I vaguely remember that for the most part I agreed with her underlying philosophy, but I still didn’t like how it was handled. I freakin’ love China Mieville, too, and agree with a lot of his philosophy, but his books like King Rat, where it’s made too explicit and where his good guys are so triumphant, are pretty offputting in the same way.
How about Octavia Butler? Especially the Lilith Brood series.
A little more obscure, but I recommend Jacqueline Lichtenberg’s (and later also Jean Lorrah’s) Sime/Gen series, starting with House of Zeor. It’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi about a society where humans have mutated into two separate species–one of which requires a life-force generated by the other one to live. The books, which span a frontier-equivalent timeframe all the way up to a spacegoing one, deal with the various ways in which the two species interact with each other, and how they slowly learn to live together without killing. They get a little mystical in the later books, but they’re all good reads and popular with both male and female readers.
They’re just now starting to come back into print as paper and Kindle versions (I know because the author’s been happily raving about the fact on her Facebook group, and all us fans are happy to see them finally coming back.) Just please, if you recommend the new Kindle versions to your friend, tell her to ignore the covers. They’re public domain stuff and pretty bad, though orders of magnitude better than what the publisher slapped on them initially. For some reason this series has almost continually been saddled with bad and/or completely ambiguous covers.
I asked Pepper Mill, since she’s a science fiction fan (we met at a science fiction convention), and she recommends the old classics – H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, things like War of the Worlds, The Time Machine. She also thinks Ray Bradbury’s work is really good – Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and others.
Verne didn’t have many women in his books (they kept introducing them into the movies based on his works), but there are some strong female roles in The Children of Captain Grant (AKA In Search of the Castaways, and the Disney movie of that title isn’t really a good representation of the book) and the only-recently-translated The Mighty Orinoco.
Many older female SF fans like Heinlein because, as bad as he seems today, he was really quite progressive about females for his time. At least his females seemed to be sentient and competent, which is better than most females were portrayed in SF at the time. They aren’t particularly realistic, just more palatable to most women.
Some of LeGuin’s writing is very good for novice SF readers, while some is not.
Speaking of novices…James Schmitz wrote some very good stories with female characters which were reprinted fairly recently. I’d recommend any of his work.
So little John Varley love in this thread! Read all of these:
Steel Beach- although set on the moon ~200 years into the future, it’s a story where the technology is more backdrop than centerpiece.
Mammoth- somewhat on the silly side but this is an excellent story about the cloning of a woolly mammoth with a bit of time travel mixed in. Fantastic story.
Red Thunder/Red Lightning/Rolling Thunder- all excellent stories but for the female fan Rolling Thunder is the book to recommend because of the strong and awesome female lead. You don’t need to read the series but I’d recommend all of them. Red Thunder is the kind of book that takes you back (despite being set in the near future) to the heady days of the space program when it had some balls.
The Golden Globe- an actor is chased across the solar system as he attempts to make it home to Luna so he can play Hamlet. No description could do it true justice. The book is full of moments of awesome.
OK, I’ll admit that I love John Varley. I thought that he’d already been mentioned.
John Scalzi is my newest SF crush, though. If nothing else, give her Old Man’s War to read.
After a little thought, I would recommend instead reading one of the better collections of scifi stories. Disposable Hero, if you’re still reading this, introduce her to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame books or maybe the Hugo and Nebula winner anthologies. If she doesn’t like these stories, she isn’t going to like science fiction.
Yeesh. To Sail Beyond The Sunset isn’t good reading for anyone. Heinlein’s stuff got bizarre-for-bizarre’s-sake toward the end and that one was basically creepy on many levels. It goes far beyond his well-known preference for free love / group marriage.
Time Enough For Love isn’t a bad read (and features some of the TSBTS characters in its last section). Any of Heinlein’s future history works are enjoyable and I think are still available in “The Past Through Tomorrow”.
Anyway - +1111 on Bujold’s Vorkosigan-verse stories. Shards of Honor is indeed the first one in the Miles series, though Falling Free is set a couple of hundred years earlier in that same universe (a descendant of that group of people appears in one of the later Miles books).
Other Bujold series: The Sharing Knife (4 books set in a sort of alternate or post-apocalyptic North America). Nothing too intense, enjoyable reading. I had fun mapping out the places the characters travelled, against the waterways of the midwestern US :).
Her “Curse of Chalion” seriies (CofC, followed by Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt) is set in a very richly described world. It’s definitely hard fantasy vs. SF. It’s not as easy a read as some of her other stuff, however. You really need to pay attention!
Sort of coming in late here, and don’t know if anyone else has already suggested it, but I’d go with Vatta’s War by Elizabeth Moon. I’ve found that young girls seem to enjoy Sci-Fi more when there is a female protagonist in the story. My daughter, who isn’t a big Sci-Fi fan liked Vatta’s War quite a bit.
If fantasy is more in line I’d try something by Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern)…she really enjoyed that as well. ETA: She also liked the Armageddon Reef series which is sort of Sci-Fi/Fantasy all rolled up into one.
-XT
Another Robinson book she might enjoy is Stardance.
I’ve got my wife to read some SF and she enjoyed these:
S.M. Stirlings - Dies the Fire (and then the sequels)
Ursula K. Le Guin - Left Hand of Darkness
William Gibson - Neuromancer
Madeleine L’Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
ONLY the first couple of trilogies, though, and Moreta and Nerilka’s Story. McCaffrey had a pretty good world going, but she milked all she could out of it, and the fans clamored for more. I can’t blame her for writing even after the well has run dry, but I’ve quit reading her books after several disappointments.
Blimey, didn’t realise this thread had come back to life!
I gave her ‘Replay’ by Ken Grimwood to read because while its sort-of sci-fi I just figured it was a good read and she would find it interesting.
Unfortunately she’s had it for ages now but hasn’t read it and I don’t think she’s going to, sorry guys but looks like its a bust! :\
But to be fair I think its more that she’s just extremely busy with work and home-life rather than a lack of interest.
As a female, former non-sci fi fan, my introduction to sci fi was through Heinlein, and I read most of his stuff in high school or just after. While I agree that some of it may not be enjoyed by many females, I personally think both Friday and Starship Troopers are good starters. Not sure why Heinlein is so… disliked.
Well, the underlying theme of Star Ship Troopers is probably not going to win him many fans on this board. 
-XT
Honestly, what little I’ve read of Heinlein (and it is little) struck me as pure adolescent male fantasy.
I picked up a Heinlein book, Number of the Beast from a second-hand book store once and it was one of the very few books I threw in the bin halfway through reading.
It was many years later before I picked up, Starship Troopers and realised why he was such a big name in sci-fi literature though much of what he writes isn’t really my thing.
Worked my way through the uncut version of Stranger in a Strange Land recently and I can’t decide whether it was a good book or a bad book but it was certainly odd.
I dislike Starship Troopers for much the same reason I dislike Sherri Tepper: both of them use their fiction to fantasize about what the world would be like if THEY were in charge, and they turn their political/aesthetic opponents into fools or demons or whatever. It’s heavy-handed and annoying.
Heh. Pick up For Us, The Living by Heinlein. You will discover what heavy-handed and annoying truly is.