Sooooo over the "demon lover"

[gryphonsegg]

I just got majorly disappointed by a recommended novel that turned out to be just another romance with yet another Tall, Dark, and Dangerous hero and a human woman as the embodiment of all that is eeeeevil because she's a grown-up Mean Girl and the rival of the Special Girl narrator/main character. *sigh*

Can anybody recommend a recent (published in the last couple of years) fantasy or science fiction book that is written by a woman, has a female main character, and does NOT have a Demon Lover or an Alpha Hero as the main character's love interest? Superpowers for the main character would be a plus but not a necessity.

Comments

[ithiliana]

*thinks*

I do not think I can.

In fact, one of the few I can think of in which the female protagonist does not end up paired up (though there's a bit of a hint that it might come about in future) is Janet Kagan's HELLSPARK.

Everything else is all about the pairing, and demon lover seems to sum up all the fantasies and paranormal romances, and alpha male the sf....

[gryphonsegg]

*sigh* I was afraid of that.

What's Hellspark like?

[ithiliana]

It's (sadly) out of print--it's space opera, with a protagonist who is a Hellspark (a culture of linguists/traders), solving a murder mystery on a newly opened planet and proving the sentience of the indigenous inhabitants (who communicate via feather movements rather than verbally), and who has an AI computer who's becoming sentience. One could argue that the protagonist is a bit Mary Sue-ish (but no more than most male heroes in the genre), and the linguistics and range of species and cultures that are foregrounded in the exploration team, are lovely. (Kagan has another out that does have a romantic relationship, but it's between older people which at least is different), space opera but also biologically oriented (a sort of lost colony story in which the data for the expedition was lost, and the group has spent generations trying to figure out what was folded into various species' DNA's). Very smart, very funny, very lovely both of them.

Ah, I take it back: Suzette Haden Elgin's Ozark Trilogy: the protatonist is fairly young, and does have a sexual encounter with a typical apha male hero, but it's utterly disasterous in its results (and they never get together permanently, just have the one night stand, so to speak). The three novels are Twelve Fair Kingdoms, The Grand Jubilee, And Then There'll be Fireworks. (You could technically call it YA I guess since Responsible is an adolescent, but it's got some fairly grim underpinnings). It's sort of sf/fantasy: the Ozarkers (from the US--Elgin was born and raised in the Appalachians, and has a PH.D. in linguistics) traveled from Earth to a new planet by spaceships/magic (the magical system is based on Noam Choamsky's transformational grammar!), and their culture hasn't changed much (v. patriarchal), but Responsible is in effect a lynchpin around which the magic system works. Happy marriage is NEVER part of Elgin's work (she also wrote the Native Tongue trilogy), in fact, quite the opposite.

(I'm noticing these are all much OLDER than you originally specified!).

Joanna Russ (who wrote more than the lesbian separatist novel THE FEMALE MAN): THE TWO OF THEM (time travel, future time cops, so to speak, during which the female partner breaks up nastily with the male partner in order to rescue a young girl from a dystopian patriarchal culture. WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO is her deconstruction of the lost colony story (i.e. a small group of human stranded on a planet cannot possibly survive despite male passengers' attempt to force it on the women). It's incredibly bleak!

So now I'm wondering about the lack of major cool stories about women in sff who don't get heternormatived.....

Jody Scott's I, VAMPIRE is very much not heteronormative (despite the title, it's is not a standard vampire novel--it's sort of lesbian satiric hybrid romp through....time and space! The female vampire protagonist meets an alien named Virginia Woolf, and well, let's just say it's in no way standard--and I've not met anybody else who has read Scott--Just realized as I was looking for it, that she died in 2007). I don't think I read PASSING FOR HUMAN alas. And I lost my I, V in one of my many moves during college. Have to see if I can track it down to see if it's as amazing as I remember.

Elizabeth Moon's REMNANT POPULATION about a 70 year old woman who refuses to evacuate the colony planet and stays there on her own, then has first contact with an alien race--despite Moon's problematic crap in CitizenFail, I would recommend this one still.

AHA, and that reminds me: Dorothea Dreams by Suzy McKee Charnas which is about art, revolution, politics, again, with an older female protagonist.

Charnas is better known for her dystopian series MOTHERLINES. DD is fantastic, stand alone, and very different.

