Recently, a younger person reading a vintage award-winning novel I will not name beyond saying that it was Larry Niven’s Ringworld… um let’s see, where was I… this younger person observed that the primary woman character in the book was limited to serving as eye-candy and also as someone to whom the novel’s unlovable protagonist Louis Wu could explain things at great length. The usual conversation ensued, including an assertion that the novel is a product of its time1.
One might infer, therefore, that to look to older SFF for interesting women characters is futile. This is incorrect. Older SFF offers a bell curve of representation where women characters are concerned. Authors like Niven, Garrett, Laumer, and early Anderson are over at what we will diplomatically call the MCP end of the scale. There is another end of the scale, as these five vintage stories demonstrate.
Jirel from Black God’s Kiss by C.L. Moore (1934)
Warlord Guillaume is astounded to discover that the small kingdom of Joiry’s most ardent defender is the fierce warrior woman Jirel. Guillaume’s army overcomes the keep’s defenses. Guillaume is certain that Jirel will surely swoon at his feet provided he dominates her sufficiently.
This assessment is flawed. Jirel is extremely possessive of her little kingdom and is little inhibited by morals when it comes to keeping that which is hers. If her impressive martial prowess is insufficient, there are always demonic forces Jirel can employ.
Moore did have a small advantage when it came to realizing that women could be more than eye-candy, plot rewards, or (if in a Venus Equilateral story) someone who can smirk knowingly as their engineer boyfriend does something that is clearly going to end in tears. Catherine Moore was a woman herself2. The remaining examples are all by men3.
Martha Dane from Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper (1957)
Expeditions from Earth to Mars found a nearly dead world. Like Earth, Mars gave birth to a race of (surprisingly human-looking) intelligent beings. While long extinct, the Martians left vast troves of written material humans could easily peruse… if only there were any way to decipher an unknown written language unrelated to any known language.
Enter Martha Dane. The task of deciphering Martian seems impossible. Her coworkers are not exactly supportive. However, there is something that can serve as Martian’s Rosetta Stone, and Martha will be one to discover it.
Competent women are a recurring element in Piper’s fiction (the one novel where women are relegated to secondary status is set in a damaged society). I could cite characters like Ruth Ortheris, Princess Rylla, Sylvie Jacquemont—but they were supporting characters. In this novella, Dane is the protagonist.
Grandma Erisa Wannattel from “The Second Night of Summer” by James H. Schmitz (1950)
Some in the Valley of Wend see Grandma Wannattel as a source of amusement. Others value her folk medicine. Local authorities are inclined to view her as disruptive—a convenient scapegoat for untoward developments. Who better to blame than an eccentric old lady without any obvious powerful allies?
Grandma Wannattel has powerful allies whose nature would astound Wend. She does not need them. She was selected for her task because the Department of Galactic Zones on far-off Jeltad knew she had the skills and determination necessary for success. If the Department’s assessment is wrong, if Grandma is not up to the task, then Wend, along with the rest of the planet Noorhut, is doomed.
Schmidt is another Golden Age author fond of strong women leads. The problem here was to narrow down the possible examples to just the one.
Mia Havero from Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin (1968)
The Ships delivered colonists to their new homes, saving them from doomed Earth. The Ships use their carefully sequestered wealth of Terrestrial technology to rule the colonies. They dribble out tech secrets in return for the raw materials they need. They are particularly vigilant to ensure that no colonies allow explosive population growth (which they believe doomed Earth). Not every colony world is happy with this oversight, which is why from time to time the Ships scour disobedient colony worlds clean of life.
Twelve-year-old Mia Havero grew up on a Ship. Mia has no reason to think of the current state of affairs as anything but natural and just. Mia will soon face her Trial. The Trial’s purpose is to determine if the tween is fit to live aboard a Ship. The Trial’s actual result is to open Mia’s eyes to injustices that she previously ignored.
The novel features sympathetic characters, competent prose, and a good narrative pace. Some people have called this the best Heinlein juvenile not written by Heinlein.
