Nine titles honoring women’s unseen contributions to science

C. E. McGill was born in Scotland and raised in North Carolina. Their short fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Strange Constellations, and they are a two-time finalist for the Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in SF/F Writing. They now live in Scotland with their family, two cats, and a growing number of fake succulents (the real ones keep dying).

Our Hideous Progeny is their first novel and they have begun writing their second.

At Electric Lit McGill tagged nine novels honoring women’s unseen contributions to science, including:

The Fair Botanists by Sara Sheridan

This novel follows another Elizabeth, the recently widowed Elizabeth Rocheid, who arrives in Edinburgh in the 1820s. An eager botanist and artist, she offers her services as an illustrator to capture the once-in-a-lifetime flowering of the Agave Americana plant in the city’s brand-new Botanic Garden. Along the way, Elizabeth strikes up a touching friendship with Belle Brodie, a fellow botany enthusiast (whose interest in the rare flower, however, runs in a far more commercially-exploitable direction). With plenty of cameos from famous scientists and thinkers of the era, Sheridan skillfully captures the buzz and excitement of this period of scientific history, painting a fascinating portrait of the Botanic Garden and Georgian Edinburgh as a whole.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue