So I asked on twitter for what people were looking for in Science Fiction and Fantasy Books they seek to read. This is my third column (the First can be found here, and the Second can be found here) where I offer suggestions in response to some of the answers you gave me on twitter. Note that I still am taking requests on twitter, so feel free to tweet me with what you'd like to see for me to make suggestions in future posts.
Today's post will deal with two more twitter followers with different requests: Books written by "ladies about ladies" and books that are epic in scope. More after the jump.
I'm not really much of a book cover person myself honestly, so I'm going to skip that part of this tweet - I get most of my books from lists and suggestions from authors' twitter accounts and blogs, and as such I rarely have a chance to really be browsing by covers in the first place. So let's talk about the other part of this request: Books written by ladies about ladies.Books written by ladies about ladies, mostly. I’m also a big judger of book covers.— De Facto Captain Merrin (@merrinish) November 18, 2018
Fun fact most people* don't know about the genre: there are as many great SF/F writers who are women as men and if you're still reading significantly more male authors than female authors, that's on you, not what's out there. In the past 23 months, I've read 308 books with a single author. Of those 308, 220 have been by women authors with only 88 being written by men.
*"Most people" here does not include the tweeter, as Merrin is another hockey/book blogger who is just as aware of this fact as I am. You should definitely follow her if you're following me.
Naturally I have a lot of books that thus fit the criteria, but let's narrow it down a little more, since recommending every book by a woman with a woman as lead protagonist is going to leave me with a LOT of books - let's only choose books in which most of our central characters are women (or identify as such).
Two Books/Series I've previously recommended in these posts fit the criteria pretty damn well and I'm going to quickly highlight them again here:
The Tiger's Daughter (Their Bright Ascendancy) by K. Arsenault Rivera (Review here) which is a phenomenal love story between two women in an epic fantasy world as they reach for their destiny of becoming gods who slay the powerful Traitor and his demon army in an East Asian inspired world. The sequel, The Phoenix Empress, just came out this year as well.
Heroine Complex, Heroine Worship, and Heroine's Journey by Sarah Kuhn (First book reviewed here) which I recommended in my last post is a series which features a group of Asian American Superheroines in San Francisco struggling with their own anxieties and insecurities, their friendships, and of course their romances. They're just so much fun.
Now for some new suggestions:
The Spiritwalker Trilogy (Cold Magic, Cold Fire, and Cold Steel) by Kate Elliott (First book Reviewed Here)
Kate Elliott is one of my favorite authors I've discovered in the past three years (I've read 14 novels by her over that span) and her Spiritwalker trilogy perfectly fits the nature of this request. The series takes place in an alternate fantasy version of our world circa 1800, in which the ice age never totally ended, the geopolitical conflicts went very differently such that much of Europe is under the control of mages using "cold magic." Moreover, there exists a parallel world, a spirit world, which touches our world in ways most people don't know of. In this world comes Catherine "Cat" Hassi Barahal and her cousin Beatrice "Bee" Hassi Barahal, who are the best of friends. But when Cat, who possesses a secret power to shroud herself with shadows and turn invisible, becomes given away to a rude young cold mage to fulfill a marriage contract, she finds both herself and Bee caught up in a conflict between both the human and spirit worlds that will change the world order forever.
Cold Magic begins slowly, but once it gets going, the trilogy is just oh so much damn fun. Cat is our first person narrator and is just an awesome character - highly intelligent but rashly impulsive, incredibly brave but also reckless, and damn passionate in her beliefs and desires. Her friendship with her cousin Bee forms a major part of the trilogy and this female friendship I suspect is a large part of what you'd be looking for in a book. And then of course there's the romance Cat gets into as she goes from Europa (Europe) to the Antilles (the Caribbean) to places not even of our own world as she attempts to find safety and stop those who would cause harm to those she loves. Oh and did I mention that basically all of the characters are PoC? It's a totally wild ride, but it's a fantastic one with an awesome different world and awesome different characters - and I've scrambled to read all of the other short stories in this universe I could find by Elliott because I haven't wanted to let it go.
The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar (Review Here)
The most literary book so-far in these suggestion posts so far, The Winged Histories is a stand-alone follow up to Samatar's "A Stranger in Olondria," that features the stories of four women in a fantasy country in the lead up to, the middle of, and the aftermath of a civil war. The book requires no reading of the prior novel and 99% ignores it, in favor of the telling of each woman's story in each of its four parts. The stories tell tales of wants, of love, of realizations of truths, etc etc as each woman comes to learn more about themselves and the people around them. It's a hard book to summarize really (I try in the linked review) so I'm not going to go any further in that regard here.
Samatar excels in writing beautifully, especially in her descriptions of events seen and felt by each of the characters. One character's story is written entirely in song, and it worked really well even for a reader like me, who generally avoids stories not told in straight prose. The stories are sometimes heart-wrenching, but they all center around these four women who are pushed into various roles by their societies only for them to each push back against those roles in order to live the lives they each really want. A beautiful book and recommended.
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Okay so let's try to meet both of these criteria here: at least one SciFi story with a space setting and a fantasy story with a dragon, with both settings having to be big/epic in scope. Despite what gets made into a movie these days, much SciFi and Fantasy is smaller in scope, dealing with characters facing more personal issues than epic ones. But there's plenty otherwise out there, naturally.Character driven stories with a big scope, and an epic feel. Space settings are preferable for Sci-Fi and my fantasy stories always need a dragon or two.— Kevin (@Kpower90) November 19, 2018
Let's start with Fantasy books, epic in scope, featuring Dragons!
