This gem from 30 years ago was recommended to me by The StoryGraph.

I had no idea such great women characters were available back in the early 90s.

The setting on a quarantined planet where only women survived a plague lends itself to a wide gamut of women characters that defy gender roles and allows the work to age well since missing technologies can be attributed to the isolation.

There are some echoes of the movie Alien and themes from the Bene Gesserit of Dune, but this is in no way Alien or Dune