April has come to an end, and so has the fourth annual Women in SF&F Month. Thank you so much to each of this year’s participants for their guest posts—they made this month’s series of guest posts possible, and it was wonderful to read their articles! There were lots of great discussions on a range of topics—writing a gender system, romance, writing with depression, Octavia Butler, refusal to read books by women, older science fiction written by women, working for ongoing representation—and more. Of course, my reading list also expanded since there were also lots of fantastic recommendations for a variety of books by women from science fiction to SF&F comics to not-necessarily-SF&F comics to recent/upcoming debuts, as well as books featuring epic female protagonists and mature women. If you missed any guest posts during the event, you can find all of this year’s posts here.
Also, thank you to to Renay for her continued work on the list of recommended science fiction and fantasy books by women. She began this project, in which we collected reader recommendations of favorite SF&F books by women, during Women in SF&F Month 2012. Last year’s submissions brought the list to over 1,000 individual titles, which can be sorted by the number of times they were entered. This year, we’ve been collecting more reader-recommended favorites. We have about 1,000 submissions so far this year, but we’d love even more so we are leaving this open for a couple more weeks before collecting the data. If you haven’t already submitted some books this year, you can add up to 10 of your favorite science fiction and/or fantasy books by women here. If you have filled it out, thanks so much—the more contributions, the better, and it’s been exciting to see the growth of the list!
It’s been a very busy month (I also just moved and have mountains of boxes to unpack!). I probably won’t be blogging this weekend due to having a lot to catch up with, but check back on Tuesday for a guest post on violence in genre fiction written by Gemsigns author Stephanie Saulter!