[gryphonsegg]

Hellspark sounds good. There's a used bookstore in my town that might have it. I know about the Ozark and Mother Tongue books. I've read The Female Man and some of Russ's short stories. I started We Who Are About To and had to put it down because it was too depressing. I've read Remnant Population. I've read summaries and reviews of Charnas's dystopian books and decided that a)I appreciate that someone else has written them and b)there is no way I could make it even half-way through any of them. I knew she'd written other things, but I'd always assumed her work in general would be too upsetting for me to read. If DD is very different, though, maybe I should give it a try.

[ithiliana]

DD is very different from the others -- and not paid enough attention to, for some reason.

Perhaps because it's not that major dystopian thing!

[holyschist]

Hmmmm. Tanya Huff's Valor books, maybe? The eventual love interest is, I think, not really an alpha male, although he is fairly macho (although TBH, I am thus far not very interested in him--but they're just FWB in the books I've read so far). They're also interesting for positing a mixed-race, mixed-gender, mixed-species, mixed-everything future corps of space marines where thus far all of the potential conflicts besides interspecies are not really an issue. It's a take I have not seen before. Torin doesn't have superpowers, but she is scarily competent.

Alaya Johnson's books; while the love interests are a water spirit (The Spirit Binders) and a djinn (Moonshine) respectively, they're not Demon Lovers in an trope sense, I don't think--although I do rather have issues with the former and I'm waiting to see how things play out. The former has a pretty powerful heroine (at a price), the latter so far has one particular very useful ability, but is not superpowered otherwise.

Devon Monk's paranormal fantasy books--so far the love interest does not seem to be an alpha male, and I'm pretty sure he's not a Demon Lover. They have a pretty interesting premise, too, although I'm not all caught up. The heroine definitely has powers, but with a price.

I've mostly been reading YA (a lot of it older than "last few years") this year, so...not thinking of a whole lot else right now.

[gryphonsegg]

I've already read the Valor books, and you're right about the love interest. He's not an Alpha Male/Alpha Hero in the romantic fiction trope sense, and it's that trope that bothers me. The "alpha" label usually gets applied to a guy who is always angry, inclined to take his anger out on people who have nothing to do with the cause of it, sexually abusive, verbally abusive, often strongly tempted to hit his partner and/or other people who are physically smaller and more fragile than he is, unable to trust his partner to make her own decisions, and operating with a staggering sense of entitlement. Torin's not-quite-boyfriend-yet may be fairly described as "macho" or as an "alpha male" in a more sociological or animal behaviorish sense, but he's far too easygoing and too okay with other people having lives that don't revolve entirely around him to fit the romance trope.

YA recs are welcome. I've already read The Hunger Games and liked it, and I've already tried Graceling and bounced off it for other reasons. I would be quite happy to read a book that doesn't have a love interest at all. It's just that most of them do have one, and I don't mind that in theory, but in practice these particular types I dislike appear to be the most popular LI types right now. I specified "last few years" because it's fairly safe to assume that if an SF/F book with a woman author and a female protagonist is older than that and it's not a really obscure book within SF/F circles, I've either already read it or already given it a glance and passed over it for other reasons. For that matter, if you've tried older books that turned out to be better than the summary and first few pages would indicate, I'd be glad to hear about those too.

[holyschist]

Hmmm, you might try Fire depending on why you bounced off Graceling, but there are definitely reasons to bounce off Fire as well.

I would be quite happy to read a book that doesn't have a love interest at all.

Good luck. People have been wracking their brains over at mothwing's LJ trying to come up with some, and it's pretty dismal picks. In fantasy/historical fiction, it hardly seems to happen unless the books at aimed at a younger-than-YA audience. :/

You've probably already read Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead?

[gryphonsegg]

I've heard of it, but I've been hesitant to read it because of an internet fight among reviewers. If you've read it, what did you think of it?

[holyschist]

Guardian of the Dead?

I really enjoyed it, and I think Healey tried hard on all fronts and failed on at least some. Mileage among readers varies on how she handles the main character being fat (she's moving towards self-acceptance, but in a way that was too subtle and triggering for some readers), and there are some problematic "Chinese NZer secondary character is learning experience for white main character moments". I have not seen any specific critiques of the Maori aspects.

It is definitely a consciously post-Racefail book, and it tries harder than most and mostly succeeds. I like that Healey solicited feedback on problematic aspects so she can make different mistakes in the next book. But I also know people for whom some of the failures were dealbreakers.

