LQ's Faves

These are just some of my favorite things ... My criteria? Excellent writing, often experimental writing; excellent storytelling (believable characterization & plots); conceptually intriguing, interesting ideas; and often (not always) these works make me laugh out loud, even if they're treating the most serious of subjects. Note: There are many other writers who I think are excellent writers, and there are many other writers who are comfort-food to me, or fun, or interesting for one reason or another -- but these books below are the ones I can read over & over, and I respect them technically. -- lq, 6/5/00

• Patricia Anthony. God's Fires
• Marci Blackman. Po Man's Child (some magic realism)
• Katharine Burdekin. Swastika Night
• Octavia Butler. Wild Seed.
• Suzy McKee Charnas. The Holdfast/Motherlines series: Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, The Furies, and The Conqueror's Child
• Candas Jane Dorsey. Black Wine
• Suzette Haden Elgin. Native Tongue
• Karen Joy Fowler. Sarah Canary
• Ellen Galford. The Dyke and the Dybbuk
• Jewelle Gomez. The Gilda Stories
• Carol Guess. Switch
• Anne Harris. Accidental Creatures
• Bertha Harris. Lovers
• Ursula K. Le Guin. Always Coming Home.
  The Dispossessed.
  Dancing at the Edge of the World (essays)
  And just about everything she's written, honestly.
• Astrid Lindgren. All three Pippi books. Pippi Longstocking, Pippi in the South Seas, and Pippi Goes On Board
• Elizabeth Lynn. Tornor trilogy: Watchtower, The Dancers of Arun, and The Northern Girl
• Naomi Mitchison. Memoirs of a Spacewoman
• Pat Murphy. The City, Not Long After
• Alice Nunn. Illicit Passage
• Marge Piercy. Woman on the Edge of Time.
  He, She, and It.
  Dance the Eagle to Sleep
  and all kinds of other things she's written ...
• Rachel Pollack. Temporary Agency and Unquenchable Fire.
  Godmother Night - sad, intense, but excellent
• Joanna Russ. Her short stories, especially.
• Sheri Tepper. Beauty.
  The Gate to Women's Country.
  Grass.
  The Family Tree
• James Tiptree, Jr. "Your Faces, O My Sisters!" in Aurora: Beyond Equality.
  "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" in Aurora: Beyond Equality.
• Elisabeth Vonarburg. The Silent City.
  In the Mother's Land.
• Sylvia Townsend Warner. Lolly Willowes or, The Loving Huntsman (1925)
• Sarah Waters. Affinity
  (and Tipping the Velvet, although it's not sf)
• Jeannette Winterson. The Passion
  (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is actually my favorite of her works, but it's not sf)