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God’s War

Author: Kameron Hurley

Sugar and spice and all things nice? Don't let Victorian misconceptions about women fool you. Open this novel and you are in a predominantly female world that is as nasty and brutish as anything. When a novel opens with the heroine casually cutting someone's head off, you know you are in for a book that takes no prisoners. There's a war that has been going on for generations, and it has sucked nearly all the men out of society and into the front line. So women have filled the niches left behind, including Nyx, our heroine, who is a bounty hunter and who spends large portions of the novel giving or receiving beatings, torture or other violence. Gender doesn't define how people behave, social context does. And as Nyx's adventures bring her up against the implacable forces that rule this world, we see how her environment has necessarily made her tough. Elements of military sf are incorporated into an account of the plots, betrayals and assassinations that emerge from a matriarchal society divided against itself. The result is a fast-paced, hard-edged novel of breathless action and cruel violence. Why it's on the list: It is refreshing to find a novel that demonstrates that women are equal masters of the sort of tough-guy story usually considered to be the exclusive preserve of men. And one of the points of this list is to overthrow any and all preconceptions about women writers.

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