldn’t be obscure to people who read this blog, this particular novel with its interesting approach to telepathy is not the book people normally think of when discussing Russ.
Also, while it is a recent collection, I can’t recommend Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages enough.
Maybe Tanya Huff doesn’t count as obscure now that she’s had a 2-season series on Lifetime, but I love Tanya Huff’s work in all genres. So I’m gonna mention her anyway. Oh look, I already did.
The Smoke series for a gay protagonist.
The Blood series for a bi vampire and a vision-impaired female protagonist.
And I think it’s the Valor series, military sf with a female protagonist.
I’d nominate the Last Herald-Mage trilogy, by Mercedes Lackey. While the main character in that series is a white male, he’s also as queer as a $3.00 bill! I don’t really know how ‘obscure’ Misty is, but I only learned of her work via word-of-mouth.
Also, any of the books set in the Shadowrun universe written by Stephen Kenson. He’s an openly gay author, and the novels featuring Talon (Yes, another GWM) are excellent!
Vanishing Point by Michaela Roessler.
Maureen McHugh’s name is known, but I think Mission Child counts as too obscure: it’s out of print, was dissed by the Tiptree jury, and met with a bunch of criticism from people who thought the protagonist should have been a superhero rather than a resourceful but confused picaresque young woman.
Kate Wilhelm’s Juniper Time, perhaps her first SF novel that could be unambiguously styled “feminist” (The Clewiston Test is a great critique of the patriarchy, but the heroine’s utter isolation and the Embittered Lesbian Villain are problems), is a great piece.
Without criticizing Naamen’s idea, which is awesome, I wunna point out that the original “Top 10 Obscure” list does contain a gay man, Murray Leinster.
Does Katharine Kerr’s Polar City Blues count as obscure? Her fantasy is well-known, but this is SF (and a police procedural, and a thriller, and … stuff). Prominent roles for women, a gay man, and Black people. Bobbie Lacey hit a glass ceiling, but not because she’s a woman … I read it right after a lot of material on the web about white privilege, and it might have been designed to wake up the privileged reader.
Kij Johnson, _The Fox Woman_. Beautifully written fantasy set in Heian-era Japan. Unlike a lot of the Japan-flavored crap that’s come out more recently, the story feels of its time and place, perhaps because it’s based on a folk tale. Kitsune, the fox who desires to be human, is one of the most memorable characters I’ve met; the woman whose rival she becomes is a real and complicated character; and every time I reread it I’m surprised by how much the queer male subplot moves me. This is literally the the book that kept me from giving up on sf/f, and I am amazed how hard it is to find someone who’s heard of it.
Nalo Hopkinson, _Skin Folk_. IMHHO her best work. (I know it’s short stories, but I think the novel criterion is problematic; a lot of talented people, especially in SF, are obscure because they don’t write novels.)
Margo Lanagan, _Black Juice_. Dark, poetic, powerful short stories set in genuinely inventive worlds, where people risk their lives facing infernal angels, clowns kill for their art, and a young girl can be sentenced for her defiance to sink into a tar pit. Obscure because she writes YA, uses a non-novel form, and is Australian (thus hard to find in the US, in my experience).
Helen Oyeyemi, _The Icarus Girl_. Amazingly written. A sensitive, difficult British girl finally finds a friend on a trip to visit her mother’s parents in Nigeria, only to find that she is neither human nor a friend at all. Obscure among sf fans because its mainstream marketing has downplayed or hidden the fact that it’s a fantasy novel.
Jean Hegland, _Into the Forest_. Not as good as the other books on this list, but definitely obscure among sf fans, but deeply female-centered, and I personally love the way it subverts the tropes of the post-apocalyptic novel with its presentation of the end of civilization (not with a bang, but with a whimper).
Along the same lines, Susan Beth Pfeffer, _Life As We Knew It_. YA sf novel; a teenage girl grows up quickly when a large asteroid collides not with Earth, but with its moon, changing tidal, volcanic, & weather patterns.
I also think you could conceivably count Bujold’s Vorkosigian novels; I’ve been amazed by how many sf fans have never heard of her, despite her “major” genre awards.
Warchild by Karin Lowachee
I really like the lists that I’m seeing.
@Zhara
re: short stories.
