Favourite authors: Melissa Scott

The Womens Room UK is a great organisation which seeks to help the media in the UK find female experts on all sorts of topics, and was founded as a reaction to the under-representation of women's voices in the media.  It's a great group of people, and has a very active following on Twitter at @TheWomensRoomUK.  Today, they asked people to name their favourite female authors, and I chose Melissa Scott.

I can't remember when I first came across Scott, but I think the first of her books I read was Trouble and her Friends.  I hesitate to pigeon-hole her work, but it's broadly science fiction, and often has an element of cyberpunk.  It's also always refreshing, but what really stands out for me is the positive LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans) characters that she introduces.  A number of the books explore issues of gender and sexuality, but mostly, the characters are just, well, there, and the question of their sexuality, in particular, is incidental: it's just part of who they are.  There are times when this - or their gender - may be relevant to the main plot, but often it's not.  To give an example, I've just re-read The Shapes of Their Hearts, where one of the characters, Traese, is a woman living on her own with sporadic, but non-physical contact with another woman.  Is there a longing there for a deeper relationship?  She (Traese) also speculates briefly on whether two or more of the other (male) characters may be more than partners in the professional sense, but this feels like an honest and unforced reflection which fits effortlessly into the story.

I also like the fact that Scott's main characters are often female, and as the protagonists in both of my novels (Hacking the Dragon and Big Brother's Little Sister) are girls, I wanted to nominate her because her writing was part of what spurred me on to write books for my daughters.  She's exactly the sort of writer that I hope they'll grow up to read when they're a little older.

Whilst writing this, I've discovered that Scott has her own Twitter account at @blueterraplane, so go and have a look/follow.