Internet fight among reviewers?

[gryphonsegg]

I remember some very, ah, spirited discussion about racial issues in the book. Some people who read the book and posted reviews found the racially problematic aspects to be dealbreakers, and some people who weren't bothered by those aspects got kind of mean about the other readers failing to support progressive woman writer who was trying so hard.

[holyschist]

Oh, yeah--I remember the dealbreaker reviews, but I guess I didn't see the backlash. :/

I can definitely understand them being dealbreakers, but I can also understand sticking with her because she's actively trying to do better. I'm more in the latter camp (and pretty sure she won't make that particular mistake again), but YMMV.

[gryphonsegg]

The problems mentioned in the dealbreaker reviews didn't seem like the kinds of problems that are usually dealbreakers for me. But the backlash made me wary for some pretty complicated reasons. I can't think of a simple way to explain it, but basically it's like this: Apart from the distinction of "has problems in X area" vs. "doesn't have problems in X area," there's a more subtle distinction I've noticed in discussions about both fictional and real life events and issues. It's a distinction that cuts across the easier-to-pin-down distinctions between "X fail" and "absence of X fail." It has something to do with, for lack of a better way to put it, being a jerk on a personal level about defending what you like or hating on what you dislike. It's possible to write a book that contains "X win" and/or shows promise of overcoming "X fail" in the future and yet still has a subtext of being cool with this sort of jerkiness. And when people reveal this sort of jerkiness in defending a book, I get cautious about the possibility that something about the book is particularly jerk-friendly. It's not necessarily the case, but it's something I'm suspicious of.

[holyschist]

Mmm, yeah. I did not get that kind of subtext--and when Healey did her "I would like specific feedback on social justice issues in whatever way you feel comfortable with" post, she explicitly did not link to the critical reviews because she didn't want those reviewers dogpiled (although she unfortunately did not say that was why she wasn't linking in the initial post, which she probably should have). So my impression is very much that she is not cool with that kind of jerkiness. Again, YMMV.

Honestly, I think that kind of jerkiness on the part of readers is a cultural thing that seems to be really widespread now. I think it's connected to reader-entitlement--witness the incredible backlash Cashore got for having Katsa not want to get married, and the amount of readers complaining that she's going to write a book about Bitterblue next and not another Katsa-and-Po book--this idea that if one reader likes a book, EVERYONE must like that book, with no room for personal taste or different tolerance levels.

It's true that some authors encourage it or at least tolerate it coyly (*cough*JimButcher*frown*), but I think even if they actively try to stop it, it will still happen because of where reading and reviewing culture is right now.

[gryphonsegg]

The biggest reason I couldn't get into Graceling was because the setting seemed too generic. I'm not entirely sure that's the right word for it, but it seemed like the scenery and a lot of the supporting cast were ordered from a stock fantasy warehouse. I didn't think it was bad, just kind of bad with only a few characters and concepts standing out as potentially interesting. To be honest, I feel a bit guilty for not liking it more. It had so much buzz because of the "female warrior really shown as badass" angle, and I do think it succeeded at that more than the majority of the attempts at "ass-kicking warrior heroine" had. There just wasn't enough other stuff beyond that to make me really interested in the world itself and a big chunk of the cast.

[holyschist]

I think Fire has a somewhat more interesting setting, but also tries to make a metaphor about sexual violence and...I'm not sure it succeeds. If you don't mind spoilers, mothwing and I had a discussion about it here. I liked the book more than she did. I'm going to have to reread it with the idea that Fire is a completely unreliable narrator, though, and see how that affects my reaction.

Larbalestier's Liar might fit your criteria.

[gryphonsegg]

Interesting discussion! It does nothing to make me want to read the book (I am REALLY not into superhuman feminine beauty as a power/problem/plot device), but it does make me want to read more of your (and other thinky people's) comments about it.

[holyschist]

It's not just superhuman feminine beauty--one of the recurring dangers is nonhuman monsters, so for example a monster wolf that wants to eat people that is so beautiful that people let it, and there are certainly male monsters (such as Fire's father), and part of the text is dealing with how Fire being female interacts with how people perceive her monstrous beauty. But...yeah.

The nonhuman monsters are probably my biggest sticking point to reading Fire as an unreliable narrator, but I kind of really want to see fic reinterpreting parts of the story from that premise now.

There is a spoilerific review at Strange Horizons that I found very interesting.