Granny Weatherwax from Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett (1987)
On the Discworld, it is a well-established fact that the eighth son of an eighth son will be a wizard. Wizard Drum Billet, desirous of a worthy successor, seeks out just such an eighth of an eighth… only to realize too late that Esk may be the eighth child of an eighth son, but she’s a daughter, not a son.
The wizarding world is not keen on social reform. Just because Esk’s possession of a staff means she has the potential to be a wizard does not mean that the wizards approve of the development. Enter the formidable Granny Weatherwax. Granny is no wizard. She is just a witch determined to reshape the world into a more pleasing order, and a witch with sufficient skill and determination to do so.
I know for a lot of people, 1987 is too recent to be considered older. Alas, the median age of a human on Earth is 30.62 years. 2024 less 31 years would be 1993. More than half the human population was not even born when Equal Rites was published. Also the 1980s were a golden age of backlash against women in speculative fiction, as detailed here, not to mention a certain infamous essay that enhanced the stature of cyberpunk in part by erasing all of the SF written by women in the 1970s. But then, when hasn’t there been a backlash against women underway?
Of course, there were certainly more than five SFF authors who managed to rise above their time and place when it came to writing women characters. No doubt I overlooked authors, and works, that are utterly obvious to my devoted readers. Feel free to mention these works in comments below.
- It is a curious thing but… despite having read thousands of science fiction novels, I have never once encountered a book that was not a product of its time. No books published in the 20th century that could only have been written in the year 44,675; no books remaining from the End Permian. This might have something do with the structure of space-time and the nature of causality. ↩︎
- I can’t help but notice that of Moore’s two leads, Jirel and Northwest Smith, it’s the male, Smith, who is irresistibly attractive, possesses the defensive skills and wariness of a baby rabbit, and depends on other people to save him over and over. It is almost as though Moore took all the negative stereotypes usually applied to women characters in ’30s pulp fiction and applied them to a man, then made him the protagonist. ↩︎
- Was I tempted to just quietly include something by the ineluctably masculine James Tiptree, Jr.? I was indeed. ↩︎
Pratchett’s early novel ‘Strata’, in which the idea of a flat world first emerges, also features a formidably competent female protagonist, Kin Arad.
Since 1987 counts as Ye Classicke Era: there are few females as formidable as Cordelia Naismith, from Shards of Honor in June 1986.
Digression: My candidate for “best Heinlein juvenile not written by Heinlein” is John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless. The only thing that might disqualify it is that the people are people with all their failings and griefs, and they are perhaps written better than anything by Heinlein. But I digress from the topic here.
My first thought when I saw the post title was “Is Shards of Honor old enough to qualify as classic? Probably yeah, I’m just old now”.
Margaret Strange and her daughter, Lady Eleanor of Purbeck, are as formidable as they come, and as close to primary characters as can be found in Keith Roberts’ Pavane.
Then there’s the Chief Officer of Sisu in Citizen of the Galaxy. Some might consider her a minor character, but I wouldn’t want to be the one to inform her of that.
I rarely recommend Asimov these days, since we found out what a creep he was, but there was a window in the 1940s where he was writing about women as if they were human beings. In particular I think of Bayta Darrell in “The Mule” who figures out everything, kills without mercy, and saves the universe (or at least Seldon’s Plan).
Then there’s Virginia Matuchek (née Graylock), witch, scholar, and special ops agent in Anderson’s Operation Chaos, which is like Heinlein’s Magic, Inc, but better.
Three is a magic number, so maybe I should name Kaththea Tregarth as my third example, the female member of a set of sorcerous triplets, who loses her magical power and risks death and disaster to regain it in Norton’s trilogy beginning with Three Against the Witch World, continuing in Warlock of the Witch World, and concluding in Sorceress of the Witch World.
If I recall correctly, Virginia Matuchek was explicitly modeled after Virginia Heinlein.
As soon as you said “Asimov,” I thought of Bayta Darrell. I was also struck by how much stronger and richer she was than Asimov’s reputation for writing female characters would lead one to expect. I think Noys Lambent in The End of Eternity also kind of works — she starts out seeming to be your stock sex-object character, but the story ends up subverting that quite a bit.
