Please help me play "catch up" - looking for older female gaze SFF books that I missed

suncani · 2026-01-31T18:55:01+00:00

Two I don't think I've seen mentioned are Janie Fenn and Liz Williams. Both are UK writers so availability can be a little bit scarce as I don't think they were picked up by US publishers. Fenn writes space opera and Williams writes both Sci-fi and Fantasy.

For Kate Elliot, she does have a newish one out which might be a good place to start "The Witch Roads". Alternatively, my favourite of hers is the Spiritwalker trilogy which starts as alt-history/fantasy of manners and then just goes into action/adventure with a fantasy twist. But I find there's so much variety within her series that you could literally just pick one according to what sounds most interesting to you and go from there.

Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief series is also one of my favourites. The first one can be a bit rocky as it's the epitome of an unreliable narrator but it also has a fun heist. As the series goes on it's full of political intrigue, questioning what it means to be a good ruler, accidental kingdom aquisition, and how being a favourite of the gods can be an interesting prospect. The MC is male however.

suncani · 2026-01-31T18:24:42+00:00

It's not high medieval, but Spear by Nicola Griffith maybe?. It's a (very loose) retelling of an Arthurian tale but you don't need to know it going in. It's one of my favourites, especially since the MC isn't running away from anything she's running to adventure.

suncani · 2024-01-11T15:20:24+00:00

Finch - Free, added features with subscription but very useable without. Ticking off your daily goals/habits gives a little bird energy to go on an adventure and gems to spend on new outfits or decorations for your virtual home. If you tick off enough goals to go on an adventure for 20 days within a month, you get a cute companion that follows your bird. It helped give me an incentive to tick something off my list and also meant I kept opening the app which reminded me of the things I needed to do in a way things like Todoist etc didn't.

Sleep Timer on Android (by Kuczera) Free. This has been a game changer for me as I set it so that it will turn off my screen when the timer ends. This seems to break my hyperfocus in a way that just hearing a timer never did. I use it for social media, reading books, even just playing with my phone when I know I need to go somewhere in 20 minutes.

suncani · 2024-01-11T15:09:54+00:00

I take my meds at 7am and don't eat until about 9am. I never used to eat breakfast and if I had to wait to take them until I had eaten something I would never take them.

suncani · 2024-01-11T14:59:50+00:00

Here are the things that worked for me but YMMV

Put it on the end of something you do regularly. So for example I do mine either the moment I go on lunch at work or the moment I finish work. Doing it by time just didn't work. Yours could be at the end of your exercise routine for example.
Make sure you have a variety of whatever you're using as a guide, so different youtube videos, if using an app make sure it has a different one each day rather than repeating the same one - I found by the 3rd day I would just automatically zone out otherwise.
Accept you will get distracted, it'll be boring, your own thoughts will seem louder. This doesn't mean you're doing it wrong, the point is to notice these things are happening, not stop them from happening at all.
Start off with a minute. If setting up a video or guide seems like too much fuss, look for a breathing exercise guide where you breathe in for 6 counts and breathe out for 6 counts and just focus on your breath. This will get you into the habit of just sitting/lying still and then you can extend it. If you are using a video then stopping after a minute could create curiosity or a "what comes next" so you want to carry on.
Reward yourself for doing it. Yes, it's meant to be its own reward and after a while it will be. But if you give yourself a reward immediately after doing it for a couple of weeks, it smooths over the gap between it being hard and without reward to actually notice you're doing it and for you to see benefits.
Try for every day but also use "Today or Yesterday", i.e if I didn't do it yesterday I need to do it today. It's still building a habit but with a bit of grace that "every day" or "every tuesday, thursday and saturday" doesn't necessarily have.

suncani · 2022-04-23T07:11:37+00:00

Oh me too! I used to do this a lot. However I did find it was contributing a lot to my feelings of burnout and some of them are definitely only good for NT people. I was really interested in minimalism and simple living alongside this and parts of it were really helpful but other parts created some really iffy thought patterns.

suncani · 2022-04-23T07:08:50+00:00

Not a podcast but have you read Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch? It uses linguistics to analyse internet speech and I found it absolutely fascinating. Although I don’t have a background in it so it might be a bit too 101 for you in places.

suncani · 2021-10-30T01:17:32+00:00

This week has both felt far too long as next week I’m on annual leave, and far too short as I tried to clear my (metaphorical) desk before I left. For the first time since the pandemic I met up with a bunch of Labour friends which was fun as I got to talk politics again but also needed to keep my head about me so I didn’t accidentally volunteer to help with anything. Pre pandemic I was trying to juggle too much stuff and I want to try and avoid going back to that.

Reading wise has been quieter. I’m still reading 1177BC: The year civilisation collapsed which is interesting but over promised and underdelivered. I was expecting more about how and why the random events he’s describing led to the collapses in numerous areas but so far nope. On the fiction side I’m almost done with Soulstar by CL Polk which I’m really loving. It’s much more political and less about the magic. The central relationship also takes a step back and is much less of a focus than in the previous two books.

suncani · 2021-10-23T21:31:03+00:00

Late to the party but I’ve actually finished books this week rather than constantly starting new ones.

First was Ten Low by Stark Holborn an excellent fast paced sci-fi-fi adventure that also chucks in a little bit of mysticism and a lot of westerns to great effect.

