55 Formidable Female Protagonists to help me celebrate Midsummer Eve or maybe to give you ideas of books to read this lovely summer. I am chipper today the first day of holiday. Today’s five mighty awesome protagonists include a fierce covert operative, two mighty psi talents, an undaunted and intrepid space diver and the recorded personality of a dead woman.

I will present new FFPinSF every Friday for at least four more weeks. They are selected by me drawing their names out of a bowl.

Cally O’Neal – Secret Assassin (John Ringo)
Angharad Gwyn – the Rowan (Anne McCaffrey)
Sira di Sarc – Welcome Stranger (Julie E. Czerneda)
Boss – Safety First (Diving into the Wreck – Kristien Kathryn Rusch)
Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark – Mind Recording (Michael Swanwick)´

Cally O’Neal – Secret Assassin

Books: Cally’s War (2004) free online edition, Sister Time (2007) free online edition, Honor of the Clan (2009) free online edition, Eye of the Storm (2009) free online edition
Series: Cally’s War Series, Hedren War
Author: John Ringo
Genre: Military Science Fiction
Publisher: Baen

Co-written with Julie Cochrane, this series is more cloak and dagger spy genre fiction as the humans strive to overcome the game rigged by the Darhel race which has the rest of the galaxy’s races in virtual thralldom—except for the Posleen and humans whom they fear, while they systematically use humans to combat the Posleen while bleeding the humans when and where possible by underhanded clandestine acts to weaken future options of humanity.

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Angharad Gwyn – the Rowan

Books: The Rowan (1990)
Series:Tower and the Hive
Author: Anne McCaffrey
Genre: Psi | Science Fiction
Publisher:ACE | Bantam | Corgi

Entertaining novels, The Rowan is the protagonist of the first novel but she figures in the remaining books to where her children are the main characters.

Told in the timeless style of Anne McCaffrey, The Rowan is the first installment in a wonderful trilogy. This is sci-fi at its best: a contemporary love story as well as an engrossing view of our world in the future.

The kinetically gifted, trained in mind/machine gestalt, are the most valued citizens of the Nine Star League. Using mental powers alone, these few Prime Talents transport ships, cargo and people between Earth’s Moon, Mars’ Demos and Jupiter’s Callisto.

An orphaned young girl, simply called The Rowan, is discovered to have superior telepathic potential and is trained to become Prime Talent on Callisto. After years of self-sacrificing dedication to her position, The Rowan intercepts an urgent mental call from Jeff Raven, a young Prime Talent on distant Deneb. She convinces the other Primes to merge their powers with hers to help fight off an attack by invading aliens. Her growing relationship with Jeff gives her the courage to break her status-imposed isolation, and choose the more rewarding world of love and family.

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Sira di Sarc – Welcome Stranger

Books: A Thousand Words For Stranger (1997), Ties of Power (1999), To Trade the Stars (2002)
Series: Trade Pact | The Clan Chronicles
Author: Julie E. Czerneda
Genre: Space Opera
Publisher: DAW

I am currently reading Ties of Power, book two of the Trade Pact series. Trade Pact and another series called Stratification is part of Julie’s Clan Chronicles. Sira is member of the clan with supreme mental powers. Unfortunately for her she is too powerful for any male of her specie to overcome which by their biology dooms her to eternal life without any chance of ever mating. But she has a plan which includes her loosing all her memories …

A review is coming up soon.

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Boss – Safety First

Books: Diving into the Wreck (2009), City of Ruins (spring 2011)
Series: Boss
Author: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Pyr

This story is written entirely in first person. The female protagonist are called the Boss by everyone. She is a loner, preferring her privacy above everything else. Kristine gives her some of the old man and the sea kind of vibe.

When she was a little kid, she lost her mother and her father stopped talking to her. Now she travels around the sector searching out old ships and dive in them. Her main interest is historian but she also makes money on tourist adventure dives.

While traveling in her small one person spaceship, she comes on a strange energy disturbance and what she finds is beyond anything she could have expected. She have found a Destiny Vessel, once built on earth itself some five thousand years ago when there wasn’t any faster than light engines. No such vessel should have been able to go this far, not even in five thousand years.

After researching the Destiny Vessels and hiring a crew she returns to the Destiny. It’s interesting how well the the author describes the diving operation. The operation comes to an halt when one of the divers get caught in a strange field and dies. One of the divers steal a skip and reported the derelict to the Empires Military. Suspecting that the Destiny Vessel was equipped with lost stealth technology the military took over the site and closed it off from civilians.

Next she is hired by Rita Trekov the daughter of a war hero that never showed up for the peace ceremony. She wants her to get him out of the Chamber of Lost Souls. This wakes memories of her own mother being lost there. So she researches him. She also goes back and see her dad. They both have issues. Rita and her father follow the team she assembles back to the old station the chamberis at. Thats when the secrets begin to come out.

