6 SF/F Books Challenging Gender Roles That Aren’t by Joanna Russ

In Lila Bowen’s forthcoming Wake of Vultures, out next week, the main character spends much of the narrative identifying as male, something that helps underline the difficulties of a woman (and a person of non-binary gender) in the book’s Old West setting. In honor of Bowen’s attempts to buck the binary (and in keeping with the #WeNeedDiverseBooks shout-out in Bowen’s dedication), here are five SF/F books that question rigid gender roles—with a mea culpa that every list of this type probably needs to include Joanna Russ’ The Female Man.

Excession by Iain M. Banks
While a lot of Excession deals with the Culture’s attempt to make sense of the sudden appearance of a celestial body that is possibly older than the universe itself, the multiple intersecting story lines include an in-depth look at how couples reproduce in the Culture, where switching genders is a three-month process and everyone is bisexual by default. Due to this advanced biology, couples are able to get one person pregnant, swap genders (while the baby waits in suspended animation), and impregnate the other partner. Over the course of the novel, one relationship actually goes south because half of a monogamous couple cheats on the other while the baby is in stasis inside them.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Ann Leckie’s imaginative, operatic sci-fi saga is much more than the sum of its odd conventions, but those conventions are definitely unique and worth discussing. In Leckie’s novels, the Radch Empire uses artificially intelligent hive minds to control the human “ancillaries,” that house their consciousnesses, but have only ever used female pronouns to refer to themselves and their subjects. As the series progresses, Breq, an artifical intelligence inhabiting one of the Radchaai ancillaries, continually guesses the incorrect gender of characters and refers to everyone she meets as “she.” It’s an element that helps drive home the alienness of the culture and Breq’s lack of a self as a former tool of the Radch Empire, and colors her actions as she works to change it.

Imajica by Clive Barker
Barker’s vast epic fantasy is practically all about love and gender and the boundaries in between, and nowhere is this more clear than in the character Pie’oh’Pah. Pie is technically a gender-fluid creature, but can take on either a male or female appearance as suits them (or their partner). As their lover Gentle falls more and more in love with the identity behind the beauty, Pie transcends the gender binary to become something entirely new. It’s an apt metaphor for what the heroes are trying to do to the entire multiverse: reconcile its masculine and feminine elements into a better whole while tearing down the rigid patriarchal ideas set up by the villainous Autarch.

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter
Angela Carter often used surreal settings and fantastical situations to explore gender and sexuality through a feminist lens, and The Passion of New Eve presents her themes at their most blatantly satirical. The novel traces the evolution of Evelyn, an English teacher who comes to a dystopian New York full of giant rats. At the beginning of the novel, Evelyn is a disgusting male chauvinist, but through a surreal and terrifying journey, is transformed into a woman significantly more aware of the society around her. She then must come to terms with the world she lives in and take her place in it, reconcile her former objectification of women, and eventually find independence, either as the “New Eve” that everyone wants her to be, or as something else entirely.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
In this feminist take on anthropological science fiction, a monolithic megacorporation sends a researcher named Marghe Taishan to a colony planet designated “GP,” or “Jeep.” Jeep is affected by a virus that, generations earlier, wiped out the male population, killed many of the women, and gave the survivors the mysterious ability to reproduce asexually. While Marghe begins the novel trying to test and synthesize a vaccine, she eventually learns about and adapts to the culture, becoming a traveling wise woman. As she journeys across the planet, she encounters multiple clans of women, from the aggressive, nomadic Echraide to the more gentle village-dwellers. Griffith allows aggression between Jeep’s conflicted, many-faceted cultures—a stark difference from many other science fiction works featuring matriarchies.
What are some of your favorite SF/F works that deal with gender?