Dr. Susan Calvin was great, except for the story “Liar!” which I despised, and which stepped all over the feminist message that came with her. Probably on purpose.
I’d hardly call Susan Calvin a feminist character. She was an exemplar of the commonplace stereotype that a woman could only be capable in a typically male profession if she were cold, sexless, and unfeminine, a perpetual spinster. There are plenty other such lady-scientist characters in older SF, although the attractive ones usually ended up falling for the male hero and giving up their scientific careers to become barefoot and pregnant. Calvin was exempt from that because she was unattractive.
After all, “Liar!” was the first Susan Calvin story Asimov wrote. So her lovelorn behavior there was what she “came with.” It was later stories that allowed her to grow beyond that unflattering beginning, though still within the conventions of the era’s gender portrayals.
I was thinking about tEoE today for some reason, and forgetting her name but remembering that she turns out to be smarter than the nominal lead; I haven’t read the book in a long time but am wondering whether we were clued that the male lead’s first mistake was treating her as a sex object.
Actually I think it was kind of the opposite; Harland was very puritanical and disdained the open sexuality of the century Noys came from. Though I guess in that sense he did dismiss her as nothing more than his boss’s sexual plaything.
Although that was hardly his first mistake, since the story is pretty much about how he learns that he’s been making many, many mistakes for a very long time.
Something I ran across when I did my 50 Nortons in 50 Weeks project is that Norton got push back when she started using women protagonists in the 1960s.
Martha Dane is my favorite character in all of Piper. Maybe in all of science fiction!
Maybe C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine? In my hazy memory her younger helper is the viewpoint character, but Morgaine is definitely the star of these novels.
I was about to namecheck Morgaine!
I would like to add Killashandra Ree, Crystal Singer [Anne McCaffrey].
Cherryh also has Bet Yeager of Rimrunners.
and the Chanur series
And Ari Emory, and Pyanfar Chanur, and whatshername of Serpent’s Reach. I think Downbelow has both Signy Mallory and a married Konstantin. Probably forgetting some.
Cherryh has many strong female characters.. Illisidi from the Foreigner series who is not even the main character.
The one from Serpent’s Reach is Raen a Sul hant Meth-maren.
Thanks. I remembered “Meth-maren” as a name (mostly that the oldest human was one) but didn’t know if it was her clan. I like the book a fair bit, but the names didn’t stick despite re-readings.
Alyx in Joanna Russ’ stories is very formidable.
Absolutley, Russ’s Alyx was groundbreaking, and completely changed the playing field. Jirel of Joiry is important too, but her stories weren’t reprinted in book form until the late 1960s after many of the Alyx stories had already been published. A number of critics have said that every modern day female action hero owes a debt to Alyx.
Eleanor Arnason has very interesting women in Ring of Swords and Woman of the Iron People, both published in the early 1990s.
Anne McCaffery has a few, starting with Lessa from the first Pern novel and Killashandra from the Crystal Singer series. If ’93 is the cutoff, Sassinak from the Planet Pirate books squeaks in under the wire.
On which note, Elizabeth Moon, who cowrote the Planet Pirates, released her Sheepfarmer’s Daughter in 1988, and Paksennarion is definitely a badass.
My reading group was a bit concerned that Jirel does swoon at the end of “Black God’s Kiss”, and she quests in “Black God’s Shadow” to undo her vengeance. But there was still a lot to love about her.
We were reading The Future is Female! Vol. 1 (ed. by Lisa Yaszek), which collects women sf writers from the 1920s through the ’60s. Not surprisingly, a good number of strong female protagonists are featured.
Jirel’s swoon is much easier to accept if you look at her falling for Guillaume once he’s doomed as the price the Black God exacts from her for her vengeance.