I think SF, unlike mainstream work, has a relatively vibrant short form audience and community. A professionally published short story in SF reaches several thousand people at the very least, and potentially a lot more. And there are a lot of different markets. The biggest mainstream markets have distributions of 5k, but most are 1k or less. (Harpers and the New Yorker are the exceptions to this.)
Anyway too much fussing about the numbers, but generally, I think SF’s short form is much more highly valued and read than mainstream counterpart.
Now short stories are more ephemeral than long stories, which makes a certain amount of pragmatic sense (and isn’t always a bad thing, as it lest short stories be much more topical and current particularly if authors write a book or so a year, with lengthy amounts of lead time). Novels can, and are designed, to have a more enduring quality, so at least conceptually all short fiction is obscure (because it’s ephemeral) While some novels are. Or something.
Anyway, rock on, loving the lists…
The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price.
YA time-travel fantasy where the past is shown to be properly alien.
Sorry for being so scattered.
Just throwing out:
Pamela Sargent’s “Earth Seed” which is ya-y and good and had some gender stuff, though not groundbreaking in terms of feminism, me thinks, but I was 13 when I read it last.
Melissa Scott’s Silence Leigh books, Space Opera-y. Lots of fun. Has a lot of feminist content, a little bit of queer flavor, and a great story.
SWORDSPOINT by Ellen Kushner (fantasy of manners, queer protagonist)
THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD by Ellen Kushner (fantasy of manners, beautifully feminist and queer)
FIRETHORN by Sarah Micklem (fantasy, open exploration of “coarse” sexuality)
BOOK OF A THOUSAND DAYS by Shannon Hale (YA fantasy, Mongolian-inspired setting)
Solstice by Ulises Silva – maybe more Urban Fantasy than SF, but it actually covers the ending of the world (not just the dystopic or utopic societies built by survivors) from the perspective of women of color – one of whom is also a lesbian. It’s a spectacularly written book, lyrical and horrifically depressing.
Anything in the Kage Baker’s The Company Series. The first two – In the Garden of Iden and Sky Coyote are spectacular – though I am not sure how obscure such an extensive series is.
Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls by Jane Lindskold is a wonderful YA cyberpunk with a disabled heroine.
Time’s Child by Rebecca Ore….hmmm I am seeing a definite fondness for time travel in my reading preferences…..
Solstice by Ulises silva. It’s speculative fiction about writers who can make their writing come true. The lead character is a tough woman of Japanese and Mexican descent. Also, I can’t remember the last time I read a book, let alone SF, where two Laos women were main characters.
zahra mentioned Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. I would like to second a vote for that. I stumbled across it by accident and it’s amazing.
This is a great idea by the way. I haven’t heard of most of these books and now i have a big list of new stuff to find. Hurrah!
Excellent books forgotten or never much noticed in the first place:
Christine Brooke-Rose, Textermination
Bev Jafek, The Man Who Took a Bite out of His Wife and Other Stories
Anna Kavan, Ice
Elizabeth Knox, Black Oxen
Rebecca Ore, Gaia’s Toys
Rachel Pollack, Godmother Night
Jody Scott, I, Vampire
Mary Staton, From the Legend of Beal
Sue Thomas, Correspondence
Wendy Walker, The Secret Service
Is Elizabeth Moon’s The Deed of Paksenarrion series of novels obscure?
Jody Scott, I, Vampire
I still think the first book (Passing for Human) was better. Even though I, Vampire has Virginia Woolf. But we can propose both: they’re sequels, in a kinda way…
For worldbuilding, I love A Door Into Ocean, by Joan Slonczewski, though it’s probably the best known of her books.
Again, probably not obscure enough, but Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow is superb.
Jane, I wholeheartedly second Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God.
I would also like to nominate Elizabeth Knox’s Dream Duet: The Rainbow Opera/Dreamhunter and Dreamquake.
Also, Vonda McIntyre’s Starfarers series.
[...] Feminist SF Wants to Know: What Are Your Favorite Obscure, Underrated SF Books? [...]
[...] the nominations for our “Top Ten Obscure F/SF” book list ended at midnight last night, anymore comments won’t make it onto the nomination list. We [...]
[...] and voted on by Feminist SF – The Blog! readers is now up! It’s been a bit over two months since I first suggested the list and looking at the final eleven books (there was a tie) I’m extremely gratified – I now have [...]
naamen, do you have on hand a list of the original nominees, and the various winnowed down lists? i’d like to post on the fsfwiki.
laura