Some trans science fiction and fantasy books. You can find my earlier recs for f/f science fiction and fantasy here.
Also I somehow totally blanked on this while making the powerpoint, but Charlie Jane Anders’ stuff should be in the last slide. Her two books are CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT and ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY. I’ll link to some of her short stories below the cut.
The queer SFF database’s tag for trans books is here. There’s more than I included in the rec post, so go knock yourself out!
I included the author identities because I figured people would want to know if the book was own voices. Disclaimer that gender is a weird nebulous thing and life isn’t easy or straightforward, so depending on when you’re reading this post (I’m writing 8/2/19), some of the authors I listed as cis might have had gender realizations. I literally saw this on Twitter this morning with one of the “more trans SFF” books, so figured it was worth saying.
Below the text cut you’ll find the titles and authors, links to my queer SFF database (which includes links to trans reviewers and content warnings), and some of my favorite SFF short stories by trans people.
Science fiction and fantasy books by Asian authors! Because not all SFF is by white men, and I want to shout about some awesome books by authors of color. I cannot stress enough that this is only a small sample of the books out there! I didn’t have nearly enough space to include all the marvelous Asian authors writing either in the English language or who have books translated into English.
Actually, speaking of translation, Ken Liu (whose short story collection is above) does a lot of work translating Chinese science fiction into English. Also, Clarkesworld is particularly good about publishing translated stories from China.
Obviously, most of the authors featured here have more than one book! I was sticking to one book per author so that I can fit as many people in as possible.
You can add more authors in the reblogs and replies! However, please only suggest Asian authors, not white authors writing Asian characters.
You know what Good Omens does NOT get enough credit for? How it never, not once, makes gender presentation the butt of a joke.
Crowley presenting as female to be Warlock’s Nanny? The way this was filmed, acted, and written wasn’t made to be funny whatsoever. She was stunning, I loved the hat!
Pollution using they/them pronouns while the postman used the gender neutral honorific of sir for them? What’s there to make fun of? They’re royalty.
Archangel Michael, who has a traditionally male name, played by a female actress? Never questioned.
Lord Beelzebub’s androgyny? Only respect for the Lord of Hell.
Aziraphale sharing Madame Tracy’s body? Crowley recognized his angel and accepted it no problem. He was right about the dress too, it did suit him!
Crowley’s pure, unfiltered non-binary/gender-fluid energy in general? Fucking fabulous. Who could seriously make fun of this demon’s style? As someone once pointed out to me, you could swap him with Tilda Swinton and I’d see no difference. What an icon.
Good Omens is the first big show I’ve seen to basically avoid transphobia all together when the opportunity presented itself, and even say fuck you to the gender binary as a bonus. If the biggest binary in all the universe, Heaven and Hell, don’t give a damn about it then why should you?
Lord of the Rings was published in the fifties, and largely written in the forties. Tolkien’s opinions on society and morality and technology are at some points genuinely more conservative than what I’m comfortable with. And yet, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that Tolkien actually deconstructs most of the clichéd fantasy tropes he supposedly originates. Some examples.
The long-lost heir is not the hero, he’s a side character who deliberately uses himself as a decoy.
The real hero actually fails in his quest, his goodness and determination and willpower utterly fail in the face of evil, and the world is saved by a series seemingly unrelated good deeds.
The central conflict is not between destroying the world and preserving it. An age of the world will come to an end, and many great and beautiful things will perish, whether the heroes win or lose. The past may have been glorious, but preserving it is impossible, and returning to it is impossible, time has passed and the world has moved on. The king returns, but the elves are gone and magic fades from the very substance of Middle Earth. The goal is not to preserve the status quo, the goal is the chance to rebuild something on the ruins.
Killing the main villain seems to instantly solve the problem, eradicate all enemies and fix the world, except it doesn’t, not wholly, since the scouring of the Shire still has to happen.
Also, the hero gets no real reward, and what he gets, he cannot really enjoy. He is hurt by his ordeal, and never fully recovers.
There is a team of heroes, a classic adventuring party, except the Fellowship is together for less one sixth of the series. The Fellowship is intact from the Council of Elrond to Gandalf’s death, four chapters. The remaining eight are together until Boromir’s death, an additional six chapters. This is nothing compared to LOTR’s length of sixty-one chapters, if I count correctly.
Tolkien is not classic high fantasy. If you actually think about it, there is very little magic. The hobbits’ stealth is not magical, most elven wonders are not unambigously magical, wizards are extremely rare, and even Gandalf hardly uses magic if you compare him to the average DnD wizard. Most magic is indistinguishable from craft, there is no clear difference between a magic armor and a very good armor, between magic bread and very good bread, between magical healing and competent first-aid plus a few kind words.
TLDR: Stop praising recent fantasy for deconstructing Tolkien if they’re “deconstructing” something Tolkien has never actually constructed.
