What Best Sci Fi Fantasy Books 2020 Feature Strong Female Protagonists?

Honestly, got a bit burnt out on epic fantasy, so Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi' was a breath of fresh air. The protagonist's gender is ambiguous, but many read them as female. Their strength is a profound, gentle curiosity and an unwavering kindness towards their strange world and its sole other inhabitant. In a year of chaos, this book's quiet wonder and the protagonist's resilient, unbroken spirit felt like the deepest kind of strength. It’s a completely different, meditative take on the prompt.

I scrolled through a bunch of 2020 lists looking for this exact thing. 'The Space Between Worlds' by Micaiah Johnson really hooked me. The protagonist, Cara, is from a dirt-poor, dangerous world and gets a job traversing the multiverse because her counterparts on other Earths keep dying. Her strength is pure, raw survival instinct and a deep, cunning understanding of systemic inequality. She's not a noble hero; she's someone who uses the rules of a brutal system to her own advantage, and watching her navigate the politics of the wealthy core worlds while her own world is literally crumbling is so tense and smart. It's a sci-fi thriller with a heart, and Cara's emotional guardedness feels like its own form of armor. Also, side note, the world-building around the multiversal travel logistics is surprisingly gritty and grounded, which makes the whole thing feel more urgent.

Those 'best of' lists from 2020 always bring me back to a few that genuinely stuck. For me, the standout was Tamsyn Muir's 'Harrow the Ninth'. It's a wild sequel that completely inverts everything you thought you knew from 'Gideon the Ninth'. Harrowhark Nonagesimus is a protagonist defined by staggering, self-destructive grief and obsessive magical intellect. She's not 'strong' in a conventional, physically powerful sense; her strength is a fractured, terrifying will to impose her reality on a universe actively unspooling around her. The narrative itself is famously challenging, mirroring her fractured psyche, which makes her eventual moments of clarity so devastatingly earned.

A more accessible but no less brilliant pick is 'The Once and Future Witches' by Alix E. Harrow. It's a historical fantasy set in an alternate 1890s where witchcraft is a suppressed, folkloric memory. The three Eastwood sisters—James, Agnes, and Beatrice—each wield a different kind of strength: scholarly grit, righteous fury, and healing resilience. Their fight to reclaim magic is deeply intertwined with the suffragist movement, making their strength explicitly collective and political. The prose is incantatory and beautiful, and the sisters' flawed, fraught relationship is the real heart of the power here.

I'd also toss in 'Network Effect' by Martha Wells, the first full-length Murderbot novel. While Murderbot is agender, its narrative voice—cynical, anxious, and fiercely protective—resonates with many readers seeking protagonists who defy traditional heroic molds. Its strength is in its capacity for connection despite its programming, a deeply relatable arc. And for pure, world-shaking scale, 'The City We Became' by N.K. Jemisin features multiple protagonists, but the women like Bronca and Neek are incredible forces of cultural memory and defiant creation, literally battling cosmic existential threats. That book is a manifesto in narrative form.

You know, I think the definition of 'strong' gets really interesting in 'Upright Women Wanted' by Sarah Gailey. It's a slim novella set in a future American Southwest governed by a rigid, authoritarian regime. The protagonist, Esther, is a stowaway with a queer librarian gang—who are actually smugglers of subversive literature. Her strength isn't about being the best fighter (though there's action); it's about the courage to choose a truth that her entire upbringing told her was wrong. It's a story about finding your people and your moral compass in a world designed to break both. The western-pulp aesthetic mixed with a deeply personal coming-of-age story makes it incredibly memorable. Gailey packs so much heart and rebellion into such a short page count, and Esther's vulnerability is what makes her eventual resolve so powerful.