A to Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women In Speculative Fiction.K Is For Ambelin Kwayymullina

 Ambelin Kwaymullina is an Indigenous Australian children’s and YA writer, who also has a day job, as an Assistant Professor of Law. We first met at a science fiction convention and this delightful lady helped me get a school visit by Alice Pung to my disadvantaged school, for which the Stella Award folk paid. 

She is also a talented illustrator and has done some picture books.

What I particularly remember her for, though, is her YA Tribe trilogy, starting with The Interrogation Of Ashala Wolf. At the end of this post, I will link you to my interview with her on this site. 

The universe of the Tribe books is in the very distant future,  when supercontinent Pangaea is back. The good news is that people are finally looking after the planet and the environment. The bad news is that in other ways, the world is a dystopia. There are people with powers of various kinds, including the heroine, and they are put into concentration camps. 

Some of them escape and go into hiding. They call themselves the Tribe.

The novel is very Australian, understandably, and the villain is named after a real person, a “protector of Aborigines”. If you don’t live in Australia you will probably not know about these dreadful people who did anything but look after the needs of Indigenous Australians! Thankfully they are long gone. 

There are two sequels, The Disappearance Of Ember Crow, and The Foretelling Of Georgie Spider. It was an amazing trilogy. 

She and her brother Ezekial also wrote Catching Teller Crow, a YA novel with a ghost heroine, which won the YA section of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize and a Notable in the CBCA Award. The Notables are the long list (I actually got a Notable myself for my novel Wolfborn!)

The books are easily available on line, in ebook, print and audiobook. Do try them!

Here is my interview with the author. 

https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-interview-of-ambelin-kwaymullina-on.html

PS It IS a trilogy though she said in the interview it would be four books.

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women In Speculative Fiction.J Is For Juliet(Marillier)

 Okay, sort of cheating again, using her first name, but I do love this woman’s work. She lives in Australia though she is a Kiwi. I hadn’t heard of her before one of our students asked me to buy some of her works. I haven’t read them all, but I have read enough of her books to share with you. I have reviewed some on this site and even had an interview with her, done by my former student Thando Bhebe, who contacted me only recently - hi, Thando! 

https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2010/12/interview-with-juliet-marillier.html

Juliet has been nominated for, and won, many awards, including six Aurealis  Awards(Australia) and the Julius Vogel Award(New Zealand), as well as the Tin Duck Award(Western Australia). She also received a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, in 2025.

I’m not surprised. Her novels are very readable stuff and, as they tend to be inspired by fairy tales, they are familiar when you read them. 

For example, Heart’s Blood is sort of based on “Beauty And The Beast”. It’s set in Ireland during the Norman period in England. The heroine isn’t left there because of her father’s actions, she is a scribe there doing a job for the summer. 

Here is my review of it.

https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2009/11/hearts-blood-by-juliet-marillier-sydney.html

Her Sevenwaters series, also set in mediaeval Ireland, starts with Daughter Of The Forest, based on the fairy tale “The Six Swans” about a princess who discovers that her brothers have been turned into swans by their evil stepmother. The only way she can save them might cost her own life. 

Ireland isn’t the only setting for her fairy tale fiction; one of her YA novels, Wildwood Dancing, is set in Transylvania and is based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”.

More recently, she has written the Blackthorn And Grim series, first a trilogy, then a sequel about the characters’ children. It’s not based on on any particular fairy tale, but is set in the same universe as the Sevenwaters series. Blackthorn is the woman, Grim is the man who helps her and they eventually fall in love. It starts with Blackthorn being saved from execution by the book’s villain, by an elf whom she had once helped. The deal is that over the next seven years she must never deny help to anyone who asks her for it. There are Arthurian elements in it, but you need to read it to get that point. Grim is lovely, by the way. I’d be pleased to have him for a boyfriend.

The books are easily available online in print and ebook format, and some in audiobook. Do check them out! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women In Speculative Fiction. I Is For Ivan Vorpatril.

 Today I am going to cheat a bit. I couldn’t think of a female author I have read whose name started with I, a book title or even a heroine name starting with I, so I have chosen a male character in a novel written by a woman, Lois McMaster Bujold, whom I have mentioned under B. 

The novel is A Civil Campaign, her Regency romance-style book set in her Vorkosiverse and her character is Ivan Vorpatril, the cousin of Miles Vorkosigan, the hero of the series. 

Ivan is Miles’s best friend and also a humorous sidekick, who appears regularly in the series, when Miles needs his help. He does get his own novel late in the series, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, in which he marries, while helping a woman. In A Civil Campaign he helps more than one woman, starting with an ex-woman, Lady Donna, who has become Lord Dono. He goes to the spaceport early in the novel, bunch of flowers in hand, to meet his former lover, only to find that she is now a he, after a trip off planet. Lord Dono is completely transformed and can even father children. This is a matter of an inheritance to a Countship, something a woman can’t get on the backwards planet Barrayar, where women can’t even join the army.

Ivan gets a shock, but helps out as best he can. While he is generally considered a bit dim-witted, he isn’t, really. He just does what Miles persuades him to do, complaining all the way.

Ivan is tall, dark and handsome, and women like him. He always seems to have one girlfriend or another, while Miles has one romance at a time, keeps proposing and being rejected. 

In the novel Cetaganda, when Ivan and Miles are sent to represent Barrayar at the funeral of an Empress, Ivan is the one who receives all the  invitations from (female) members of the local aristocracy, while Miles gets on with solving a mystery. 

In Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance he conducts a speedy Barrayaran wedding ceremony using a breakfast cereal to represent the traditional circle of groats, to help out a woman who is being chased by the authorities, and gets involved with her family from the uber-capitalist planet Jackson’s Whole, whose Cetagandan matriarch had hidden something important underneath the headquarters of Imp Sec during the time when Cetaganda was ruling Barrayar. I won’t go any further because spoilers, but this novel is a lot of fun and the first time Ivan has been the protagonist instead of the sidekick.

Thinking about it, it’s not as inappropriate as we might think to talk about Ivan instead of a female character, because there are a lot of women in his life, and female issues in the books where he plays a large role.

The Vorkosigan novels are easily available online, in print, audiobooks and ebooks. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women in Speculative Fiction, H Is For Barbara Hambly

 I confess Barbara Hambly is one of my favourite spec fic authors. She also writes historical crime fiction, in the Benjamin January novels, which I have reviewed on this site. When I first discovered them, I was a bit disappointed, as I had been reading and loving her fantasy. But they quickly became among my favourite of her fiction. 

However, this A to Z is focussing on speculative fiction, so let’s get on with it. Fortunately there is plenty of that to enjoy. And most of her books are in a series of one kind or another. I will keep to a few individual books and series, or this post will be novel length in itself. 

The first of her works I read was Dragonsbane. It was wonderful! It starts with a young man coming to find John Aversin, a knight who once slew a dragon and ask him to do it again, on a dragon menacing his own area. He is shocked to see him as a middle aged bespectacled man with a regional accent. He also discovers that John killed the dragon because it was necessary and did it with a harpoon, with the help of his partner, Jenny, a witch. It was beautiful and he regrets having had to kill it. But the current dragon is not a villain. 

It’s the first of the Winterlands series.

I read what was then the Darwath trilogy(she has written more since then). Two people from our world, Rudy and Gil, turn up in another universe, Darwath. Rudy begins to train as a wizard. The woman, Gil,  becomes a soldier. However, she is a historian, and it’s her research on what happened in this world that saves the day. I won’t go into detail, because spoilers, but the original trilogy is amazing. There are a number of shorter stories set in the Darwath universe.

Barbara Hambly wrote three Star Trek novels and some Star Wars books.  She got into trouble about one of the Trek books, Ishmael, over copyright issues as it was not entirely Star Trek, but if you can find a copy second hand it’s well worth a read. It’s very funny. 