I like the classification of “Hard vs Soft magic systems” in fantasy only because I can say that Game of Thrones has softer magic system then Fairly Odd Parents
GoT magic: plot armor, special effects fiasco
Fairly Odd Parents magic: has consequences, is limited in power and the time in which it is available to a given non-magical creature, is utterly neutral and entirely dependent on the wishes of the user
LGBT Rep: sapphic (I’m assuming lesbian) pov character, lesbian love interest/major character, gay man pov character
Spoiler-Free Review:
Ho-ly crap my dudes, I finally did it. I finally finished this absolute unit of book, and guess what? I really loved it a lot. This is exactly a book I’ve wanted for forever. A really killer high fantasy epic that also just happens to be really gay at times.
The main romance in the book is a f/f slow burn (yes, an honest to god lesbian slow burn), and I went in pretty much only knowing that, not even knowing who. At times I was definitely Sherlocking every single female character trying to figure out who the gays were, and I was pretty sure I knew who they were pretty on, but it takes a while for it to get going. When it does though…they sure do go, huh?
There is also an older gay male point of view character who’s gayness is pretty important to his story and motives, though (and this is a slight spoiler but it comes up pretty early on) the love of his life died some time before the story began.
This is a long, long book, and the Gays have issues throughout, some of it stemming somehow from them being gay or from their gay relationship conflicting against the society. Even with that, once their relationship really starts, there isn’t much in the way of outright homophobia. It’s hard to explain exactly, but there is the sense that being gay isn’t normal or completely accepted in the society, but also the relationship is pretty accepted once it gets kicked off. And the one plot issue that comes from someone trying to stop the relationship still doesn’t really stem from it being a gay relationship. It’s hard for me to explain further without going into spoilers.
But yeah, the gayness isn’t hidden by any means, but it also isn’t always in focus. It interweaves with the plot for sure, but the central plot isn’t about it by any means. It’s very much a high fantasy story with a high fantasy plot, and it just so happens that the main romance is f/f.
Synopsis: Honestly there is so much going on that I’m not sure how to set it up, so I’m just going to copy and paste the official synopsis from goodreads:
“The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction–but assassins are getting closer to her door.
Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.
Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.
Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.”
The Good: You get the sense of the threat of homophobia without ever actually having to face it. The romance is cute and is the opposite of rushed. All of the definitely defined gay characters feel like fully fleshed out characters. They have motives. They have good and bad qualities, and aren’t perfect but also are never demonized. They do good and bad things. Dare I say, they are treated like actual people?
What Might Hinder You from Reading It: You are utterly intimidated by the size of the book. It’s really hefty. You don’t like high fantasy. You don’t like dragons. You don’t like monarchy stories (which I often don’t but I still liked this).
also before we accuse Tolkien of being morally simplistic and overly black and white in his storytelling, maybe consider that a truly just war - a war where all the fighting and the loss meant something, where the victors won and it could be uncomplicatedly celebrated and the state of the world was actively improved, was… how do I put this?
something of an escapist fantasy for a guy who watched his friends die in the Great War and who survived the Somme aka “Pointless Bullshit: This Time With Chemical Weapons”??
JRR Tolkien was not a perfect man and I don’t want anyone to think I’m arguing that, but this basic criticism of his works annoys me to no end because 1. they do know he wasn’t trying to apply real-world moral complexity to his stories for a reason, right? and 2. despite this, he was DEEPLY uncomfortable with portraying the orcs as a faceless mass of sadistic bad things with no redeeming qualities
I’m actually discussing this in my dissertation, and there’s a great quote from Andrew Lynch’s essay “Archaism, Nostalgia and the Tennysonian War” found in the book: ‘Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages’.
“Tolkien… consciously wielded archaism as an anti-modernist cultural weapon. The insistent archaism of the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings reveals his cultural campaign to restore a sense of heroic potential to English life” (p. 81)
“Generally speaking, Tolkien’s narrative can be seen as a way of ‘getting over’ the war” (p. 82)
There’s a really good point to be made that after the first World War and then the second, came a wave of nostalgia for a simpler, more honourable past. Tolkien was part of that wave and it’s very important to note that his somewhat simplistic portrayal of ‘good vs evil’ on the field of battle is reactionary to this harrowing personal and cultural experience. Much like the other motifs in LOTR, the presentation of war compounds into a lament for a dying world, or at least the death of heroic ideals.
I am contentious over Lynch’s assertion that such an act was conscious, but one of the main themes of LOTR is the death of an age and the remembrance of a more heroic past and I think this applies both to the in-universe characters and to Tolkien himself. War in LOTR is certainly not allegorical of Tolkien’s own experiences, but I think that OP’s right, in that Tolkien was - to an extent - escaping to a heroic past and, in his own distaste for war, turned it into an “ideological symbol” (as Lynch puts it).
Lynch even goes on to say that the theme of LOTR’s warring isn’t “good vs evil” but “medieval vs modern”.
