This is in part related to this post on Tumblr. I am not referring to this as a list of “feminist” SF writers, as some of the writers I’m listing make Certain Assumptions About Gender Roles and/or are not actually feminist. However, these women SF writers write stories that are clearly not the kind of weird misogynistic stuff you get from certain early dude SF writers. (I am looking at you JT McIntosh. WTF.) This is also not an exhaustive list, as I am lazy/am restricting my self to authors who immediately come to mind while I’m typing. I’m going to try to aim for older SF writers.
Joanna Russ: Feminist sf writer who is probably best known for The Female Man. I have mostly read her Alyx stories (where she basically created a character that was the absolute negative image of the typical pulp sf/fantasy heroine). With Alyx, she used the basic assumption that the typical SF heroine is pretty, young, white, gentle, and demure. Alyx is a short Ancient Greek, middle-aged for her time period, and pragmatic/ruthless. I’ve also read some of her academic essays and short stories.
Andre Norton: I do not really classify her as a feminist writer. Sometimes her thinking is very feminist other times it is very, very not. Her writing falls more into the pulp-adventure style of SF writing rather than the Big Concept/Theme kind of SF writing. She writes a lot of coming-of-age stories, stories involving people with psychic powers, and so on. Makes some effort/attempt at writing non-white characters but often fails at clear representation. I recommend Star Man’s Son (aka Daybreak 2250 A.D.), Star Rangers, and The X-Factor. Also writes fantasy or a combo of fantasy and science fiction. Tends to write “technology bad, back to nature good,” but has also written “science good, people trying to blame science for bad things bad.”
Tanith Lee: Her sf/fantasy was both very dark and very psychological. Also extremely disturbing which is why it was always hard for me to read! Holy crap her stuff could be depressing. A lot of her themes involve sex/sexual obsession and so on. I have no real recommendations for this writer even though I’ve read her stuff. NOT a favorite writer. I do however recommend Don’t Bite the Sun and Electric Forest. Both are good examples of the kind of story she writes. If you like dark/horror themes in your fantasy/science fiction Tanith Lee is the writer for you.
Jayge Carr: I have actually only read one novel by Jayge Carr. Leviathan’s Deep. This book is about colonialism and imperialism. Our Heroine is a magistrate who is trying to stop the encroachment of the Terrene empire! Bad things happen! There’s a muckraking journalist who I suspect was dropped on his head too often as a baby because omfg. (It’s also a pretty good culture clash story between matriarchal aliens and patriarchal imperialist humans). Did not consider herself a “feminist” but there were definitely feminist ideas/themes in Leviathan’s Deep. The only reason I’ve only read Leviathan’s Deep is that her other books are Very Hard to find and the one I did, did not hit me in the same place as Leviathan’s Deep. (That is, a voracious need to find out more about the protagonist. Who is awesome.)
Judith Merril: Another writer where I haven’t read a lot of her work! Best known (to me at least) for her short story “That Only a Mother.” Mostly because it was horrifying, though not for the reasons I think the writer wanted it to be. (The story is one that I have Feelings about given the plot, which is “a woman gives birth to a mutant child and proceeds to be delusional about the child’s very obvious mutation.” Guess who I don’t identify with!)
Zenna Henderson: She’s best known for her “cozy” SF style. Gentle, simple solutions to complicated problems. Her stories tended toward Moralistic lessons about Being a Good Person. A lot of her stories feature teachers interacting with their students or children in general. It would however be a mistake to decide that her stories can’t have a bite to them. She wrote stories that dealt with generational trauma, abuse, and other mental health issues. One of her stories features a woman terrified to leave the house due to some unnamed disaster. Another story features a teacher who um. Gets abandoned just before an alien invasion because they interrupted an act of sympathetic magic being cast by the kids of the former colony.