The world building is better than average, the characters are vivid and the story is catching. The end build up for a sequel I would definitly buy. I have to check up other books by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark – A Mind Recording

Books: Vacuum Flowers (1987)
Author: Michael Swanwick
Genre: Cyberpunk
Publisher: Arbor House | Simon & Schuster UK | ACE | Legend

Elizabeth and Michael Swanwick are both new to me and a story about a mind recording escape slavery for the corporation that owns it and goes into hiding in a fully inhabited solar system (our own) sounds worth reading even if it was only for the vistas.

Among the vanguard of today’s boldest writers, Michael Swanwick presents his world of plug-in personalities, colonized asteroids, and a daring fugitive named Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, a high-tech criminal seeking refuge on Earth’s orbiting settlements–where all human evils blossom in the vacuum of space.

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Here are five secret agents for some easy summer reading. It is also my personal line of progression with secret agents in Scifi. As a kid I started out with Cap Kennedy along with other YA flavored SF like Perry Rhodan, the Dumarest Saga, Venus Prime and such.

Before reading Paul Anderson’s Flandry series of a far future where a crumbling and decadent empire need saving from crafty aliens. You can get the Dominic Flandry series in new omnibus releases, but they probably win the contest of bad covers (James Bond like man draped in nude/semi nude women).

I upped my game a bit when it came to secret agents with Morgan Roche in the Evergence Trilogy.

Cally was inherited from John Ringo’s Posleen series and I came to that from John Ring & David Weber’s excellent Prince Roger series (That one is still one of my favorites). I might in fact have read Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac series before Cally’s War but I wanted to finish with the best.

Enjoy!

Cap Kennedy of F.A.T.E

Author: Gregory Kern (pseudonym for Edwin Charles Tubb)

Cap Kennedy, is space opera in the style of Perry Rhodan. Known as F.A.T.E. in the UK (where only the first six books have ever been published), the novels follow the adventures of Captain Kennedy, an intergalactic investigator and Free Acting Terran Envoy (F.A.T.E.) of the Mobile Aid Laboratories and Construction Authorities (M.A.L.A.C.A.) who is assisted by his team of companions, engineer Penza Saratov, veteran scientist Professor Jarl Luden, and the human chameleon Veem Chemile. Tubb wrote 17 Cap Kennedy novels, all under the pseudonym Gregory Kern.

Dominic Flandry

Author: Poul Anderson

Dominic Flandry is the central character in the second half of Poul Anderson’s Technic History science fiction. He first appeared in 1951.

The space opera series is set in the thirty-first century, during the waning days of the Terran Empire. Flandry is a dashing field agent of the Imperial Intelligence Corps who travels the stars to fight off imminent threats to the empire from both external enemies and internal treachery. His long-time archenemy is Aycharaych, from the planet Chereion, a cultured but ruthless telepathic spymaster who weaves plots for the expansionistic rival empire of the alien Merseians. Similar to the James Bond stories (which started two years later), every new adventure brings Flandry another beautiful damsel to woo and rescue.

The illegitimate son of a minor nobleman, Flandry rises to considerable power within the decadent Empire by his own wits, and enjoys all the pleasures his position society gives him. Still he is painfully conscious of the impending fall of the Terran Empire and the subsequent “Long Night” of a galactic Dark Age. His career is dedicated to holding it off for as long as possible. In time, he passes the mantle to his daughter Diana, who is also illegitimate.

Flandry is willing to disregard conventional morality and use his foes’ tactics against them. He can cheerfully deceive, seduce, and blackmail; grimly and regretfully, he mind-probes his son into a vegetable in A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, and in that same book, bombards Aycharaych’s homeworld of Chereion into radioactive ruin to punish Aycharaych for his part in fostering trouble in the marches of the empire.

Novels

Ensign Flandry (1966)
A Circus of Hells (1970)
The Rebel Worlds (1969)
A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows (1974)
A Stone in Heaven (1979)
The Game of Empire (1985)

Collections

Agent of the Terran Empire (1965)
Flandry of Terra (1965)

Morgan Roche

Author: Sean Williams & Shane Dix

Morgan Roche is an intelligence agent for the Commonwealth of Empires and the protagonist in the Evergence Trilogy.

The Prodigal Sun (1999)
The Dying Light (2000)
The Dark Imbalance (2001)

Cally O’Neal

Author: John Ringo

Co-written with Julie Cochrane, this series is more cloak and dagger spy genre fiction as the humans strive to overcome the game rigged by the Darhel race which has the rest of the galaxy’s races in virtual thralldom—except for the Posleen and humans whom they fear, while they systematically use humans to combat the Posleen while bleeding the humans when and where possible by underhanded clandestine acts to weaken future options of humanity.

Cally’s War Series