Fav. SF/F with Strong Female Leads
Discover top science fiction and fantasy books with strong female leads. Explore empowering stories of heroines who defy odds in these must-read SF/F novels.
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The Snow Queen
by Joan D. Vinge
An epic, Hugo Award-winning novel that draws upon the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Snow Queen.
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ID: 0809500604
(Type: books)
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Wild Seed
by Octavia E. Butler
Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex -- or design. He fears no one -- until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss...and savage anyone who threatens those she loves. She fears no one -- until she meets Doro. From African jungles to the colonies of America, Doro and Anyanwu weave together a pattern of destiny that not even immortals can imagine.
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Keeping it Real
by Justina Robson
The Quantum Bomb of 2015 changed everything. The fabric that kept the universe's different dimensions apart was torn and now, six years later, the people of earth exist in uneasy company with the inhabitants of, amongst others, the elfin, elemental, and demonic realms. Magic is real and can be even more dangerous than technology. Elves are exotic, erotic, dangerous, and really bored with the constant Lord of the Rings references. Elementals are a law unto themselves and demons are best left well to themselves. Special agent Lila Black used to be pretty, but now she's not so sure. Her body is more than half restless carbon and metal alloy machinery, a machine she's barely in control of. It goes into combat mode, enough weapons for a small army springing from within itself, at the merest provocation. As for her heart, well, ever since being drawn into a game by the elfin rockstar Zal (lead singer of The No Shows), who she's been assigned to protect, she's not even sure she can trust that any more either.
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Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.") From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin This book has been published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the cover available.
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ID: 0819562718
(Type: books)
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Slow River
by Nicola Griffith
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide. Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed. Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future. But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be...
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Heretics of Dune
by Frank Herbert
Thousands of years after the death of God Emperor Leto II, the Bene Gesserit and the Bene Tleilax struggle to direct the future of Dune, now called Rakis
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In Conquest Born
by C.S. Friedman
In Conquest Born is the monumental science fiction epic that received unprecedented acclaim—and launched C.S. Friedman's phenomenal career. A sweeping story of two interstellar civilizations—locked in endless war, it was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award.
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Survival
by Julie Czerneda
After her partner is kidnapped and the Earth is attacked by an alien race called the Ro, biologist Dr. Mackenzie Connor is forced into helping an alien archaeologist discover the truth behind the area of space known as the Chasm. Reprint.
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The Living Blood
by Tananarive Due
Award-winning author Tananarive Due's spine-tingling tale of supernatural suspense "weaves a stronger net than ever" ("Kirkus Reviews") as a woman searches for inherited power that can save her hometown from the forces of evil.
