Entry-level SF

Yesterday I was reading a discussion about entry-level SF.  It was a long discussion, with many different viewpoints, all of them recommending their best books to hook people into reading SF.

SF has an image problem.  It always has had, but for me as a woman SF writer wanting to write about the world from a feminist perspective it's even more of a problem.

So what would I recommend as entry-level SF for women readers?  Sadly, nothing that I've seen recently on my local bookshop's shelves. That's a problem in itself, as the bookseller clearly believes SF is for men and doesn't stock most of the new books by women authors.  The few that do make it onto the shelves are military SF.  Not a great introduction to the genre for women.

No, if you want entry-level SF go look in the young adult section. It isn't marketed as SF, but one look at the covers and blurbs of many of the books will tell you that they most definitely are.  And just as importantly, many of these books tackle soft SF issues wrapped around the hard SF core of the story. Most of the exciting new SF I've read for the last decade has been YA.

Take Scoff Westerfield's Uglies/Pretties/Specials trilogy, exploring the consequences of extreme re-making of our bodies.  Everybody ends up Pretty, but there's a price to pay, a price that keeps people controlled and docile.  If you want a warning about what cosmetic surgery could become, read them.

Then there's Sam Hawksmoor's The Repossession and The Hunting.  Teleportation experiments on vulnerable kids, anyone?  Or how about Sarah Crossan's Breathe, taking the old joke about taxing the air we breathe and showing what happens when we do.

Memory wipe?  Try Teri Terry's Slated and Fractured.  An exploration of not belonging and its consequences?  Try Veronica Roth's Divergent.

Mobile cities?  Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series, with their terrifying cyborg Stalkers.

All these books deal with hard SF issues, but they also explore the soft SF cultural and individual consequences for people of the worlds they've drawn. And just as importantly, they all tella damn good story, something a lot of adult SF has got too up itself to do.  But that's another rant for another day.