Really Good Lesbian/Feminist Science Fiction
Explore the best lesbian and feminist science fiction books! Discover empowering stories, strong female leads, and groundbreaking LGBTQ+ themes in this curated list of must-read sci-fi novels.
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Accidental Creatures
by Anne Harris
Anne Harris returns with an outstanding look at the near future. Never before has her technological insight been so acute, or her portrayal of sex and gender issues more startling or insightful. A bio-technology corporation has created a new species, intelligent, four-armed, humanoid "tetras" who can live in the vats in which "the company" grows biopolymers. Both the tetras and the human vat-divers they were created to replace are at the mercy of vicious corporate politics. But soon the victims become the aggressors, and something amazing, a transcendent change, occurs not only in their lives, but throughout the world. Anne Harris has created an extraordinary, breathtaking vision of the future.
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Hand of Prophecy
by Severna Park
A galaxy whirls in conflict as tyrant slavers prepare to reclaim the frontier planets wrested from them generations ago. Living on one of the forfeited worlds they covet most is Frenna, bred for bondage and given a virus that guarantees two decades of youth for servitude, followed by an agonizing death. But then she learns an amazing secret: the end is not inevitable. There is an escape. An antidote. A cure. Yet Frenna's escape is into an exotic, bloodswept world, a fierce arena where muscled slaves wage brutal battles for their masters' amusement. Frenna has become a medic: her job is to administer a mercifully quick end to the mortally wounded. But she still carries the secret of freedom. And as warships arrive in conquest, this last hope must survive in a murderous domain of monstrous holograms and irresistible deadly potions. In the final frenzy, sisters and lovers, killers and saviors, all will be swept together in a maelstrom of annihilation, survival and redemption.
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Speaking Dreams
by Severna Park
A tautly-told lesbian science fiction tale of slavery and spiritual freedom, power and resistance, love and destiny.
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A Door Into Ocean
by Joan Slonczewski
The Sharers of Shora are a nation of women on a distant moon in the far future who are pacifists, who are highly advanced in biological sciences, and who reproduce by parthenogenesis-- because there are no males. Conflict erupts when a neighboring civilization decides to develop their ocean world and sends in an army.
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The Slave and The Free
by Suzy McKee Charnas
Walk to the end of the world. Alldera the Messenger is a slave among the Fems, in thrall to men whose own power is waning.
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The Iron Bridge
by David E. Morse
A woman from the 21st century travels back in time to 1773 England to cause the collapse of a bridge under construction. An ecological commune in the U.S. hopes this will derail the Industrial Revolution, thus saving the world from its consequences.
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Dark Water's Embrace
by Stephen Leigh
Struggling with rising infertility and infant mortality, repopulation is essential for a group of humans on a distant planet. Anais, a brilliant female doctor with inexplicable physical abnormalities identical to her own in the preserved corpse of a member of the planet's long-extinct race, she must find the link between the mysteries of the planet's past and the plight of the humans in order for her society to survive.
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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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Vigilant
by James Alan Gardner
A member of the Vigil, monitors of government corruption, Faye Smallwood suddenly becomes the target of a sinister and lethal conspiracy threatening to unleash a deadly plague on the planet and joins forces with outcast explorer Festina Ramos to unravel the mystery. Original.