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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Read part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | index | afterword

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General Mike O’Neal is popular with the troops and at home after liberating first Earth then planet after planet from the Posleen. The Darhels fear him and now that the war is almost over, they strike. General O’Neal is set up and captured, his troop are killed in an ambush. A kangaroo Court with drummed up charges is held and he is found guilty.

His transport to prison is intercepted by a Bane Sidhe strike team lead by his daughter Cally, who he thinks dead. They bring Mike to earth without showing Cally.

The news of what happened leads to mutiny on the Moonbase and Fleet and they are just about to start fighting when neither side can fire their weapons. The human mentats tell of a new enemy, more fierce and technological advanced than the Posleen.

The Darhels and the alliance depends on humans to fight their wars, and there is only one leader that can save their bacon this time, General Mike O’Neal. But after what they did to him, his family and humanity it’s not going to be easy to get him to help. This time there will be change, a lot of change, with Mike O’Neal in charge of the war.

The Hedren Tyranny has invaded and they have mental powers they use for war. Michele and the other mentats have been trained in the Way that forbid violence but now they have to face the ‘Dark side’.

John Ringo is fantastic at portraing life in the military even when they are not fighting and making it interesting to the reader. Even appointing officers and NCOs interests as much as a battle (almost).

But there is more going on in this book, it hints of bigger powers behind the scene and the ending is a total cliffhanger. Now I have to wait for the resolution (Probably 2 more books). I was a bit disappointed by John Ringo’s homepage, there was no information on the series there, not even on this book.

Eye of the Storm (Free Online Book) was a hard book to put down, John Ringo at his best, a superb military science fiction. I recommend it.

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