SF Women Read-A-Thon

I'm back! It's been a while since I've posted and I have a new project. I'm still going to read and review pretty much everything I read (including my yearlong backlog of read books, and including ARCs/galleys). But now I have a goal: prove to the world women have been writing sci-fi for as long as it has been around.

I'm tackling that goal by proving it to myself, first, by reading as much and as widely as I can by women who have written sci-fi. Then, when someone asks for recommendations for "something like Piers Anthony" or "really hard SF" I can offer up some great SF by a woman. Specifically a woman who is not Ursula Le Guin, who is amazing, but is so so often the only woman I see on 'best sci-fi' lists.

My methods are a little suspect but they're not difficult. I went to my favorite used bookstore and found about 20 sci-fi books written by women that were written in the 1970s or earlier. I picked women I'd never heard of, with a few exceptions for classics I hadn't read. It cost me about $16. I might end up reading a lot of mediocre sci-fi this way, but people have been reading a lot of mediocre sci-fi by dudes for decades and keep recommending those books so other people read them et cetera ad nauseum until they become canon. I know I'll also find some gems, then I'll recommend them, then hopefully other people will read them because I reached outside both the canon and my comfort zone.

Why? Because I want to help good books get read, and because people seem to believe that women don't write SF or don't write SF as well or didn't used to write SF for some reason and I want to prove them wrong. And because many good books by women especially from 30+ years ago get left on the shelf at the used bookstore because no one recommended them.

Largely, because every single time I go into a "looking for recs" thread for SF on reddit there are literally zero recommendations for books by women. Except Le Guin, probably because a lot of people didn't know Ursula was a woman's name when they were kids. (They only read a woman because they didn't know better!) In threads specifically requesting books by women there are always the 'why are you only reading women, that's sexist' responses, but when someone points out in other threads that only men have been rec'd, that's also called sexist. I'm tired of that. It is not the case that women don't write good enough SF to be recommended. It's not the case that women don't write SF, don't write hard SF, don't write good SF. 

And because these all seem to me to be problems that regardless of cause, I can't do much about except to be loud and vocal about books that I love, and to find more books I love and share them! So I'm going to stock my arsenal to launch a silo of recs.

I'm going to call this my Sci-Fi Women Read-A-Thon and tag my Goodreads shelves, Instagram, and blog posts with #readathon_sfwomen, so follow along!

I started this project about a month ago so I'm excited to see that other people like Liz Bourke from Tor.com feel the same way.