I fell down a lovely, TBR-bloating, procrastination-encouraging rabbit hole with this list. It's so great. A fun way to find more authors for the list has been to look for recommendations in subgenres that people tend to think of as male-dominated. For example, cyberpunk or military science fiction.

It's tough to tell, since a few authors are represented multiple times, but I think I've now included at least 140 individual authors (and am probably still missing a few that people have recommended). Unfortunately, I should probably start preparing for my flight next week. Must stop reading “recommend your favorite authors” comments sections...

I've started this list at Jessica's suggestion. If I've missed an author, let me know - and if you could suggest a particular book, that would be even better, because picking specific books is turning out to be the hardest part of making the list.

I'm trying to stick to one book per author, but that's been difficult in a few cases. So many of these women write/wrote multiple unrelated series, and it's not always easy for me to tell what their most popular book/series is. So far, I have more than one book listed for Tanith Lee and C.J. Cherryh and may go back and list additional books for some of the others.

On a related note, did you know that LibraryThing has a "Rating Statistics" feature on its author pages? It's been coming in very handy.