A little-known case that I was clued into by an early (4 decades ago) netizen putting together a bibliography of female protagonists: Kynance Foy, in Brunner’s A Planet of Your Own , breaks a monopoly whose representative made the mistake of treating her as a sex object instead of a bright graduate of law school. (Unlike many Ace Double halves, this was republished, per ISFDB as an ebook in 2011). My contact thought that Foy was the first female outright leading character in SF; Martha Dane comes 9 years earlier, but ISTR she’s major but not leading. The story is not prime Brunner even from that time in his career — I suspect he padded it to make up the required length — but Foy is unstoppable.
I haven’t read “The Blazing World”, but it’s about a woman who is sole survivor of her own kidnapping and… it’s probably more of a fantasy, but it was published in 1666, yes 1666, so there wasn’t a lot of difference then. There also are “Wonder Woman” (1941, technically fantasy inasmuch as gods are involved, again) and also two incarnations of “The Golden Amazon” (1939, 1944). One spaceship-wrecked on Venus, I’m told, who grows up super-powered there, and another who is “the subject of a glandular experiment as a baby” – I suspect these are contradictory, and conceivably cribbed from Superman and Captain America’s origins. Intriguingly to Wonder Woman readers, or possibly well known, the character’s civilian name is Violet Ray. These may not meet your leading SF character conditions, and also may be excruciatingly bad. Specifically her first appearance – “Violet Ray, mystery woman of space, comes to earth on an errand of destruction, and Chris Wilson follows into the void, seeking revenge.” I’m guessing he is boyfriend material.
“Violet Ray” is probably a play on ultraviolet rays, and Wonder Woman’s Purple Healing Ray may have been independently based on the same reference.
Also from the 80s is Mercedes Lackey; Oathbound has two badass female leads (and was written partially as a response to the above-mentioned backlash, plus Talia in the Arrows books. Diana Tregarde’s from ’89 too, so also her.
There is Angelina from The Stainless Steel Rat (novel published in 1961). She is the antagonist there, but she becomes a supporting character in The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge (1970). Definitely formidable.
Does C’mell count? She was a girlygirl, and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won.
Jo Clayton’s Aleytys starts off the Diadem books as your standard damsel in distress, moved willy-nilly here and there as the plot requires, but over the course of the books she experiences some pretty radical character development and ends up completely unrecognisable to her earlier self.
from the same author, Skeen the Rooner is pretty darn formidable.
Come to think of it, I can’t recall any of Clayton’s female characters who aren’t a candidate for your article.
Diana Brackley (Trouble with Lichen) is John Wyndham’s one female protagonist (of a novel), but his female deuteragonists tend to run to the formidable.
Other Schmitz women include Telzey Amberdon, Trigger Argee and Nyles Etlund.
Dr. Susan Calvin is perhaps more talented than formidable.
Returning to Discworld, there’s Angua von Uberwald, Sybil Rankin and Cheery Littlebottom.
If we’re revisiting Schmitz, you don’t want to mess with any of the witches of Karres.
Schmitz’s younger female characters are a mixed bag; Nile Etlund (per my copy of The Demon Breed) is hell on wheels and Telzey Amberdon is a prodigy — but Trigger Argee randomly goes to pieces when she ought to be facing down a menace, and there’s something very male-gazey about a lot of her scenes.
The obvious one that comes to mind is Rydra Wong; protagonist of Babel-17. Published 1966.
San Severina is not the protagonist of Empire Star, but she is an important and competent character in the story.
I was less impressed with the Trigger Argee stories when I read them, but it’s so long ago that I can’t recall why, or indeed much anything beyond her being the protagonist. The existence of a more recent Telzey and Trigger anthology had primed me to think of them as being comparable.
All of the Bene Gesserit, and Chani, in the Dune books. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any female characters in who aren’t formidable.
Eowyn from LoTR kills a Ringwraith (with help from a hobbit) by stabbing him in the face.
Having recently re-read the first 3 “Dune” books, Chani is actually a fairly anemic character, a typical supportive love interest used to provide extra drama for the MC, IMHO. Various BGs qualify, though.
