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Saturday, April 14, 2018

Best Modern SciFi Not Written by a Cishet White Man (Nominations needed!)

What is the very best science fiction written by a woman or POC or member of the LGBTQ+ community written in the last 20 years? 

This poll is from our Year of Diverse Polls, and as such it can't includes authors who are cishet white men. Please adjust your nominations accordingly.

Also for my FACEBOOK followers:

If you didn't read that explanation and/or don't read this and insist on adding some sanctimonious comment to WAW's Facebook Page about how you're so enlightened that you only judge art by its quality or how this is the real bigotry or "what would you think if I said no [marginalized group]; how would you like it then?" (or basically any of those boilerplate, paint-by-numbers Chadclone points), do so at your own peril. (Also true if you
did read that stuff and dropped the same old arguments anyway.) I'll be erasing comments and showing the more obnoxious commenters the door. There are ten months to go and the answers are literally a click away.

Since we did a similar fantasy poll just a while ago with a lot of dovetail, we're going to skip on to our next popular topic (but with the diverse polls rules)–modern science fiction. Please note that I'm tightening up the "modern" for this as Sci-fi tends to be impacted. (Twenty years instead of 25.)

The Rules:


  1. Please note the diversity requirements above.
  2. Nominations must be copyrighted no later than 1998 (twenty years). Any series with books before that cannot be nominated as a full series (but individual books still can be). 
  3. As always, I leave the niggling over "Science Fiction" to your best judgement because I'd rather be inclusive. If you feel like Pern is science fiction, I'm not going to argue. (Though you might need to "show your work" to get anyone to second your nomination.) I'll only throw them out if they get super ridiculous. 
  4. You may nominate two (2) books or series. If you nominate three or more my eyes glaze over and I seethe with primordial rage. But more importantly for you, I will NOT take any nominations beyond the second that you suggest. (I will consider a long list to be "seconds" if someone else nominates them as well.)
  5. You may (and absolutely should) second as many nominations of others as you wish. So stop back in and see if anyone has put up something you want to see go onto the poll.
  6. Please put your nominations here. I will take nominations only as comments on this post. (No comments on FB posts or G+.)
  7. You are nominating WRITTEN SCIENCE FICTION, not their movie portrayals. CGI may make Sleeping Giants pretty fun to look at, but if you find the books to be a little contrived, you shouldn't nominate it.
  8. No more endless elimination rounds. I will take somewhere between 8-20 best performing titles and at MOST run a single semifinal round. So second the titles you want even if they already have one. (Yes, I guess that would make them thirds, fourths, etc...)

34 comments:

  1. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
    The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss

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  2. I will nominate Andrea Hairston's Mindscape.

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  3. The Binti series by Nnedi Okorafor

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  4. THE BROKEN EARTH TRILOGY BY NK JEMISIN

    AAAAAAAAA

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  5. Samuel R Delany - Dhalgren
    Really any of his sci-fi he’s a famous black and LGBT sci-fi writer in the USA but very few people in Britain seem to have read him

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    Replies
    1. Endorse Delaney, pretty much anything, but Dhalgren is too old to meet the "last 20 years" part.

      I was saddened to realize that "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" is over 30. Dang.

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  6. Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad

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  7. I’ll nominate CJ Cherryh’s 2nd Trillogy in the Froeigner series - Precursor Defender and Explorer. For those unsure about which stories those are in the series, this is when Bren is elevated to Lord of the Heavens, and goes to the station for the first time, and then onboard the Phoenix and finally encounters the Kyo

    If nominating a trillogy in a long running series isn’t cool with the rules, I’ll go with the Explorer, the final book of this arc

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  8. Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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  9. Oh a more recent one is Samuel delany’s Through the valley of the nest of spiders - 2012

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  10. Claire North with "First Fifteen Lives of Harry August."

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  11. Convergence by Marita Smith (Book 1 in the Kindred Ties series) + Emergence by Marita Smith (Book 2 in the Kindred Ties series, out May 1 2018)

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  12. I'll nominate the Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.

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  13. Nicky Drayden's "Prey of the Gods" rocked my world last year. Cyberpunk with big threads of magical realism painted with an afro-futurist pallet.

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  14. Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death
    Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, and Kindred
    Tomi Adeymi’s Children of Blood and Bone

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  15. Since someone already nominated Friedman's Coldfire trilogy I get a free second there, so I'll nominate:

    1) C.S. Friedman's This Alien Shore (1998)

    2) Der-Shing Helmer's Mare Internum (2017-2018, stunningly beautiful web graphic novel -> www.marecomic.com *A-maz-ing*)

    Since I can't add a third (and the series is pre-1998 anyway) I'll just throw a posthumous shoutout to Julian May for her Many Coloured Land series, particularly the final novel, The Adversary. If you haven't read them I encourage you to bump them to the top of your To Read pile, you're missing something outstanding.

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  16. Bruna Husky series : "Tears in Rain", "Weight of the Heart" by ROSA MONTERO

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  17. So I Am Glad by A L Kennedy. Perhaps on the edge of the genre but involves time travel and a sci-fi writer so I think it just about counts.

    And UFO In Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo.

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  18. The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas

    or the Oryx and Crake series by Margaret Atwood

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  19. CJ Cherryh Regenesis (2009)

    She hits two categories,i believe. Does that make her qualify twice? 😉

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  20. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

    The Vatta’s War series by Elizabeth Moon

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  21. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

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  22. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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