Temeraire by Naomi Novik (Review of the First Book, His Majesty's Dragon, here)
Succinctly described as "The Napoleonic Wars, but with Dragons," Temeraire is a nine book series by Naomi Novik which wrapped in 2016. Set in an alternate world which is very different from our own due to the existence of Dragons - intelligent beasts of various sizes which can possess enormous power, the series follows Captain William Laurence who accidentally becomes the partner of a dragon captured at sea, the eager Temeraire, and becomes a part of the British Aerial Corp in their fight against Napoleon's forces. Laurence and Temeraire are essentially the co-protagonists of the series, and over the course of nine books they journey across the world (hitting every continent except for North America) as they attempt to help the British fight against Napoleon....without taking actions that could be found to be unjust or dishonorable.
Temeraire is definitely epic in fantasy scope, with dozens of characters both human and dragon introduced over the course of the series, and the books rarely tread the same ground twice. The battles, often altered from real ones occurring over the course of history, are fantastically well done, but the series is particularly great due to its characters - Laurence and Temeraire (especially Temeraire) are great fun and their compatriots over the course of the series are wide and varied and all well developed, with different interests and agendas apiece. The series' low points are what would be considered good from another series, and its high points, particularly in Book 5 and Book 9 (the final book), are really really good.
The House of Binding Thorns by Aliette de Bodard (Review Here)
The second book in de Bodard's "Dominion of the Fallen" series featuring an alternate circa 1900 Paris devastated by war and now ruled by Houses of Fallen Angels (known mainly as "Fallen") is probably not what one would think about with a book about dragons - the dragons here aren't Western dragons, but instead a kingdom of Vietnamese Dragons that resides under the Senne. The book follows from its predecessor, The House of Shattered Wings, but is mainly stand alone and features House Hawthorn, a house known for its seemingly-sadistic Fallen leader, Asmodeus, as the House attempts to form an alliance with the Dragon Kingdom. However, forces within both the House and the Dragon Kingdom have their own agendas that conflict with their leaders' and the conspiracy threatens to destroy all.
I really really enjoyed The House of Binding Thorns, whose lead characters have layers and layers to them beyond what you see on the surface and repeatedly surprises in its plot execution. And while the scope of this book never physically beyond the House and the Dragon Kingdom, the impact of the events therein affect the dividing line between life and death, and feature a conflict between immortal forces from very different origins....as well as conflicts and relationships between those immortals and the human denizens of Paris, and between the humans themselves simply caught in between. It's very different from most things I suspect many will read, and I highly recommend it.
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Okay now let's go on to the SciFi book suggestions:
The Indranan War Trilogy by KB Wagers (Review of First Book can be found Here)
Described on its own promotion as a space opera trilogy where its lead heroine merges Han Solo and Princess Leia, The Indranan War trilogy (Behind the Throne, After the Crown, & Beyond the Empire) is more unique than that. The series takes place a millennia in the future after humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and follows Hail Bristol, who has spent the last twenty years as a gunrunner around the galaxy under an assumed name. But Hail is also the daughter of the Empress of the Indranan Empire, a powerful Empire with traditions originating back on Earth and specifically India, and when her family begins being assassinated, Hail is brought back home against her will to serve as the heir to the throne. But the conspiracy that attempted to eliminate her whole family has more deadly intentions for the Empire as a whole, and Hail soon finds herself needing to use her skills as a gunrunner, as well as allies from not just home but from her criminal days, in order to prevent the Empire's destruction and to reclaim the throne that she very much never wanted.
The series begins as essentially political scifi before switching to full blown space opera, and is a lot of fun throughout thanks to some excellent dialogue and characters, and the action scenes, particularly the individual combat, are done really really well. The ending gets perhaps a little bit silly in the end, but the series is definitely epic in scope, with battles taking place between fleets of two different galactic empires, ship chases occurring throughout space, with multiple populated planets held in the balance. And again, I loved the characters so much, so that even the silly final sequence against the villain wasn't really much of a problem. Definitely recommended.
Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee
This trilogy - Ninefox Gambit, Raven Stratagem, and Revenant Gun, has picked up two Hugo award nominations and is one of my favorite series I've found in the past few years. The trilogy features a universe in which the dominant political structure, the Hexarchate, rules with an iron grip and imposes a strict calendar - derived from complicated mathematics - upon all those they conquer and rule - consisting of mandatory celebrations and ritual sacrifices. Divergence from the calendar can result in technology used by the Hexarchate failing, and as such, is punished severely . The trilogy beings when a brilliant mathematical mind, the soldier Kel Cheris, is tasked with retaking a fortress overtaken by heretics who want to project a different calendar. For this purpose, she finds body bound with the mind of Shuos Jedao, the Hexarchate's most brilliant general....albeit one whose final act was to commit a mass murder of his own troops. Along the way of the trilogy, Cheris will find herself forever changed by Jedao's influence, and the entire Hexarchate will feel the impact of Jedao's final strategy.
My description above is brutally insufficient but I don't want to spoil anything, but man did I love this trilogy, with the second book being particularly great. It can be a little tough to read at first, as the author does not bother trying to dumb things down or explain things to the reader (as the characters should already know all of these things), but if you get through it the result is an absolutely epic space opera with themes of the value of free will being very prominent and a roller coaster ride that is incredibly hard to predict. And the characters are just so damn good, with even the ultimate antagonist of the trilogy getting some great and fascinating development near the end.
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