We’re running late this month for book voting, so I’m going to keep the choices to short works, if possible. I was looking at the Not the Man Booker Prize list for 2018 and found two that met our #ReadWomenSF criteria, and those are:

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh (226 pages) – longlisted.

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Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia and Sky, kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them – three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.

The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood and transformation.

Sealed by Naomi Booth (157 pages) – shortlisted.

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“We came out here to begin again. We came out here for the clear air and a fresh start. No one said to us: beware of fresh starts. No one said to us: god knows what will begin.”

Timely and suspenseful, Sealed is a gripping modern fable on motherhood. A terrifying portrait of ordinary people under threat from their own bodies and from the world around them. With elements of speculative fiction and the macabre, this is also an unforgettable story about a mother s fight to survive.

Heavily pregnant Alice and her partner Pete are done with the city. Above all, Alice is haunted by the rumours of the skin sealing epidemic starting to infect the urban population. Surely their new remote mountain house will offer safety, a place to forget the nightmares and start their little family. But the mountains and their people hold a different kind of danger. With their relationship under intolerable pressure, violence erupts and Alice is faced with the unthinkable as she fights to protect her unborn child.

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To meet the more “hard” sci-fi elements for our reading, I’ve also chosen a classic Anne McCaffrey book.

The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey (255 pages)

[image error]The brain was perfect, the tiny, crippled body useless. So technology rescued the brain and put it in an environment that conditioned it to live in a different kind of body – a spaceship. Here the human mind, more subtle, infinitely more complex than any computer ever devised, could be linked to the massive and delicate strengths, the total recall, and the incredible speeds of space. But the brain behind the ship was entirely feminine – a complex, loving, strong, weak, gentle savage – a personality, all-woman, called Helva…

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And our Wild Card choice (a book highlighted in a previous month but didn’t get voted in):

The Female Man by Joanna Russ (228 pages)

[image error]A landmark book in the fields of science fiction and feminism.

Four women living in parallel worlds, each with a different gender landscape. When they begin to travel to each other’s worlds each woman’s preconceptions on gender and what it means to be a woman are challenged.

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There we have it: four books (all under 260 pages) to read for our next #ReadWomenSF Twitter chat, which is scheduled for 8pm BST on Monday 1st October 2018. The above book choices will be available to vote on until tomorrow (4th September, 23:59 BST) on my pinned tweet on Twitter (@gemtodd). If you don’t have Twitter, you can leave your nomination in the comments below or on my facebook page.