She is also a great Doctor Who fan, which led to her Antryg Windrose series. Three of them were published by regular publishers, as well as a novel set in the same universe, and she has self published several novellas and novelettes that continued the adventures of Antryg and his partner - “companion”? - Joanna. Antryg Windrose is a wizard who once was studying with a villain. That has kept poor Antryg imprisoned in a tower that locks up his magic, in the first novel The Silent Tower. Joanna, a computer expert from our world, comes into his life when it turns out that the villain is not so dead as thought, and her boyfriend is used to build a giant computer in which the baddie can put his mind. 

Basically, Antryg is the Tom Baker Doctor, with cheap jewellery instead of a long scarf. The author has admitted it, but I certainly noticed it when I first read it. This is my favourite series of all her books, but I love them all. I’ve been buying the self published titles as well. 

The James Asher books are horror fiction, starting with a book called Those Who Hunt The Night in the US, and Immortal Blood where I live. I have reviewed some on this site, so I won’t go into detail here, but they are very readable stuff. It starts with James Asher, a spy agent in the Victorian and Edwardian era, being approached by Spaniard Simon Ysidro, on behalf of the vampire community in London to find out who has been killing them…or else they will have a go at his intelligent wife, Lydia. Simon falls in love with her, so in the books that follow - there are eight - he helps James for her sake. This series is the only one I have read that makes the point that, while vampires can love, they can’t actually have sex, or at least the men can’t, for obvious reasons. In this universe, vampires are what they are because they want to be vampires. They are selfish, as Simon admits. If a vampire bites you, you just die, you don’t become one of them, unless you have requested it. 

The first two books in the series are available in audiobook. You might need to get the rest second hand from ABEBooks. There is a self published novella in this series in ebook.

I have mentioned Bride Of The Rat God on this site, also only available in audiobook. It’s worth buying, great fun, set in 1920s Hollywood. The reader is excellent.

I have just started reading The Ladies Of Mandrigyn, the first of the Sun Wolf And Starhawk series, but I bought it second hand from ABEBooks. You can get it in audiobook, but I listened to a sample and don’t recommend that. 

There is so much Barbara Hambly to enjoy, I’ll leave it here. 

I’ll just give you a link to the Wikipedia article, which has a list of her works and a biography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Hambly

PS I know I promised a post on The Handmaid’s Tale, but this is such a long post, I’ll see if I can slip it into my X “Extras”.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women in Speculative Fiction. G Is for Kerry Greenwood

 Today I am going to talk about Kerry Greenwood. You probably know her for her crime fiction - Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman. Those two series are the books for which she is best known. In fact, when you hear her name, Phryne Fisher comes up first. 

 But she wrote some speculative fiction as well. 

Most of her spec fic was her children’s and YA books - around a dozen speculative fiction books, in fact, including The Broken Wheel, which was set about ten years in the future after a destructive accident with a satellite, and had a lot of societies between Melbourne and Geelong, including a mediaeval group who had been the Society for Creative Anachronism and were now living a mediaeval life. I found that novel a bit silly, but I did agree with her that if there was only one computer left in the world, the SCA would have it! I used to be a member. I remember who was in the group with me, and they were very much techno nerds; the mediaeval thing was strictly cosplay. 

 But she also wrote three novels set in the world of Greek mythology - Cassandra, Electra and Medea. 

Cassandra is, of course, about the Trojan princess whose prophecies were never believed. In the original myth, she was dragged back to Mycenae by Agamemnon and killed by his wife, Clytemnestra.Kerry didn’t like that ending, so Cassandra survives and she and her lovers help Agamemnon’s daughter, Electra, whose little brother Orestes is, in fact, her child of a rape by her mother’s lover Aegisthus. 

