Reading Future Classics by Women

As I mentioned last week, one of my projects for this year is to read through the eleven books voted by Torque Control readers as the best science fiction novels written by women between 2001 and 2010. Hopefully, some of you will be joining me in this!

Each month, I will post a reminder at the beginning of the month, along with a bit of background discussion. In the second half of the month, I will host a discussion of the book here. I’ll post round-ups of reviews and discussion elsewhere of the novels too, whether recent or from previous years. Sometimes there will be contributions exploring a novel from other people, and I would certainly welcome others. (Niall has volunteered!)

There’s no great incentive to read this list in ranked order. I suspect some of the rankings are a very close thing, and the given order of the list is no authority for subjective quality. So instead, this will be a chronological project. I’ve gone with global chronological dates instead of their publication dates in the UK in particular. Life has yet to be published here, and some of us are occasionally prone to reading books on import instead of waiting for the possibility of local publication. Further, a major proportion of the poll participants were based outside of the UK, and so this country’s publication schedule does not necessarily affect the local availability of a given novel for them.

(It’s been an interesting challenge: I had no idea how hard it was going to be to figure out the month in which some of these books were published.)

So here’s the schedule:

February	Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones
March	The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon
April	Natural History, by Justina Robson
May	The Time-Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffennegger
June	Maul, by Tricia Sullivan
July	City of Pearl, by Karen Traviss
August	Life, by Gwyneth Jones
September	Farthing, by Jo Walton
October	The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North, by Sarah Hall
November	Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin
December	Spirit, by Gwyneth Jones