A clarification: I wanted to mostly focus on olden timey men who wrote strong women characters. Moore is in there because I can’t resist a chance to mention her work, because the context in which she published was more unwelcoming to women characters than later decades, and because it was not known at the time she was a woman. When Henry Kuttner asked Lovecraft for an introduction, he wanted to express his admiration of the work of an author he assumed was a man.
Later, Kuttner and Moore got married so probably at some point he realized she was a woman.
“probably” Snort. Oh, James humor.
Did Lovecraft write a nice introduction, and did he know key details about Moore when he did?
Ringworld isn’t of its time, its worse. Both alien species in the book have non sapient females that are kept like livestock. You could replace the female lead with a lucky fleshlight and nothing would change. The people who created with ring could carry out massive technological projects but couldn’t imagine a role on a crew for women other than prostitute. Ringworld is so far beyond passive sexism that you would expect from an older story, its actively and aggressively woman hating.
Equal Rites is okay, but really let down by the ending. After proving both Granny and the wizards wrong, the first female wizard decides…to never do magic. The trope that the powerful woman must learn that she should give up her power is so tired and boring. Granny does become less of a gender essentialist “girls are emotional and can’t do math” type in the later books, but I was surprised she spouted so many sexist stereotypes after all the praise I’d seen of the character.
Avoiding spoilers – I think you misunderstood “Equal Rites” and whose form of magic is a problem and shouldn’t be done. Esk isn’t so much gifted with an inheritance of wizard magic but has it inflicted on her, along with a wizard staff which has its own ideas apparently of how its “owner” should act. When what makes wizards different from witches, apparently, is a disregard for consequences. But what really makes a wizard is a hat. And who makes a hat, a milliner – but I think that’s in a different book by a different author. A witch’s hat also is important; that’s headology.
Agreed about Niven. Thanks for saving me from going on an anti-Niven rant. It seems I can’t escape running into his name in these columns.
He may not be the worst of the worst, but still and always…Ugh.
I think we see Esk in a much later book (Thud?) in fact doing some magic.
Discworld definitely has “early installment weirdness”. None of Death, Granny, or the Patrician started out the way they were written later, and I don’t think the differences can be attributed entirely to in-universe character growth. “Real” Granny starts with Wyrd Sisters, Death maybe with Mort, and Vetinari… I’m not sure, and don’t care enough to comb through a bibliography.
Rincewind hardly changes, which maybe isn’t a good thing.
Esk reappears in both I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd’s Crown.
Zelda M’tana.
Jo Clayton’s Skeen should be on the list!
When I saw this title, my first thought was Martha Dane from Omnilingual, but I figured she would not be listed, since it was a short story.
Glad I was wrong.
Piper had lots of interesting women characters but Dane is the only one I can remember who was the protagonist.
How on earth–or out of it–did you miss Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga–or, for that matter, the Koudelka sisters and Ekaterin Vorsoisson, Elena Botharis Jesek, Ellie Quinn, and, of course Sargent Taura from that same series?
a) James’s “five X” format precludes him from trying to list all possible examples
b) James was aiming for older SF (4 of his example are long before Bujold published anything), and male authors, to make a point
Samuel R. Delany should be added to this list, too.
For whom? It’s been a long time since I’ve read much Delany, but all of the key characters that I can think of are male.
[Sorry, posted in reply in the wrong place at first]
The obvious one that comes to mind is Rydra Wong; protagonist of Babel-17. Published 1966.
San Severina is not the protagonist of Empire Star, but she is an important and competent character in the story.
Minor typo: “Schmidt” referenced in the last paragraph on Schmitz. In a field with an unusual number of authors whose names begin with an “SCHMI”, I find this understandable.
I’m going to quibble about him being referred to as a Golden Age author though. Yes, he squeaks in before WW2’s ending with a 1943 short story, but everything else is afterwards, and the bulk of his work by my eyeball estimate seems to be 1960-1970s.
From the cover of “Agent of Vega” I’m getting more of a “mature Tina Turner” sense than probably I should. Thunderdome and all that.
Later Anderson had Orion Shall Rise from 1983, one of the protagonists is a woman, I can’t remember any names