The last several months of posts have all focused very heavily on my endless search through mountains of recent published literature featuring queer women, seeking something that either compared to my small offering to the literary world, or filled the gap in my chest for some wholly gay scifi content.
And, I have discovered, I think, that what I seek doesn’t exist. I have hinted at it in previous posts, but this is me facing it full on.
Last month I shored up my little anxious bunny personality and participated in a book con, solo, for the first time. I even sat on a panel. Be still my heart. I’m actually quite great in public speaking scenarios, masterful even, but usually these are scenarios where I am giving a TED talk equivalent on the merits of leadership, or my expertise in spacecraft propulsion design. These are topics where I am in my element, and I am a self-proclaimed rube when it comes to talking about books. I mostly just frighten off any coworkers or innocently friendly strangers who say the barest hint of interest in the subject before I unleash a deluge of over enthusiasm that I am quite sure is full of unpopular opinions.
But this con went really well. At least, I think it did. I had fun. And I got to talk to people about books, which was even more fun. And at one point I even got to proclaim enthusiastically to a crowd full of great energy that the true solution, and message that I want to spread, is that there “just needs to be more lesbians in space!”
That went over well.
But if this series of blog posts has had anything to prove, its that it has been incredibly hard to find this genre without the science fiction being trash, or the lesbians being barely part of the plot. I have been frustrated. I made excel sheets and radar plots to better quantify my frustration. Guys, I designed my own ranking (Rozkillis Ranking will NOT be seeing a blog post, I was mad when I wrote that, I have since eaten a fruit, and feel much better about things). I’ll show you the ranking though:
Thus far I have been hitting the book shelves of established stores pretty hard. I try to buy local, I try to avoid Amazon and Barns & Noble. I do buy things from cons and indie publishers, or self-published content. But this journey started because I was trying to compare my work to other big-published work, so I, too, could get an agent to help me big-publish my work. Instead I wound up with a queer indie publisher who let me have waaaaaay more creative control over my story and thank fucking gods.
SO this post is going to address the things I have noticed as differences between queer stories published by big publishing houses, and queer stories published by indie press.
Here are some repeated trends I have identified in big-published books:
- There are queer main characters and a queer love interest, but the love interest is fraught and angst filled, hardly being allowed to come to any sort of conclusion save for maybe a fade-to-black at the end implying the characters do eventually figure it out. This had often been paired with a far more frustrating trope that the main character instead spends the span of the book reminiscing or engaging in sex with men, either as a coping mechanism or as a bad bisexual sub-plot (The Incandescent, The Rutheless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry, The Space Between Worlds, This is How You Lose the Time War)
- The author is a true-blue scifi writer who is REALLY invested in writing a good scifi story, and, even though they want to include queer characters, it cannot be at the expense of the quality of hard science fiction, therefore the queerness is lost by the wayside as something absolutely boring (Shieldrunner Pirates, Some Desperate Glory, Luminous Dead, Dead Space).
- The Science Fiction takes a massive backseat to the soft, friendly, fully emotionally secure queers who only have surface level issues and character traits, but they are great AMBASSADORS TO QUEERNESS for the friendly ally hoping to read a Gay Thing ™.
I have Feelings about all of these. And theories about what is happening here. For subset number 1, these are books where the story might actually be really great, and I think the author tried, REALLY tried to make their characters queer in the fullest sense. But I can smell in the pages where some editor stepped in and said “Eh, maybe it’s a better story if, instead of them falling in bed together, they just pine really hard over each other from afar, make some stupid mistake of falling into bed with a dude, then wrap up the whole story with a kiss, and more looks of longing”. This is more or less a thinly veiled “but it can’t be too gay, we can’t alienate the poor heterosexuals!” At least I hope that’s what is happening. I hope some editor or publisher just doesn’t have the balls to commit and instead is just hiding behind a curtain of “but bisexuality is a thing too!” (and yes, it is, but I swear there has to be pissed of bisexuals reading this trope too, its gross). In this moment I want to envision the authors weighing their frustration with the desire to get their work out there, with the hope that it moves the needle just so slightly to the future. I want to praise them for the well thought out story, and the intent behind their characters. But I want to roast an editor on a spit. Tamsyn Muir even commented on this once in an interview where she explained she expected her editor to “get rid of all the gay stuff” and was pleasantly surprised it got to stay. I, too, am pleasantly surprised. And cautionary because there is still PLENTY of time for Tor to fuck that up with the last book (glares in the direction of major publishing house).
This second category grows from something else I am familiar with. Since I have been nearly exclusively reading books written by women, I can understand the desperation of needing to make their work of a quality that can stand on a male dominated playing field. So some of these books are just victims of that line of thinking. The science fiction is entirely sound, and thrilling to engage in, but the romance is out of place and nearly useless to the story. If the romantic portion and be replaced with two best friends, or cousins, then its just… focus on the story, and don’t reach for the gay points. Wait, that’s what they already did. The story is fine. Maybe its just the frustration of me wanting more that I just will not get.
I’ve harked on my disgruntled nature for trend number three. I don’t need to get into it further. I will simply say I was… surprised, and maybe a little relieved to hear so many other people at that con panel talk about how they hate when gay characters talk like therapists in a book and are not allowed to be as trashy as I was when I was in my early 20s. So, while the collective brain cell of the internet might think that cozy queer stories cannot include messy relationships and toxic behavior, it was nice to hear that actual readers in the flesh enjoy some trash novels from time to time.
Okay so, where had I not run into these tropes? The indie books. Don’t get me wrong, I have read some pretty bad indie books, and some (not finished) self-published books where I wanted to scream “but could at least one more person have read this before you hit GO on the amazon self-pub page?” But I went to this con and straight up broke-even on book sales vs book purchases, and now need to acknowledge what I have been missing in this quest.
The writers are out there. They want to make the content, its just not getting beyond the underground still.
I also need to concede that the type of book I want to read, with scifi and enjoyable queer romance intertwined, is just such a rare, rare combination. Theres content out there, but I had to read a few strictly romance novels to realize THAT is closer to the content I want, I just want them in space. With a good space story. And space things happening. Fuck why is this so difficult?
Its happening. I know it is. I see it leaking through the cracks in the big house world. Winters Orbit, The Space Between Worlds, Gideon, books I have bought but haven’t gotten to yet, books I haven’t even heard of yet… I think it is out there. I think the quest for more lesbians in space is progressing. And since I have passed the age range for being an astronaut (and have some fun little inner ear things going on that probably medically disqualify me) the best way for me to contribute is to keep pushing my own stuff.
But I’ll admit, I think if I want this incessant buzzing in my brain, begging for the right taste of serotonin from my reading material to shut the hell up, I might just need to take a double shot indie published queer scifi, with an indie queer romance chaser to wash it down. That is until we can get the next generation of books out that put those three shitty tropes to bed for good. There’s nothing wrong with an indie deluge. I am part of it, and it’s been fantastic.
Points to the authors I got to hang out with at Lavender Con!
AZ ROZKILLIS 