Latest Reads

In the past few months I've been browsing Seattle's many excellent second-hand bookstores and recently picked up two anthologies of Science Fiction comprised entirely of stories by female authors.  

So far my favorite has been Octavia Butler's "Blood Child".  Although I read a lot of Sci-fi, I haven't read any of Butler's work before, and I think I've been missing out.  

In an effort to get more reading in I've decided to multitask: I'm working my way through "Guns, Germs and Steel" on the side, and am also meandering through the latest Margaret Atwood ("In Other Worlds").  So far she's mentioned Homer, Leonard Cohen, and Ursula Le Guin all within a few pages of each other, so I would say I'm quite pleased with it. :-)

I've had several conversations recently (and coincidentally it seems) about how female Sci-fi authors don't seem to feature [m]any positive/strong male characters in their work.  I disagree in general, but it made me think about how even today there are still not many positive/strong female characters in Sci-fi, and how growing up it was finally refreshing to encounter them in books like Atwood's, or Le Guin's.  One exception I can think of is Gregory Benford's book "Cosm" which features a female physicist as the main character, but I'm having a hard time coming up with other examples.  Can you think of some?  I'm always interested in recommendations!