Women in Sci-Fi and Fantasy/Game of Thrones

[lph]

I had the same reaction to many of Robin Hobbs' books. I love them, but I keep waiting for the plot to actually go somewhere substantial. It does, eventually, but in the meantime you'd better enjoy the characters!

[Eden]

I read a really good series recently by Lynne Flewelling - the Tamir Triad - full of very strong women and a bit of gender bending (it's crucial to the plot, so I won't give anything more away)
The Bone Doll's Twin
Hidden Warrior
The Oracle's Queen

She also did (does? not sure if there will be more) the Nightrunner series, which in addition to being just plain old good fantasy, also has well rounded and non-sterotypical LGBT characters

[OakLeaf]

One thing I really loved about Ancillary Justice is that the narrator speaks a language that has no gender, and to "translate" the narrator's thoughts into English, Leckie uses generic feminine pronouns, even with respect to characters that she identifies as biologically male. It's pretty much incidental to the plot, other than a reinforcement of how many of the characters are distinctly post-human, but it forces the reader to confront their own gender stereotypes CONSTANTLY.

[Don Deitz]

Catherine Asaro has some great sci-fi. Some really great and very strong female characters. It's an inter-stellar empire political/battle series of books. Some of her descriptions of faster-than-light travel and other technologies are short and very readable but there are a sentence or two in those sections which are very enjoyable if you took a few graduate classes in quantum mechanics. You don't need to know any science to appreciate the novels.

[OakLeaf]

Robert Jordan ... admitted he didn't feel able to write female characters so hence no ladies in his first book of "The Wheel of Time" series. He said he was going to use his wife to help him write female characters.

That just strikes me as incredibly lazy. He only knows one woman? And rather than get to know a few of the other half of the world's population, as maybe just some kind of prerequisite to being a writer, he wants the only woman he knows to do his job for him?

Contrast that with this, from a recent interview with Max Gladstone:

When I’m writing a new character, especially in a fantasy, I try really hard to reject the idea that ol’ straight white normally-abled cis Max is the Default Norm Human. It’s just not true. I hard about who my characters are and what they could be, demographically speaking, and then build those character traits into the story.