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10 Female Science Fiction Authors You Must Read

From the very beginning of science fiction, women have played a crucial role in the genre’s evolution. Now, just as the genre continues to grow, so too does the long list of talented women writing stories that are central to sci-fi. From the classics to the more recent talents who are frequently featured in the Hugo and Nebula awards, here are some of the must-read names in the long list of female sci-fi writers.

Female Science Fiction Writers You Need to Have on Your Bookshelf

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does contain some of my favorites. Special mention goes to Mary Shelley, who is widely regarded as the founding mother of the genre. If you haven’t read Frankenstein yet, give it a chance and then pick up one of these phenomenal female sci-fi authors.

Ursula K. La Guin

La Guin is a master at illustrating complex and challenging social ideas and playing them out in the form of science fiction literature. She does not shy away from topics such as race, gender, and social politics, connecting them to complex and strange worlds.

The dispossessed sci-fi utopian novels
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Books like The dispossessed And Left Hand of Darkness take themes that we may be familiar with and examine how we as humans would behave if they were polarized. La Guin is able to imagine a world where the things we take for granted, like sex and world politics, are turned completely on their head. Each of her books is a dive into human psychology and morality within it.

Margaret Atwood

If you somehow missed the award-winning show, The Handmaid’s Talegrab her trilogy of books before you watch it. Along with this series of novels is her lesser known but still exceptional Maddaddam trilogy. Atwood comfortably embraces dystopia in her writing, keeping it disturbingly close to home.

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In both Maddaddam And Handmaids trilogy, we are confronted with a reality not so far removed from our own. Atwood writes about dystopias in which we could easily see our own world slipping away. Big corporations have left the Earth a barren, uninhabited landscape, and fascist governments have turned people into powerless slaves. Her science fiction is chilling, predictive, and always a little strange.

Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler is a multi-award winning female science fiction writer. Her library of works has won her multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. She is an author who repeatedly comes back into the conversation when her works become relevant again. Butler has been writing since the 70s and has built up quite a reading list in that time.

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Her work is often labeled as Afro-Futuristic and contains themes of race, God, and the human struggle within. Octavia E. Butler’s first two series, tHe Pattenist And Xenogenesis collections, explore racial differences. They examine the ways in which people in her science fiction stories deal with forced segregation with aliens, genetically modified humans and other strange inventions.

Her Similarity series explores what we consider God to be. In the future, depicted in her science fiction books, she asks what we need from God and what religion could and should mean in the future of human society.

Becky Room

Becky Chambers is becoming increasingly popular with her heartwarming studies of personality and societies. I won’t say a study of people, because there are all sorts of other elements and organisms thrown into her sci-fi microcosm. These little worlds, stepping into sci-fi, make her one of my best female writers of the moment.

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For a perfect picture of what Becky Chambers can do with her science fiction, pick up the Traveler series. This collection of four books takes place in enclosed environments and examines the interactions of various creatures. Each new book places different personalities, backgrounds, and often physiologies together and examines how they react. Her emotional intelligence is what sets her apart from the rest.

NK Jemisin

When it comes to decorated sci-fi writers, few can compare to NK Jemsin. Her various works have received much praise, with her Broken Earth collection as the first trilogy to win the Best Novel Hugo Award for all three books. She has shaken up the world of science fiction and produced some of the best works in the genre of her generation.

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Her award-winning Broken Earth As an example, we see Jemisin’s ability to paint vast, generation-spanning science fiction novels. With this trilogy, a planet is plagued by seasons that last for generations, wiping out humanity and reshaping the planet. In these books, we see humanity struggle to survive and endure the apocalypse again and again.

Arkadi Martine

With a few science fiction novels under her belt so far, Martine is definitely one to watch on the list of best female science fiction writers. The first two books in her Teixcalaan series have already made waves and won multiple awards. She has caught the attention of the science fiction world and is making a name for herself.

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Her Teixcalaan series is a fascinating mix of ancient Mayan cultures, cyberpunk futures, and dramatic space opera. These books take an incredibly engaging crime fiction approach to the story, spinning a tale of murder, political intrigue, and of course, the vast unknown of space.

CJ Cherryh

When you look at CJ Cherryh’s repertoire, you wonder when she had time to do anything other than write. In her illustrious career as one of the best science fiction writers of all time, she has published over 80 novels, making even Stephen King look like a part-timer. She has written vast collections of science fiction based on deep and elaborate universes.

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If you have to choose from her mountain of books, start with something from her Union-Alliance series. Pick up the multi-award-winning Cyteen is a fantastic introduction to the collection. Set in a world in the Union where children are raised in tanks and trained from birth with ‘tapes’, the twisting and gripping story delves deeper into the world and the issues surrounding this environment.

Anne McCaffrey

The first woman to win the Nebula and Huga awards, she can’t be left out of the list of best female sci-fi writers. She has published a vast library of works, ranging from fantastic to outright science fiction. When asked about her work, she says she prefers the science fiction genre over fantasy, but for fans of both genres, there are plenty of elements of both.

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Her best-known works in the Dragon Riders of Pern series are a great place to start with McCaffrey. Humans have colonized a planet that is periodically terrorized by a flesh-eating alien. To fight back, the planet’s dragons have been genetically modified to bond with humans. If that’s not enough of an intro to get you to pick up one of her books, nothing will.

Kameron Hurley

With subgenres to her name including cast space operas, grimdark, military science fiction, and her own coined term, bugpunk, Hurley is a highly accomplished science fiction writer. She may not be as widely published as McCafrey or CJ Cherryh, but she is certainly making waves with her varied and engaging science fiction.

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The Light Brigade is an interesting look not only at the theory of lightspeed travel, but also a dive into human psychology and motivations between government wars. In this book we see the world through the eyes of a soldier fighting a war on a distant planet. When things start to go wrong with his drops, the cause he is fighting for begins to unravel, or maybe it is all in his head.

Nnedi Okorafor

Okorafor, who is of both African and American descent, is one of the best writers in the Africanfuturism subgenre of science fiction. She has written for children, adults, and comics, winning numerous awards along the way. Her work has been adapted into film and television series, working with Hulu, HBO, and George R. R. Martin.

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The Binti Okorafor’s series is being adapted into a Hulu series, so now is the perfect time to pick it up and read it. This series from one of the best female science fiction writers focuses on our heroin as she travels to a prestigious off-planet university. During the journey, her transport is overrun by aliens, who wipe out the rest of the crew. However, she is able to communicate with them and develop a sort of truce.


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