These authors are not my tribe

I've been catching up with reading some of the women SF authors' books I bought a while ago.  And boy, have I been disappointed by them.

One work - an award-nominated novel - held the promise of a tale about genetically engineered animals and their human handlers, territory that interests me a great deal.  But that was just the book's throwaway line.  The genetic engineering of the animals was supposed to drive the idea at the heart of the story, but to me that connection was never made.

The first viewpoint in the book (which takes up the first third of the novel) was a female character who really shouldn't have been there.  All she did was comment on her post- apocalyptic life - oh, and have sex with every man she met.  Her voice as what we used to call 'ladette', a woman trying to be tough, but on men's terms. And she stood by and did nothing when her brother's child was kidnapped.

The second book was again post-apocalyptic, with again an interesting premise.  But there the women are controlled by men as usual, despite possessing awesome powers.  They were even told who they had to have sex with, and produced babies they didn't want.  Although they possessed great powers, they were, in effect, powerless.  They never questioned and challenged their control.

Neither of these women had any agency, no drive to defy or change the systems they found themselves in.  They had no vision for the future.  They were passively accepting a life where they didn't even make decisions on the privacy of their own bodies.  The authors of these stories are not my tribe.  They don't reflect the way I live, or my hopes and dreams for the future.

It sometimes seems to me that women in SF can't raise their gaze beyond the domestic, and that pisses me off big time.  For a start, it doesn't reflect my life, where contact with the domestic is as limited as possible.  For me, SF is the place where women should be equal, should have agency, should be seen as making a difference to the universe.  If we can't dream there, then where can we?

So books which perpetuate the powerlessness of women today, and the mindlessness of characters agreeing to sex with every man they meet because they're 'tough' just don't do anything for me.  These visionless women are not my tribe.