Bustle Reads 2016 discussion

Suggestions: Kindred, Oryx and Crake and The Left Hand of Darkness. What else is out there?

I finished this task this week with Kindred and LOVED it. Highly recommend.

Kindred is high on my list too. Less on the sci fi universe range but with sci fi themes I'm wondering if Egg Dancing counts. It sounds like it does and I'm really keen to give it a go.

I'm reading Wild Seed by Octavia Butler and I'm really enjoying it. I'm a bit of a slow reader (maybe a chapter or two a day) but I'll post my thoughts when I'm done.

Left Hand is really dated and has a strongly misogynist main character. I like it but I'm not sure everyone would... or that everyone would agree it's a feminist book. The author would probably be the best known author who has deliberately written a lot of feminist sci-fi... but she wrote more full-on feminist stuff later and I would rather encourage people to start with her short fiction than her novel-length works.
Atwood's relationship with both feminism and SF is... well, complicated. She's a great writer but I wouldn't necessarily bring up her works in this context.
As far as novel-length works, one of Butler's would on the other hand be one of the first things I would recommend. Kindred however isn't really SF (though I guess it depends on the definition), and neither is Wild Seed. My first choice would instead be a book that's very much SF (so much so that it's almost cliche) and which has been published under the names Dawn, Lilith's Brood and Xenogenesis (the latter two include Dawn and its sequels but they're all short enough that the combined wordcount isn't very high). It's feminist in more than one way though the main topic is broader. One warning however: horrible stuff happens and even more horrible things are discussed.

What else is out there?
One answer would be feministsf.org but actually there's more out there depending on your definitions of feminist and sci-fi... what are you looking for exactly?

Also, some GR links:
https://www.goodreads.com/genres/femi...
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2...

I'm reading Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Well, rereading as we read it in high school. I know Atwood strongly believes she doesn't write sci if but speculative fiction, but I'm happy to consider that a part of sci fi.

I will be interested to hear what you think of it on the reread. I just read it last year for the first time since 8th grade and enjoyed the experience.

Who Fears Death

I'm currently reading Dawn by Octavia Butler. Read someone else's post up there. I just can't get into this category or any of the dystopian/post-apocalyptic stuff. But I'm powering through. I agree that it is "so sci fi that it's almost cliche". Going to read fast so I can be done with it. Grrrrr...

I loved The Handmaid's Tale as much as I recall loving it in high school. I didn't want to put it down.

I finished Dawn. I hate to admit it, but it was good! I may have to finish the series at a later time. Haha!

I read The Handmaid's Tale too...to be honest I didn't love it. I could see how clever it was, but I found it hard to get absorbed into the characters? Probably just me, I know it's considered a classic! Glad to have finally read it though.

Woman on the Edge of Time. I'm glad to know about the misogyny in Left Hand of Darkness, that drives me to distraction when I'm reading. I read Atwoods Handmaid a few years back. Some of it stuck with me, but I didn't like it.

I read Freehold. It's a favorite of mine. I downloaded it from Baen's free library.
The first and second halves of the book are different enough it could have been two books. Luckily, the author didn't do that.
The story would flow better with some editing, in my opinion. There is a section at the end of the book explaining all the military terminology used in the story.

I started with Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, which is interesting because the main character speaks a language that doesn't differentiate gender at all, so the narration uses she as the pronoun for all the characters. We only find out about a handful of them, when she's speaking other languages where gender is important. Anyways, I liked it enough that I read the rest of the trilogy as well.

I read Kindred. This book has haunted me ever since I've read it. I loved it and would recommend it. The idea that someone would have to go through what the main character goes though is thought provoking and scary at the same time.