Suzy McKee Charnas: I have only read a handful of books by this writer. The books in question are the Holdfast Chronicles, which are kind of horrifying in that they’re about a misogynistic society and a literal war between the sexes! There’s a very tight gender binary in the books of the Mars/Venus variety. Walk to the End of the World is super disturbing, but I liked Motherlines (which featured parthenogenic women who’d been created that way due to some pre-apocalypse science project) and The Furies. (For no reason I can name except mmm, revenge. Of course, then everyone has to figure out wtf to do next and no one knows which was also fun.) I deeply disliked The Conqueror’s Child.
Suzette Haden Elgin: Not a favorite but possibly best known for inventing a language that was supposed to be specifically designed for women. (IIRC Based on the assumption that women were more social/empathic and required a language that emphasized this/enabled them to communicate in those terms.) I am most familiar with the Ozark series (just the first book though) and the Native Tongue series (which I’ve only skimmed except for the last book which I retained no details of).
Alice Eleanor Jones: I have only read one story by this writer. (The only story I’ve found, but apparently she’s written others.) I am only recommending her BECAUSE of this story because it lived in my head rent-free for years since I read it as a little kid. “Created He Them.” It is a sad, depressing, and horrifying post-nuclear war story about a woman who is essentially staying with her verbally abusive husband because she and her husband are one of the few fertile people left who are having healthy children.
Phyllis Ann Karr: Technically a fantasy writer, though Frostflower and Thorn and Frostflower and Windbourne are in a post-nuclear war setting. I recommend her based on these two books because they managed to be extremely weird and extremely intriguing to me. (The setup is: Thorn is pregnant and does not want to be because she has no means to raise a child. Frostflower does in fact want a child and has the means to ensure the healthy birth of the child without Thorn losing work and starving to death and losing the baby anyway. Then things get super complicated!) Interesting worldbuilding!
Joan D. Vinge: If you know about her, she is best known most likely for her Snow Queen Cycle which takes elements from the Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale. And then does a lot of weird SF-related things to it. I also recommend the Cat series, though sometimes I think Vinge did NOT think things through in regard to the series (I’m sorry Ms. Vinge, but I think butch dom sex workers are going to be more careful and ask the cute twink for things like a) a safeword b) if he actually knows what he’s asking for with that handsign before they make a move). Also, she seems to like whumping poor Cat too much. This is very upsetting! Her works are about imperialism, colonialism and a few other isms.
Jo Clayton: Jo Clayton wrote both fantasy and science fiction. Her style tended toward both the anthropological and the pulpy. At the same time! Recurring themes tended to involve “Powerful opposing forces use people as pawns in their conflict,” and also “Some utter monster is creating live-action murder porn for entertainment.” And also, “criminals being criminal and occasionally heroic but still criminal.” (SKEEN you horrible-awesome graverobber you.) She tended toward doing crossovers between her various story universes which could be either entertaining, confusing, or both. I am a big-time admirer of her more experimental narrative structures. (As an example, the chapter headings in her Skeen Trilogy are essentially the Narrator-as-character chatting you up about the story. What’s going on. General feelings about how ANNOYING the antagonists are being. Skeen’s feelings about certain issues. And so on. At one point the Narrator pretty much tells you that you can write an au fanfic in which [spoiler] does not happen!)
C.J. Cherryh: A long-time favorite though there are some stories/novels by this writer I like over others. She writes both fantasy and science fiction and tends to lean toward Big Concept SF, though many of her other works (Such as the Morgaine series) are definitely pulpy. (Or that just might be my impression of the covers.) Her writing tends to focus on the psychology and inner motivations of the characters and her work tends to be political in the sense that there are overarching plots that the characters must move through or figure out. She also writes some pretty good family interactions (and by pretty good I mean “often pretty dysfunctional in believable and occasionally hilarious ways.” I recommend the Morgaine books, the Foreigner books and the Chanur books. A good standalone of hers is Cuckoo’s Egg.
There are a great many others but are not on this list because I a) did not think of them at the time b) do not like them c) never really read them. I may or may not cover them at a different time.
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