And they’re all women

As a corollary to my last post, I just realized that all the authors I talked about (Jensen, Willis, Monette, and Clarke) are women. In fact, although like many fans of SF/F I started off with Tolkien and Lewis, I find myself drawn primarily to women writers in current SF/F these days. As I think about the books I’ve read in the past year for the first time, these are the ones that stand out to me:

Narrative Voice

I’m currently in the middle of My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen. I am already a sucker for time-travel stories (Connie Willis’s hilarious To Say Nothing of the Dog and terrifying Doomsday Book are two of my all-time favorite books), and Jensen’s feisty, clever narrator Charlotte provides a unique and delightful narrative voice that elevates what is so far a fairly middle-of-the-road plot to something amazing.

Charlotte is a prostitute in Copenhagen in 1897, charming, street-smart, curious, selfish, and Romantic with a capital R — the sort of character who claims adamantly and repeatedly that the woman who is obviously her mother is not, in fact, related to her at all.