Medea is seen from the viewpoint of the title character. She was the princess of Colchis who helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece in mythology. She returned with the Argonauts and supposedly killed her own children and fled when he betrayed her. But Jason is not the good guy in this novel. I heard Kerry describe him as an idiot at the Melbourne Writers Festival when I was first discovering her and her fiction. Which he certainly was, even in the myth. As I recall, in the myth Medea lived happily ever after while Jason was killed by the prow of a rotting Argo. 

If you have seen the film Jason And The Argonauts, it’s not much like the myth, and ends with a much nicer Medea asking Jason to take her with him because she no longer has a country, and the gods decide to leave things for another day. The film is well worth a watch, though, even if only for that famous scene with the fight with the skeletons. It was a Ray Harryhausen film, after all.

You can get all the books easily from Clan Destine Press, which 

re-printed them with much nicer covers after the originals went out of print. They are only A$4.99 each in Apple Books, and has them in audiobook. You can also get them on Amazon, in Kindle, audiobook or print. I haven’t checked the Clan Destine Press web site but I imagine they will be there too.

She wrote three volumes of “slash” fiction about male characters from myth and legend, Herotica 1 and 2 and Mytherotica. 

Out Of The Black Land, also published by Clan Destine Press, is not really speculative fiction, but worth a read. It’s about Akhenaten as seen from the viewpoint of a scribe, and his queen, Nefertiti. If you think there was something good about this monotheist Pharaoh, think again. He is horrible in this book. And once again, Kerry Greenwood doesn’t let a heroine be killed. We don’t really know what happened to Nefertiti, but Kerry Greenwood’s imagination supplies a story. 

Do you have any favourite books about Greek mythology - or Egypt? 

A To Z 2026. Women In Speculative Fiction. F Is For Kate Forsyth

Today’s woman in speculative fiction is Australian writer Kate Forsyth. Kate writes historical fiction, set in various eras, from the Renaissance to World War II, but her novels tend to be based on fairy tales, so I will count them. Besides, ALL her children’s books are fantasy. And she has received an award from the Australian Fairytale Society for her contribution to Australian fairytale culture. Also her novels are all about women.

I started with reading her children’s books, the series called “The Witches of Eileanan”, but then discovered her adult books which are fairy tale themed. 

She also wrote a non fiction book about Rapunzel,  The Rebirth Of Rapunzel: A Mythic Biography Of The Maiden In The Tower.

Speaking of Rapunzel, she has written a novel called Bitter Greens, which has two stories in it. One is the story of Charlotte-Rose De La Force, the woman who created the Rapunzel fairy tale, the other is the story of Rapunzel. That one is set in the Renaissance and the witch is a former model of the artist Titian, so no, not a hag. 

The Beast’s Garden is set in Nazi Germany. The heroine, Ava, is a singer. She has Jewish friends and on Kristallnacht saves the family by yelling at an SS officer, Leo. She doesn’t know it yet, but he is involved in a plot against Hitler, so he is fine with it, and sends away his men. They eventually marry. She has to save him from a concentration camp. The story is based on fairy tale “The Singing, Springing Lark”, a version of “Beauty And The Beast”, which has a lion instead of a Beast(hence the name Leo) and which has the heroine rescue him from a nasty woman who wants him. This is one of my favourites of her books. 

The Blue Rose is set in the time of Louis XVI, the heroine being an aristocrat who falls in love with a gardener who is fascinated by a Chinese tale about a very special rose. I believe he is based on a real person. There are hints of the Arthurian legend and the heroine is even called Viviane.

The Wild Girl is about Dortchen Wild, the girl who lived next door to the Grimm Brothers, who told them some of the stories they used in their fairy tale anthologies and married Wilhelm Grimm. The author lets it be known that the Grimms did not get their stories from old women in the countryside, as is usually assumed, but from middle class girls. Mind you, I think those girls probably got the stories from their nurses! It was a great novel, and, of course, set just after the time when Napoleon made his brother Jerome king of what he called Westphalia. It feels strange to read this and think that in England Jane Austen’s heroines were drinking tea. It’s straight historical fiction, but it’s got fairy tales in it, so I’m counting it. 