There are a lot of ways to read the book, and I think one is as a critique of the privileging of beauty. It's really very ambitious, but I'm not sure it entirely succeeds on all fronts--still, I personally give Cashore props for attempting ambitious ideas in her books. I haven't made up my mind about her yet, but her books have definitely made me think more than most of the YA I've read recently.

[ithiliana]

I'll be interested to see which of mine just posted you know--Scott is definitely obscure. Ditto Kagan. I haven't met many people who have read Elgin, and while Charnas and Russ are definitely well known, the books I mentioned aren't their bigger name/most famous ones!).

Do you know Barbara Hambly's work at all? I love her fantasies because neither male nor female protagonists are the typical fantasy tropes -- gawky, awkward, intellectual feminist female protagonists who aren't conventionally attractive end up either with wizards who are ditto (magic in Hambly's storyverses is not easy to practice--wizards are stigmatized by the political powers, always at risk for death, and to become a wizard is sort of a cross between achieving a PH.D. in a humanities area and becoming a black belt in a complex martial arts field...)

[gryphonsegg]

I do know of Hambly. I have one of her newer books on my "to read" list. The way she portrays magic intrigues me, but I've read elsewhere that a lot of her female characters end up paired with much older men, which is a long-standing squick of mine (it's one of the factors that create my frustration with the current popularity of the Demon Lover trope-- it's usually a fairly young human girl with a being who's been around for centuries). Of course, I understand that might not have been a fair assessment of her overall body of work.

[ithiliana]

The Darwath trilogy does have the younger woman/older man pairing, but in no way like the Demon Lover trope! The female protagonist (medieval history graduate student) is not that young, certainly not girlish, and when transported to the fantasy world, ends up in the local militia. The wizard, although older, is not centuries old, and, well, all I can say is that it works (the secondary pairing in the novel--the young man who turns out to be wizard who gets together with the Queen is more a traditional romance trope, but even then, Hambly tweaks it somewhat).

Her more recent ones which you might have listed (CIRCLE OF THE MOON, SISTERS OF THE RAVEN) are about women gaining powers in an extremely patriarchal society; the female protagonist's main relationships are with the other women (though there is a romantic involvement, he's not older, more powerful, and it's not the really major focus of it).

One of my favorites is The Windrose Chronicles (not good title because that's the male character):The Silent Tower, The Silicon Mage, Dog Wizard: the female protagonist is shy, mousy, smarter than hell, computer programmer who is pulled into fantasy universe--she eschews the handsome sexy alpha male swordsman for the gawky brilliant under sentence of death wizard (again, she's fully established in her profession, in an unhappy relationship at the start), and Joanna and Antryg's relationship is a bit more the focus of the trilogy, but there's some lovely worldbuilding (a world trying to move along technologically, as start of industrial revolution of sorts, outlawing magic), and I adore the two characters.

There's a stand alone novel set in that universe (Stranger at the Wedding) where the female protagonist has to save her sister from a death spell cast by an (older) wizard.

I do not think a lot of her female characters end up paired with much older men--Darwath is the closest to that. The relationships are rarely the major focus of the works (major social crises and attacks from the Void and such keep interfering with the relationships)--I'd say that they novels are more alternate world (sometimes medieval, sometimes a bit later) fantasies that don't exclude relationships.

I love her work so much because it goes against all the usual romantic and fantasy tropes in terms of relationships (she's not interested in the nobility, in lost kings, and in happy endings). (With the exception of MOON and SISTERS, the settings are fairly European though.)

[gryphonsegg]

Okay, that's good to know! It sounds like the person who complained about the older man thing may have read one or two books in which it happened and made a hasty generalization that it was A Thing with Hambly.

[gryphonsegg]

Oh, I forgot to ask the question I always want to ask of Valor fans! What's your favorite non-human species? I like the Krai best myself. At least, it was Krai all the way for the first three books. I read the POW book this year, and after getting to know the "enemies" better, Cherry Bug really grew on me and I'm really interesting in apparently unique abilities her species has.

[holyschist]

I don't know if I qualify as a "fan"--I've only read the first two or three so far and have only mild feelings of like about them. I like the Krai best of the lot, although that's not really saying much, since I find Huff's aliens...insufficiently alien (and the di'Taykan or however it's spelled kind of eyeroll-induing).

Haven't gotten to know the "enemies" well enough yet to have an opinion on them.