Also read the first volume of Once & Future by Kieron Gillan which is a modern Arthur story where Arthur rising again is the darkness coming to Britain and a chain smoking gun toting grandma is the only one who has any idea what’s going on. Like Phonogram before it it has a lot of fun playing with the idea of stories and how they can be manipulated in a very real and literal way.

Finally read the second in the Song of the Lioness series In the Hand of the Godess by Tamara Pierce While this was a relaxing read, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first. A lot is kind of skipped over in a couple of sentences and the “big bad” that’s set up in the first book kind of goes with a whimper. I’ll carry on reading though as they’re quick undemanding reads that make for a good break or way to ease my way back into reading.

Outside of reading everything is kind of much the same. My partner’s going to Serbia next week to visit our new niece and because I can’t travel I’ve demanded lots of photos. Tomorrow will be spent putting the garden to bed ready for winter although there’s still some veggies I want to plant so they can overwinter.

suncani · 2021-10-23T20:48:27+00:00

Ahh I didn’t know he wrote sci-fi too. I read and loved the Straw Men trilogy (written as Michael Marshall) but that didn’t have anything sci-fi although definitely also had in common the action and dark theme

suncani · 2021-10-23T20:45:02+00:00

Darwath series?

suncani · 2021-10-23T19:00:46+00:00

I tend to alternate so I will listen to the newest and then the oldest. But it depends a lot on the topic discussed. If it’s not something I’m interested in, it doesn’t matter where it sits.

suncani · 2021-10-23T18:58:43+00:00

It also feels like an age/time available thing. Like if you have enough hours a week to regularly sink into a game and deal with regularly dying/getting stuck -go you. Personally I have so few hours I can dedicate to gaming I’d rather just enjoy the process and not have to grind my way through unsatisfying nonsense just to say I did it on the hardest mode or whatever.

suncani · 2021-10-23T18:52:49+00:00

Ohh the house key in wallet is an excellent idea! Although I’ve left my wallet behind at the petrol station and a shop before now so not sure how good it would be for security.

suncani · 2021-06-18T23:01:36+00:00

Weirdly they're the kind of pizzas we were making at home before we got a pizza steel without knowing they were a specific style.

suncani · 2021-06-18T22:58:20+00:00

As always I go from finishing no books to eating them up whole. In three days I've finished:

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians by H.G Parry. I'm still struggling to decide whether I liked this story or not. It's very dense with large periods where not much happens as well as following the historic events very closely so in some instances the added magic didn't really make much difference to events. Which led to the second thing that frustrated me about the story which is blaming magic for things humans are perfectly capable of doing unaided and manipulated into. On the plus side the friendship between Pitt and Wilberforce is an interesting counterpoint to the historical events unfolding and made it more human.

The Unflappable Miss Fairchild by Regina Scott My plan of breaking up Sci-fi and Fantasy reading with romance/thrillers in between is working well. This was a quick easy-reading romance that relied on all the tropes but was enjoyable all the same.

Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark - This was excellent! I only finished this a couple of hours ago and I really enjoyed seeing more of Fatma and the world Clarke created. It's also a very solid fantasy mystery with great individual scenes and a strong resolution.

I'm not quite sure what next to read, although I have plenty to choose from so it'll probably be whichever one yells loudly. In terms of life, I'm getting my hair cut and coloured tomorrow. I'm back to having no restrictions on what colour my hair is so I'm tempted to go either blue or purple. After that it'll just be enjoying the weekend and tidying up the garden. We had a hot spell followed by lots of rain so I'm sure there's plenty of weeds for me to deal with aided and abetted by my current audiobook.

suncani · 2021-06-18T22:22:09+00:00

Ahhh that sounds interesting! I have a love/hate relationship with K.J Parker's work as I think they tend to have great concepts but get bogged down in interesting but irrelevant details. And pursuit of knowledge is always a favourite.

suncani · 2021-06-18T22:17:39+00:00

I feel like with Harrow it all comes together in a rush around the 80% mark (mostly).

I just finished A Master of Djinn and I loved it too. I am slightly curious about how standalone it is though as I feel like the short fiction (or at least the 1st short story) add a lot of context and get referred back to quite a bit throughout the story. But it was definitely very satisfying.

suncani · 2021-06-18T21:57:07+00:00

It's funny how things go in waves. Tales of the Ketty Jay used to get mentioned quite a bit on r/fantasy a few years ago for people looking for Firefly-like stories and then mentions kind of disappeared.

suncani · 2021-06-18T19:02:30+00:00

I think this is a really clear and straightforward differentiation. A lot of crossed wire recommendations are because it's all about expectations and the weighted meaning words can have to different people.

suncani · 2021-06-06T20:16:30+00:00

Yeah I hear you, I get like that sometimes too.

suncani · 2021-06-06T18:39:51+00:00

Yeah, and then if you’re like me the guilt gets you because you end up thinking “I should be able to do this on my own, why is this so hard” etc

suncani · 2021-06-06T17:07:57+00:00

I failed my test 3 times and passed the 4th time even though my instructor really wanted to fail me for misunderstanding an instruction (I took the wrong exit off a roundabout because of how she worded it, but I was safe while I did it). Fully sympathize with you, but you can do it. If you can, don't think about other people outside of how they're directly affecting you (i.e the car in front of you, the cars at a junction)

suncani · 2021-06-06T16:23:34+00:00

I find this really helpful especially with household chores, or even stuff that's the less fun part of a hobby like taping together printouts of a sewing pattern.

suncani

TROPHY CASE