Beauty In Thorns is about the women in the lives of the pre-Raphaelites, with hints of “Sleeping Beauty”.

I have just bought Psykhe, which is based on “Eros and Psyche”. The only other novel on this theme I have read was by C.S. Lewis and seen from the viewpoint of one of Psyche’s sisters. I’ll be interested to compare. 

There are others, which I haven’t read yet but would like to, such as Dancing On Knives, which, of course, refers to “The Little Mermaid.” 

If you haven’t read any of Kate Forsyth’s work, I do highly recommend it. 

If you have, what do you think? 

All these books are easily available in ebook. I’d be surprised if you couldn’t get them in print. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women In Speculative Fiction. E Is For Eowyn

 Today’s post is not about a writer but a character - in fact, a female character  from a novel written by a man. 

I’m talking about J.R.R Tolkien, of course, the author of classic heroic fantasy - the best known being The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings. Tolkien didn’t have many female characters in those books. There were, as far as I noticed, no women in The Hobbit, only “The Sackville-Bagginses”. We know, from Lord Of The Rings that one of them was Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, a relative of Bilbo and Frodo, but she isn’t mentioned by name in The Hobbit. In the films, there were two women, Galadriel and a character invented for the films, who falls in love with one of the Dwarves. Neither of them was in the book.

But the women in Lord Of The Rings are all strong, including Lobelia. There is the Elven queen Galadriel and even Goldberry, the wife of Tom Bombadil. Elf maiden Arwen, the beloved of Aragorn, was given a lot more to do in the film than in the novel, where she mostly sits sewing a banner for her lord throughout the book. There is more about her in the Appendices, of course, and she does fight her father, Elrond, over her marriage to Aragorn. 

But the strongest and most interesting woman in the novel is Eowyn, the niece of Theoden, the King of Rohan. Rohan is inspired by the Saxons culturally, though the Riders of Rohan are passionate horse lovers, while the Saxons didn’t generally ride. Eowyn is a shield maiden, that is, a female warrior. She is very, very good at it, and much respected for her abilities.

However, in the end she is a woman, responsible for looking after her uncle when he is under the influence of the evil Grima Wormtongue, and when the men go off to battle she is left to look after the kingdom. Theoden certainly considers this a compliment; she is, after all, competent and loved by the people, and he trusts her. Eowyn doesn’t see it that way. 

She certainly has a crush on Aragorn, though it’s as much hero worship as romantic feelings. 

But she wants to be of use in the fight against Sauron, and disguises herself as a man, Dernhelm, and smuggles hobbit Merry along, as he, too, has been told to stay behind and wants to come along. I got the impression when reading it that the men in the army knew perfectly well who she was and supported her. Her brother, Eomer, would probably have sent her back if he had known she was there.

Later, Gandalf points out to him that he had his heroics to do while she didn’t have any such thing. 

You probably know from the film, if you haven’t read the book, that she and Merry between them manage to kill the Witch King of Angmar, leader of the Ring Wraiths, who thinks he is safe because he has been told he will be killed by no man, and then finds himself being confronted by a woman and a hobbit, neither of them a man. Ah, technicalities! Dare I mention that Tolkien created the walking trees, the Ents, because he found the forest coming to Dunsinane in Macbeth irritating? And by the way,  all the female Ents, the Ent Wives, are missing. They are a dying race. 

Eowyn does get a happy ending. While in hospital she meets Faramir, the new Steward of Gondor, whose Dad had died while trying to kill himself and Faramir. They fall in love, he kisses her passionately in public - only in the book, not the film - and they decide to get married, clearly much to Aragorn’s relief. Eowyn decides she has had enough of fighting and killing and wishes to become a healer instead. I think Faramir would support her in whatever decision she makes, but that is the new career she decides on. They live happily ever after. 

Tomorrow I will be posting about Kate Forsyth.