Feminist Science Fiction

Feminist science fiction is interested in world-making and world-exploring. How would alternative socio-technical worlds work and unfold? What can we learn for our own techno-scientific societies and futures? Here is an overview of books that adress these question and that I enjoyed reading — mainly feminist science-fiction, with some sprinkles of speculative fiction and hope punk. The books with an asteriks are graphic novels. As you will see I am big fan of Ursula K. Le Guin, Becky Chambers and Martha Wells.

Year of Publication	Title	Author	Some thoughts about how the books relate to themes important to my research
1818	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	A tale about the male pursuit of innovation in relation to competition and dominance; and a warning about the ways in which a neglect of care creates socio-technical monsters. I think Ursula Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” is a great complementary reading to Frankenstein.
1905	Sultana’s dream	Rokheya Hossain	This is an amazing book that dreams about feminist ways of knowledge production, technology design and use. The foreword by Michelle Murphy is very insightful.
1968	Do androids dream of electric sheep?	Philip K. Dick	A classic.
1969	The left hand of darkness	Ursula K. Le Guin	This classic has been criticised for its dichotomous gender representation and Le Guin herself acknowledged this later. However, it is great storytelling that captures the readers imagination.
1972	The Word for World is Forest	Ursula K. Le Guin	A book about colonialism its exstractivist logics. How can people respond to systemic violence and oppression?
1974	The Dispossessed	Ursula K. Le Guin	Read also: “The Day Before the Revolution”.
1975	The Female Man	Joanna Russ	I found this book challenging to read as it jumps between different perspectives and is clearly situated in second wave feminism. It’s a classic of early feminist science fiction and interesting to read with this perspective in mind.
1976	Woman on the edge of time	Marge Piercy	I came across Marge Piercy at EASST 2018 during a panel on feminist techno science. The novel is captivating and deeply moving. Her vision of a future, more equal society challenges many assumptions the protagonist holds about her place in the world.
1979	Kindred	Octavia E. Butler	This is a book that challenges assumptions about identity and the extent to which our agency is determined by the socio-political and material structures around us.
1985	The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	Another classic.
1991	He, she and it	Marge Piercy	A must read for anybody interested in questions around the relation of AI, autonomy and a better future.
1993	Parable of the Sower	Octavia E. Butler	Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the violence the book describes is at times difficult to bear. But it is also hopeful and thought-provoking.
1995	I who have never known men	Jacqueline Harpman	Very dark and dystopian book about a group of women who find themselves isolated on a distant planet and need to survive. It raises questions around gender identity, social norms and roles.
2009	The Windup Girl	Paolo Bacigalupi	The world building is fascinating, but the storytelling and story are awful.
2009	Corpus Delicti	Juli Zeh	A dystopian novel about a health dictatorship. What if we are obliged by law to live a healthy life and resist? Considers the ways in which monitoring and (self-)tracking devices impact on our autonomy.
2013 2014 2015	Ancillary Justice Ancillary Sword Ancillary Mercy	Ann Leckie	Anne Leckie’s Radch trilogy is brilliant storytelling with the protagonist being a spaceship AI. The Radch only know the female pronoun, making it interesting to read & reflect on the ways we imagine.
2014	Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	I loved this novel for its poetic language and its world building. Set in a post-pandemic world it considers questions about intergenerational conflict and future making.
2015	Binti	Nnedi Okorafor	Loved Binti for its world making and its main character: a Himba girl who embarks on a (space) journey to find answers to questions of identity and belonging. Very mystical.
2015	Bitch Planet*	Kelly Deconnick, Valentine de Landro	Great fun!
2015	Children of Time	Adrian Tchaikovsky	Children of Time questions narratives about progress, empathy and religion. A (the last remaining?) human spaceship desperately searches for a new home. Yet the only suitable one is already occupied by a matriarchal society of intelligent spiders.
2015	The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet	Becky Chambers	The four books of Becky Chambers’ wayfairer series were our happy sci-fi place during the Corona pandemic. My whole book club all fell in love with the first book and we decided to read them all. Wonderful world making, interspecies relations and questions about nature-culture | socio-technical agency.
2016	A Closed and Common Orbit	Becky Chambers
2016	Black Wave	Michelle Tea	Not strictly sci-fi, rather speculative fiction. A quirky, fun, strange, relatable journey to the end of the world.
2016	The Power	Naomi Alderman	What if… women were physically stronger than men? Would the world be a better place? What are characteristics of gender-based violence and oppression?
2016	Infomocracy	Malka Older
2017	The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red	Martha Wells
2017	Terra Nullius	Claire G. Coleman	What if we had records about the ways in which colonisation took place, not from the colonists’ point of view, but the view of those who were killed, enslaved, invisibilised and silenced.
2017	Autonomous	Annalee Newitz	This is a fast read, a thriller about bio-politics, AI, autonomy and (human) agency in the face of increasing corporate and state power.
2018	Before she sleeps	Bina Shah	We were not convinced.
2018	Record of a Spaceborn Few	Becky Chambers
2018	Semiosis	Sue Burke	What if plants were sentinel beings? This book follows the survivers of the (last?) human space ship over several generations on the ways in which they make a new planet their home.
2018	The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century	Olga Ravn	It’s a very quirky and strange novel that keeps you wondering what is actually happening. Highly enjoyable!
2018	Murderbot: Artificial Condition	Martha Wells
2018	Murderbot: Rogue Protocol	Martha Wells
2018	Murderbot: Exit Strategy	Martha Wells
2019	The Testaments	Margaret Atwood
2019	Infinite Detail	Tim Maughan	Set in Bristol this novel considers alternative ways of communal action in our hyperconnected world.
2019	LaGuardia*	Nnedi Okorafor	Fun graphical novel.
2020	Tentacle	Rita Indiana	This was the first book we read in our book club. It is a wild and quirky stories that takes place in post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo. “Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art.”
2020	Murderbot: Network Effect	Martha Wells
2020	Entanglement	Alina Leonova	Loved it! This book offers wonderful world-making in a post-apocalyptic world. It questions our sense of reality and how valid knowledge is produced.
2020	Ministry for the Future	Kim Stanley Robertson	Climate fiction that reads at times like a text book about geo-political or geo-engineering efforts. Interesting nevertheless.
2020	Q	Christina Dalcher	This is a novel that questions educational equity. Who determines what kind of education children should receive; and what happens if we increasingly rely on standardised tests and metrics.
2020	Crone*	Dennis Culver	One of the few books that has an older woman as its main hero.
2021	A Psalm for the Wild-Built	Becky Chambers	Anyone for tea?
2021	Amatka	Karin Tidbeck	Language is performative. In this world only those things continue to exist that are continuously named. The book’s atmosphere is very dark and at times depressing. It is, however, a super interesting read and great world-building.
2021	Klara and the sun	Kazuo Ishiguro	It’s an interesting book, but I enjoyed many of the others about human-robot relations a lot more.
2021	The Galaxy, and the Ground Within	Becky Chambers
2021	Murderbot: Fugitive Telemetry	Martha Wells
2021	DAVE	Raphaela Edelbauer	Interesting, dystopian world-making. A hierarchical society that lives inside a building structure under very rigid rules. It is at times quite a long read, but in the end has great plot.
2021	House of Rust	Khadija Abdalla Bajaber	Fabulous book that takes you to a very different world and way of storytelling.
2022	A Prayer for the Crown-Shy	Becky Chambers
2022	Thrust	Lidia Yuknavitch	I came across this book through the TinHouse podcast: “Crafting with Ursula” and really liked it. It aims to tell the stories not of heroes and heroic action, but of those who are usually forgotten and silenced.