Science! But make it gay! Words to live by, if only the general scientific community would catch on. E = MC²? Nah, I prefer ME = LGBTQ². While the fundamental theorems responsible for shaping the laws of the physical universe could certainly use a bit of queering up, the science fiction genre has been rocketing off with queer themes to infinity and beyond. These authors are leading lights in the field of gay science, and are responsible for publishing 10 of the best queer sci-fi books of all time. Isaac Newton never did anything like that, did he? Just messed around with some apples. Boring.
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin takes place on a planet where queer expression is the norm. On the icy world of Gethen, the hardy post-human populace are all ambisexual. This means that they take on male or female sexual characteristics during a brief monthly fertility period called kemmer, and may shift from one gender to the other depending on the month. As a result, their society is entirely different from the rest of human-colonized space. They have no concept of war, and are far more community based – as any person can become pregnant at any time. Human ambassador Gendy Ai discovers these cultural differences the hard way, and soon becomes a political pariah due to mistrust and misunderstanding. Part social commentary on gender, part political thriller, all queer.
This Is How You Lose The Time War
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose The Time War is a story of queer love so strong that’s capable of standing the test of time – literally. The story revolves around two agents of separate time traveling factions at war, each attempting to rewrite the past in order to achieve future victories. As the agents thwart and counter-thwart each other across the ages, they begin leaving little notes for one another – first taunting, then corresponding, then burning with the sapphic passion of a quasar’s ionized matter jets hurtling across space. Now that’s real love.
A Psalm For The Wild Built
Like any self-respecting biological organism, Becky Chambers has carved out a niche for herself – in the queer sci-fi world. A Pslam For The Wild Built is her solarpunk masterpiece, centered around a society of tech-deprived humans that had to resort to community based farming after the robot revolution caused all synthetic life to wander off into the woods. Dex is a non-binary acolyte who dreams of becoming an advice giving, herb brewing “tea monk” (basically Uncle Iroh) but after failing spectacularly with their first client, they jaunt off into the woods to seek wisdom. Instead, they find a robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap who is searching for existential meaning of their own. Cozy, hopeful, queer – a rare combo in a genre that’s generally clinical, cynical and written by straight dudes.
Gideon The Ninth
Goth lesbians in space? Upload it into my mainframe, posthaste. Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon The Ninth is Dune with gay necromancers, and takes place in a star system where planet ruling, death magic practicing Houses compete for the favor of The Emperor Undying. Gideon doesn’t care about any of that, she just wants to escape her life of indentured servitude to the Ninth House – the most Hot Topic of all Houses. Her archenemy Harrow, heir to the Ninth House, intends to offer Gideon her freedom. In exchange? All Gideon has to do is accompany Harrow to a decrepit mansion and compete with necromancers from other Houses in a contest to ascend to undead godhood. How hard can it be? When you’re embroiled in a slow burn enemies to lovers arc, hard indeed.
Light From Uncommon Stars
Light From Uncommon Stars is a delightfully weird sci-fi romp about Shizuka Satomi, a woman who made a deal with the devil to entice seven violinists to into selling their souls for success so she herself could escape the fiery pit of Hell. She’s convinced six so far. Her seventh target? A transgender violin prodigy on the run. It would be so easy to deprive the young musician of her soul, but Shizuka becomes distracted from her mission after a meet-cute encounter with a retired starship captain at a donut shop. Part fantasy revolving around breaking a curse, part sci-fi orbiting an interstellar relationship based around baked goods, one fully queer love story.
Escaping Exodus
Inhabiting a body is confusing enough for a person, more so when you’re a queer person, and even more so when you’re inhabiting a queer body inside of a larger body. Nicky Drayden’s Escaping Exodus is the story of a civilization that lives on a starship in the hollowed out center of a gargantuan space beast, the command of which young Seske Kaleigh is soon to inherit. Traditional gender roles are entirely flip-flopped in this interstellar society – it’s a matriarchal one where queerness is normalized. What’s also normalized is the face that this society lives inside a city with a pulse, and Seske has to reconcile the fact that her civilization’s way of life might just be causing undue suffering on a titanic, sentient being. She might just have to pilot this ship towards a new, more ethical way of living.
Ancillary Justice
Ann Locke’s Ancillary Justice is the story of the Radch Empire, an expansionist civilization that uses spaceship fleet controlling AIs to conquer the stars. These AIs in turn pilot “ancillaries” – artificial human bodies that are used as the soldiers of an invasion force. After the mysterious destruction of the starship Justice of Toren nearly 20 years ago, only one ancillary managed to survive. This ancillary holds the consciousness of an AI named Breq, formerly a mind that controlled thousands of bodies now entombed within one. One of the most confusing aspects of Breq’s newfound existence is gender – a concept that the Radchaai avoid reconciling with by using “she” pronouns for everything. The other most confusing aspect? Why she woke up on a wrecked starship alone in the first place. She’ll figure out answers to both.
A Memory Called Empire
Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire is the story of Mahit Dzmare, a diplomat from an independent space republic sent to be the next ambassador to the Teixcalaanli Empire. Considering that she was only promoted to the position to the mysterious, untimely, possibly murder death of the previous ambassador to Teixcalaanli, she’s not exactly thrilled at the prospect. While shadowy clouds of political turmoil shadow Mahit’s future, she finds a sapphic silver lining in Three Seagrass, a Teixcalaanli official assigned to assist Mahit in her endeavors. As Mahit attempts to bridge the political divide between a star-spanning empire and a small mining station, she also has to work to bridge the cultural divide between herself and the Teixcalaanli women for whom, like a satellite out of orbit, she’s slowly falling.
Sorrowland
Looking for a cozy, queer comfort read? Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon is the antimatter opposite. It’s the story of Vern, a pregnant intersex teen who is on the run from a horrifying cult. After giving birth to twins in the woods, she is forced to fight a battle on two fronts: one against the cultists that are trying to drag her back, the other against her own body. The cultists were experimenting with something, something capable of terrifying genetic mutations, and they used Vern’s body as a guinea pig. As Vern struggles to find a safe haven for her children, she’ll have to shed light on the dark secrets of her past in order to secure a future for those she loves. And oh is the past bleak, The Manson Family is nothing compared poor Vern’s former associates.
A Door Into Ocean
One of the earliest works of ecofeminist sci-fi, Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean is the story of an all female society of underwater alien beings and their pacifistic rebellion against patriarchal alien invaders. The Sharers of Shora inhabit the watery world of a distant moon, and live a peaceful life due to their mastery of biological science. After an invasion force touches down from the planet they orbit, The Sharers launch a peaceful war of attrition against their attackers. Through a combination of non-violent resistance and clever engineering, The Sharers are able to resist these militaristic interlopers, and maintain a hard won peace.
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