books to read if you like cheesy sci fi but still have politics and/or a sense of humour

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
I tend to think of Marge Piercy as writing stealth feminist novels ... a lot of her books are described and marketed in super mainstream ways, but when you get into them, you find that her portrayals of gender and relationships are anything but stereotypical. Woman on the Edge of Time is one of her two sci fi books (the other being He, She, and It, which is about the nature of humanity, although it is not nearly as stuffy as that description would imply), and it's a really interesting read. The premise involves a protagonist imprisoned in a mental hospital who suddenly finds herself able to project herself into the future. To be honest, I think the plot is a bit weak in some places, and the real appeal is Piercy's incredibly well thought out depictions of the future society. She envisions this utopian yet still realistic future as a agrarian based society which still uses advanced technology when it is useful and necessary. The people are genderless, identified by pronouns of "zee" instead of "she" or "he". Although the ideas are interesting, the depictions of the supposedly gender neutral characters is unconvincing, as in lots of other sci fi I've read with this premise. It seems silly that even writers of speculative fiction are so trapped in the constructs of gender that even ostensibly genderless people are always identifiable as "male" or "female". Goes to show how much we've all internalized those premises, I s'pose.

Anything by Octavia Butler
The only feminist woman of colour I know of who writes sci fi (if you can school me about others, please do so!), so of course her books were a happy find. Like Ursula LeGuin, she writes novels that usually have some sort of political cautionary message and explore different ideas, and she also shares the trait of never oversimplifying or getting pedantic. I like books that can make political points through telling an interesting story, as opposed to ones that hammer their messages into your head, sacrificing the enjoyment of reading the book to do so. Butler's writing is tough, gory, smart, and well thought out. It shouldn't be unusual and exciting to find a body of work where all the main protagonists are smart, gutsy, women of colour, but unfortunately it is, so I'm glad I found these. The Parable of The Sower books are about a dystopian near future, and Butler says that they "came out of reading the news. They're books that warn us that if we're not careful, we're going to end up living in a fairly nasty world in the not-too-distant future." They combine horrific situations and details told in matter of fact ways (after all, these are the characters' daily realities), with a new philosophy/movement called Earthseed that the main character comes up with. It's egalitarian, cooperative, and above all, can be put into action immediately and lived out in everyday ways (something more folks who want to improve society should maybe be thinking about). Good stuff, at any rate.

A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
Amazing eco-anarchist sci fi about a world called Shora, populated only by women. The world is covered entirely by sea, and the women live on organic rafts they grow for themselves. Their entire culture is based around sharing, in the sense of sharing amongst themselves and also considering themselves to be a part of their planet, but not the rulers of it. Their language is structured so that everything is shared ... for example, a healer would not heal someone, they would share healing with them. It's essentially the concept that we don't live in a vacuum or a bubble, that we are a part of our environments no matter where we live, and that as such, our words and actions do not exist in isolation either. The plot of A Door Into Ocean concerns what happens when Valedon, a nearby planet where the society is stratified into peasants and the nobility and where soldiers are valued over people who practice other trades, decides to invade Shora. Slonczewski doesn't just sketch out caricatures of peaceful Shoran and warmongering Valans, though, which is what takes the book past a neat premise and into an incredibly absorbing read. This is right up there with The Dispossessed, as far as I'm concerned.