“One side [medieval] led by Aragorn and advised by Gandalf, fights a ‘medieval’ war of named volunteers and pledged faith, while the bad side is ‘modern’, with its nameless conscripts, machines and slaves” (p. 87).
And Tolkien himself acknowledges the nuance of more realistic war: “In real life they [the Orcs] are on both sides, of course” (Letters, 82), but he was writing in the style of a romance, in which aesthetic and moral goodness is only given to one side.
There’s a lot more I could say about Tolkien and his portrayal of war but I’ll just leave it at this: stop saying it’s over-simplistic.
see I didn’t have any of my books in front of me when I made this post but basically all of this
I blame the Jackson films for their oversimplification of the end-of-the-Third-Age conflict, because that definitely changed how the fandom as a whole viewed Tolkien’s works; at the same time, another commenter in this thread points out that Alan Lee drew a Moria-based orc woman tending to her baby as concept art, and I love that wholeheartedly. (The Jackson films’ view on war and how it clashes with Tolkien’s own is something I’d like to write about myself, tbh)
This is a fascinating take to me, because the simplistic good-vs-evil heroic narrative was always a simplification. As Tolkien says, the orcs are on both sides. And the heroes are on both sides. The guy on the other side of the battlefield is just trying to survive and protect his family, same as you, and the propaganda saying he’s an orc has always been a lie.
We’re getting a little better now about complex villains and ambiguous narratives, but it’s less comfortable, and less glorious, and induces a lot less straightforward feelings. Which is basically what the new era of Men is. The fourth age is less comfortable and less straightforward.
And it’s a good thing to be able to imagine our opponents complexly. But it’s also fair to mourn the loss of the certainty and stability we used to have. And I am here for reading LOTR as the final love-letter to that black-and-white worldview.
There is a particular speech pattern that recurs here and there in LOTR, a very casual, decidedly contemporary-sounding form of dialogue. We hear it primarily from three types of people: (1) hobbits of the Shire, with variations according to their respective social classes; (2) most of the locals in Bree …
… and (3) very nearly all of the orcs we hear talking amongst themselves.
In the middle of Merry and Pippin’s horrific captivity in Rohan, in the middle of Sam’s desperate attempt to rescue Frodo in Minas Morgul, in the middle of the exhausting forced march across Mordor, we get the repeated reminder that a lot of these faceless sadistic bad guys are just … common people. Specifically, common soldiers. They talk like common soldiers: they bicker, they complain and commiserate about their commanding officers, they get uneasy about how the war is going and how much they’re not being told, they daydream about what they’ll maybe do when the war’s over.
The Nazgul king, Saruman, the Mouth of Sauron – they talk like antagonists in an epic, and so do most of the people they interact with. But the orcs? With a few notable exceptions, the orcs talk much more like the hobbits than almost anyone else talks like either of them. Which is to say, like regular people.
This is absolutely not an accident, and it says something that it’s there even in the deliberately oversimplified “good vs evil” war Tolkien was writing.
All of this, and I’ll just toss in that that last part about how orcs and hobbits talk could tie in to a headcanon that came to me the other day while reading another post: it might be a bit of circumstantial evidence in favor of the theory that orcs and hobbits share some common ancestry. Yes, hobbits are assumed in canon to be related to humans in some way, and we know orcs’ ancestors were humans corrupted by Morgoth, but that’s not enough to explain why Frodo and Sam can survive Mordor so (relatively) well. Tolkien says hobbits just sort of appeared, nobody knows their exact origins, so it’s not implausible that their forebears might have been early experimental subjects of the first Dark Lord, and tossed when they didn’t turn out quite as he expected.
I’ve done some Twitter threads on this topic, so thought it might be nice to do a Tumblr post too. One of my pet peeves is when people act like adult fantasy (or sci-fi for that matter) is just a straight white dude thing and that diversity only exists in young adult fantasy. That’s such a disservice to all the authors of marginalized identities currently writing adult fantasy!
Authors and books below the cut, including links to Goodreads. I’m not providing trigger warnings (if I make the post too long Tumblr starts freaking out about it), but you can use the search function on Goodreads reviews to find more specifics.
I actually like those kind of fantasy books where the author keeps making up words for things, introducing them one by one until at the end of the last book you’re left wondering whether the Asha’man are going to have a problem with the Seanchan chanellers trying to bond each other as sul’damanddamane and that sentence makes perfect sense to you.
The thing that makes a lot of male authors unacceptable to me is that they’ll construct all sorts of fantasy worlds, such as in GRRM’s case, a world with sorcerers and witches and dragons and ice zombies and blood magic, and yet they have to include rampant, consistent, horrific, excessive sexual violence toward and objectification of women for some kind of “social commentary”. You could do a brilliant commentary on patriarchy without explicit scenes of rape or sexualization - female authors manage to do so all the time, funnily enough. We have to realize at some point that male authors have a macabre and voyeuristic obsession with women being subjected to violence of all kinds.
