The Russ Pledge: favourite science fiction by women

(Blog response to Nicola Griffiths: Taking the Russ Pledge.)

I've occasionally felt the need to answer the question, "Who are your favourite authors?" or "What are your favourite science/speculative fiction novels/stories?" I don't have a record of having answered this recently, but my impression is that a large proportion of my responses are women authors or books/stories authored by women. Here is my answer today, focusing (as per the Russ Pledge) on women who write scifi and speculative fiction (focusing a little more on science fiction than fantasy, but not shying away from the gray area between).

In no particular order (and with no claim to completeness):

• Octavia Butler's Fledgling (a vampire novel, but definitely shows a scifi mentality); 'Speech Sounds' is one of the best short stories about what it means to be human that I have ever read
• Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain is a thrillingly creative social-sf novel, and stories like 'Inertia' are an unflinching look at biological engineering and how humans adapt
• Ekaterina Sedia's wonderful The Alchemy of Stone is probably considered fantasy, but it's really steampunk science fiction with an emphasis on human (and created) expertise and craftsmanship
• Tananarive Due: 'Like Daughter' (in the Dark Matter anthology) is a particularly heartbreaking story about cloning and the confusion between genetic and personal identity
• Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels (one of my earliest introductions to overtly strong women and alternative sexualities in future-of-humanity science fiction)
• Nisi Shawl: the stories in Filter House reinvented my idea of what speculative fiction should be (and do)
• Ursula Le Guin's Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusion etc.: powerful exploration of human settlements in an alien future and the real implications of science fictional technologies
• Roz Kaveney's short fiction, especially 'A Wolf to Man'
• Nalo Hopkinson: can anyone remind me the title of a short story I now can't find about a man and a woman who wear suits that allow them to feel each other's experiences and have sex?
• Joanna Russ, The Female Man, How to Suppress Women's Writing
• Julie Czerneda, Survival (haven't read the rest of the trilogy yet)
• Jennifer Maria Brissett, 'Nasmina's Black Box' (again, might look like fantasy, but a story about human creation--and destruction--and full of gadgets and dreams)
• Suzette Elgin, Native Tongue (real hard social-science fiction, with linguistics as the science)
• Vandana Singh: speculative fiction that avoids most of the Anglo-american clichés and boundaries of the genre
• Elizabeth Vonarburg, Chroniques du Pays des Mères, and the short story 'L'oiseau de cendres'; powerfully imagined, unromantic stuff
• Mary Rosenblum, 'Search Engine' (low-life cyberpunk political thriller)
• Therese Arkenberg, 'Drown or Die' (when we terraform another world, do we change it or ourselves?)

Science fiction classics "not science fiction"?

From the British Library description of their Out of this World exhibition (starting in London next Friday):

The exhibition will challenge what people think of as Science Fiction and show that it is not a narrow genre, but embraces works of utopian and speculative fiction that people may not consider as 'Science Fiction', such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, George Orwell’s 1984 and Audrey Niffeneger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife.

Does anyone really think that any of those novels is not science fiction? I want to hear someone say so. (Someone other than Margaret Atwood, please.)

FAQ: How do I know you won't steal my story?

Every editor or publisher must have had emails like this, or received stories in "read-only" PDF format with (c)opyright notices slapped all over it, announcement that the author has also mailed a date-stamped copy of the story to his lawyer, etc.

Q. How do I know you won't steal my story and publish it under your own name without crediting or paying me?

A.1: A reputable publisher won't steal your story. They'd pretty soon go out of business if they got a reputation for doing that. (And for your information: attaching a copyright notice to an unpublished piece of work won't protect you anyway. You automatically have copyright to anything you publish [unless you've given it away]; unpublished work is a different kettle of fish. But IANAL.)

In the world of reputable publishers, this is fine advice. But we don't live in a world where everything is that simple. I can probably tell a reputable publisher from a fly-by-night pretty easily, but not every Internetizen is going to make that distinction, and there are people out there like Cook's Source who really will do (and apparently get away with for a long time) what the questioner seems to be fearing, so in this world, maybe a better answer is needed.

A.2: If you're concerned about your work being stolen by a publisher or magazine, I suggest you look around online for reviews of and/or references to the publisher in question; if they are a reputable and reasonably well-known publisher it's extremely unlikely they'd steal anyone's work. If they have done anything so unconscionable, it's very likely that you'll find reference online to them having done so. If there's nothing about them either way, then you just don't know. If you've found the publication in question via a writer's recourse such as Duotrope, then you have extra recourse in that you can report them there for abuse, leave a negative review, etc. (And again, if no one has done so, that's a good sign.) But really, if you don't have a special reason to suspect this publication, the odds are you should give them the benefit of the doubt.

I personally like to support the small press, and that means giving credit to tiny, obscure, and new publications who won't have much of an online presence yet, positive or negative testimonials, or any evidence for who they are. I give them the benefit of the doubt, and as a writer I've never been burned yet. (As an editor, on the other hand, I have been burned by reviewers who've given me reviews plagiarized from the Internet; I've received submisions that are allegedly unpublished but turned out to be reprints [of reprints]; I've received stories that are then withdrawn because they were [verboten] simultaneous submissions; I've received stories that were cut 'n' pasted from half a dozen different sources to create a surreal collage of plagiarism. I now check. Everything.)