There’s an article up on Tor.com, Break the YA Monopoly — Give Us Female Heroes for Adults, by Emily Asher-Perrin. OK. While I’m very happy that Tor.com has feminist articles, WTF? What has Asher-Perrin been reading? I’d expect an article like that in the NYT, but on Tor??? Because I can name female heroes in adult fantasy and SF for days, for any definition of hero. There are the ones like Mor Phelps (Jo Walton’s Among Others) who is ‘merely’ the hero of her own life; there are the ones like Kate Daniels (eponymous series by Ilona Andrews) or Beka Rosselin-Metadi (Mageworlds series by Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald) who could take on any Marvel heroine; there are the gritty ones like Toby Daye (Seanan Maguire’s October Daye series) or Elizabeth Bear’s Jenny Casey, who kick ass and win battles but only at the cost of great personal pain. There are the ones who make mistakes and do their damnedest to fix them, becoming a hero in the process, like Kim Murray aka Aurelia Dsaret (Sherwood Smith’s Coronets and Steel). There’s the older ones like Paksenarrion, the paladin of a warrior god (1980s, I think) and the newer ones like Verity Price, cryptozoologist, martial artist, and ballroom of Seanan Maguire’s just-begun Discount Armageddon series. There’s even mythical ones, like the fairy-tale heroines of Jim Hines’ Princess books.
The entire subgenre of Urban Fantasy is centered on female protags; granted there are Bellas among therm but there are lots of real heroes too, some mentioned above. In addition, mysteries these days more often have female detectives than not, and while some of them are bumblers who always need rescuing, others are smart and brave.
I don’t know what exactly Asher-Perrin, is missing in her reading, but it doesn’t seem to be missing in mine. I’m sure there are plenty of mysogynist books out there in recent SFF< but I'm not even deliberately trying to avoid them, just buying books that sound appealing to me. Based on what's ended up on my shelves and Kindle, I’d have said rather that the genres of fantasy and SF, both adult and YA, are serving as shining beacons right now, that other forms of literature ought to consider following.