[gryphonsegg]

I find the di'Taykin more amusing than eyeroll-inducing (most of the time, anyway) because I think of them as a response to some of the even more offensive other species portrayed by other authors, especially the "sex-crazed but exclusively heterosexual" types and the "females are sexy by human standards but males are hideous" types and the "single sex species that will mate with members of any species or sex, but they all look like slender, pretty humanoid women" types. I wonder if they're also partly a response to the previous waves of SF books which postulated that humans would be so much better off without all our icky, regressive sexual hang-ups such as women refusing to put out for men like author, or to some of the more far-out "sex positive" rhetoric in certain feminist and queer-identified circles. They seem to be, on some level, a message that amounts to "Yeah, this could totally work IF WE WERE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SPECIES WITH COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BIOLOGY AND HISTORY." But that might just be my prudish self looking for what I want to see.

[holyschist]

Mmm, I hadn't thought about them from a reactive POV, probably because I haven't read much SF (because it largely makes me want to throw books across the room). The thing is, I don't find them all that plausible as a species--so far I don't find any of the aliens all that plausible. They seem sort of one-note and simplified (and sure, there's some "humans are like x", too, but I don't feel that makes it better--I want human and aliens who can't be summed up easily with species-wide cultural traits).

[gryphonsegg]

I don't see them as all that plausible from an ecology/animal behavior point of view, but there are a LOT of super-annoying tropes in male-authored SF that Huff seems to be using the di'Taykin to give the finger to, and those tropes involve species that are even less plausible. For that reason, I give the di'Taykin more of a pass than I probably would if I hadn't read so many SF books by wanky-- in all senses of the word-- male authors when I was younger. If I had a different reading history and I picked up this series without that context, the di'Taykin would probably make me go "WHAT?! I don't . . . just . . . WHAT?!"

[holyschist]

Yeah; I have less context, so I mostly went "LOL, srsly?!" (I do think humans would have more trouble adapting to how casual the di'Taykin are about sex than is shown.)

I like reactive fiction fine, when I've slogged through enough of what it's reacting to, but I've found most SF so frustrating I really just want to see SF that skips straight past reactive to just plain plausible and awesome.

(By the way, I think you and mothwing might have some interesting conversations about books.

[gryphonsegg]

I do think humans would have more trouble adapting to how casual the di'Taykin are about sex than is shown.

*nods* I think you've got a point there. But I do like (again, because I have a different context for it) some of the things Huff does using the di'Taykin. Most of all, I like how rules and customs are set up so that certain kinds of behavior are okay among di'Taykin because they're geared that way biologically (however implausible their hypothetical biology may be) but it's also recognized that the same kind of behavior should not be expected of humans or Krai because that's just not the way most humans and most Krai are wired. For example, I like that the di'Taykin sleep in a communal tent while the humans and Krai get individual sleeping bags, and I really like how the regulations allow for superior officer/subordinate sex if and only if both the superior and the subordinate are di'Taykin. I'm used to SF where either the sexual mores of the writer's formative years are treated as universally right or there's a lot of Author On Board soapboxing about how much better everything would be if everyone would just stop being so picky about where, when, how, and with whom they have sex. So I find the policy of "Yeah, okay, that's their thing, but it's not everybody's thing" and the apparent narrative support for that refreshing.

[gryphonsegg]

Now that I think about it, it must seem a little weird that I'm as fond of the Krai as I am. If nothing else, I'm almost as picky about food as about sex. XD But something about them pleases me. Maybe it's because they're smaller than the other "fighting" races (at least in the Alliance; the other side has a small species too, and they ride into battle on the backs of these big people that are like a cross between pack-hunting carnivores and centaurs) and their feet aren't made for walking on the ground, but some of them end up in the infantry anyway. I'm sure the climbing ability is part of it. I think there's also something going on with how they're both small-yet-fierce and so far away from human beauty norms. My mom and I have this category called "so ugly they're cute" for animals they we find endearing even though they don't have conventionally pretty traits and most people think they're ugly. And somehow the eat-anything-ness joins up with everything else to make them even more amusing/endearing.

Torin and the survivors of her group get up close and personal with the "enemies" in the fourth book. I <3 the so-called bug aliens and the big centaur-cat-wolves that love to carry smaller creatures on their backs (it turns out they respond well to carrying Krai, not just their assigned partner/ally species).