I'm having a huge blank spot, and maybe someone can help me. I'm trying to remember the name of a white African female author and am having a total brainfart. She's southern African, I'm pretty sure, prolific, highly critically regarded, and has written a little sci fi, but is primarily mainstream.

Yes, I could be vaguer if you pressed me, but it would be difficult.

This gap in my memory is just so frustrating!

Nadine Gordimer?

No, she didn't write any sci fi. The author I'm thinking of has, I think, at least two sci fi novels to her name. I'm not sure they were well-received by experts in the genre, but I remember liking what I'd read.

Jesus, my mother would shoot me. I know it's one of her favourite authors.

Doris Lessing?

Winifred Holtby?

Charlize Theron?

Jesus H Christ.

Thank you, Hec, for getting the right name from my vague and incorrect memory. It was her Shikasta series that my mother tried to wean me off sci fi with. My mother? Not always the most sensible woman.

Until now, though, I hadn't realised she wasn't born in Africa. She was born in Iran.

And thanks, the rest of you, for playing along with my senior moment.

eta: except P-C. No thanks for you!

Lessing would have been my next guess.

For some reason, my mother really wanted me to stop reading sci fi and fantasy books, and wanted me to read socially conscious books. So she introduced me to Doris Lessing (and we see how well that took) and Octavia Butler's Kindred.

She so crazy.

Of course, I'm insanely grateful to her for the Octavia Butler thing, because she's one of my favourite authors ever, but how was Kindred supposed to make me stop reading sci fi?

Also, for a woman with a chronic spy thriller habit, she really has no room to need to wean anyone off any genre. There's no more crap in my backyard than there is in hers.

One of my favorite writers is Ursula Leguin, and I am not a sci-fi reader per se.