Anne McCaffrey's Women

[ailbhe]

Summary reposted from elsewhere:

Look! I am a feisty and independent heroine with real dialogue and plot-centric actions! Whoops, there's a man, I'm a sharp-tongued but essentially brainless vagina on a stick.

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

I'd add the the exceptions Ursula K Le Guin, C. J. Cherryh and Octavia Butler who all write excellent female characters at least some of the time (I have not read everything ever written by these authors) and for the younger reader Trudi Cannavan (still good for growups, and by 'younger', I mean YA not small-child).

Some SF is almost entirely lacking in characterisation of any sort; Egan, Clarke and Asimov come to mind. The women are 2D characterised of people who exist largely to say plot-relevant things but then so are the men, the aliens, the robots, the computers and just about anything else that you might expect to have a personality. I don't think it's anti-women to write women this way if you write men this way too; but I also don't think it's especially feminist either.