A Door into Ocean

John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner 1987, Prometheus Award nominee 1987.

A Door into Ocean is the novel upon which the author's reputation as an important SF writer principally rests. A ground-breaking work both of feminist SF and of world-building hard SF, it concerns the Sharers of Shora, a nation of women on a distant moon in the far future who are pacifists, highly advanced in biological sciences, and who reproduce by parthenogenesis – there are no males – and tells of the conflicts that erupt when a neighboring civilization decides to develop their ocean world, and send in an army.