It’s difficult to believe that the final week of the month is over—thank you so much to all of last week’s guests! Here’s a brief overview of last week in case you missed any of their essays:
- Fran Wilde (Bone Universe Trilogy, “The Jewel and Her Lapidary”) discussed shifting perspectives in books within a series, both in general and within Updraft, Cloudbound, and Horizon. She also asked the authors of some of her own favorite series to share their reasons: N. K. Jemisin on her Inheritance trilogy, Aliette de Bodard on her Dominion of the Fallen novels, and Elizabeth Bear on her Edda of Burdens trilogy.
- Nisi Shawl (Everfair, Filter House) discussed age and women in SFFH: “We are it. This, more than anything else, is the connection I want everyone to make between old women and speculative fiction: equivalence. Identity. Like all humans we face the unknown every day; unlike most humans, we know that.”
- Megan Whalen Turner (Queen’s Thief, Instead of Three Wishes) shared how her local bookstore highlighted books by women during Women’s History Month and discussed the importance of Discovery: “I believe that Discovery, the process of finding books and authors that are new, is the most important aspect of increasing diversity in publishing.”
- C. A. Higgins (Lightless trilogy) discussed the process of writing Constance in Supernova: wanting to create a largely unsympathetic heroine and discovering how to make her climactic scene work.
- Bridget McKinney (SF Bluestocking) wrote about the incredible work women are currently producing in SFF and recommended ten books that may offer some hope (including but not limited to Binti: Home, All the Birds in the Sky, and Sorcerer to the Crown).
We will continue to collect speculative fiction books by women to add to the 2017 list for another week: click here to add up to 10 SFF books by women you read and loved in the last year. You can find the list of recommendations from 2013-2016 here.
This month’s Patreon book theme was science fiction selected for a James Tiptree Award honor, and I posted my review of April’s selection yesterday: Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler. It was fascinating, unsettling, engaging, disturbing—and I loved it!
April 2017 has come to an end, and it is possible that this was the last Women in SF&F Month—or, at least, the last one that fills the entire month. It’s been great fun, but it is very time-consuming to organize and keep going for an entire month. Since I do enjoy reading all the essays, I am reluctant to end it entirely, which is why I’m considering perhaps just making it two weeks in April next year, but I’ll have to see what’s going on in my life when the time comes.
In case this does end up being the last Women in SF&F Month series, I want to say thank you to everyone who has written a piece over the last six years, everyone who has shared these articles on social media, and everyone who has read these articles. It has been a pleasure, and I’ve been floored by the incredible essays that have been part of this series since it first began in 2012.
