Guest Post: Daniel Pinkwater on How He Exercises His Profession

From Octavia Butler, author of multiple Nebula- and Hugo-award-winning novels, to longtime Star Trek scriptwriter David Gerrold, LGBT+ creators have long played a major part in steering the direction of speculative fiction. And the canon has never been more diverse and fascinating than now, with authors from a wonderfully wide range of backgrounds and experiences.

In this post we want to particularly spotlight all the contemporary LGBT+ writers of speculative fiction who are bringing their own perspective to science fiction and fantasy. Whether it’s semi-autobiographical surrealism or a unique, intricately imagined other world, you’re sure to find something on this list that piques your interest. Perhaps you’ll even discover a new favorite author, or one who motivates you to write your own book!

So without further ado, here they are, for your enjoyment and inspiration: 11 LGBTQIA authors of contemporary spec fic that you should know.

1. Michelle Ruiz Keil (author of All of Us with Wings)

Keil just exploded onto the scene with the June release of her YA fantasy debut, All of Us with Wings. This elegantly crafted novel follows seventeen-year-old governess Xochi “” who, like Keil, is bisexual and Latinx “” after she and her young charge accidentally summon a pair of vengeful demons to attack people from Xochi’s past. If you’re looking for an own voice LGBT author whose stories involve fantastical elements, yet still feel incredibly down-to-earth and authentic, Keil is definitely one to add to your list. “My favorite books make me feel seen and known and accompanied”¦ less alone,” she noted in a recent interview with mitú. “My deepest hope is that is that All of Us with Wings will be that kind of company for its readers.”

2. Malinda Lo (author of Adaptation)

Like your reads dark, dystopian, and with a distinctly sophisticated voice? Lo and behold (no pun intended), you’ve found your literary champion. Malinda Lo, a Chinese-American author with several speculative fiction books under her belt, has also written for LGBT culture site AfterEllen and helped co-found Diversity in YA. (Talk about a woman of many talents!) After the success of her first novel, a queer retelling of Cinderella, Lo went on to write the sci-fi/thriller series Adaptation, which centers on a young woman named Reese as she attempts to make sense of the world in the wake of an unprecedented natural disaster “” discovering herself in the process.

3. Alex London (author of Proxy)

Though Alex London has been around for a while, he’s often published under the slightly altered pseudonym of C. Alexander London, so you may not be sure exactly who he is. Rest assured, however, that his brilliance remains intact no matter what name he’s using. London’s first series, Proxy, boasts one of the most intriguing speculative premises we’ve heard in recent years: in a post-apocalyptic society, the 1% are punished for their misdeeds by being forced to watch a proportionate sentence carried out on a proxy, or a poor person who subs in for them. But when rich boy Knox and his lower-class proxy Syd (who happens to be gay) disrupt the system, the results are both revolutionary and shockingly unpredictable “” a truly impressive feat in the oversaturated dystopian YA market.

4. J.Y. Yang (author of The Black Tides of Heaven)

Yang, a queer and non-binary author, specializes in “silkpunk,“ which draws inspiration from real-life East Asian culture and history. Their first book, The Black Tides of Heaven, kicks off with a pair of twins “” Akeha and Mokoya “” coming into their supernatural abilities. Mokoya is gifted with prophetic vision, but Akeha’s talents are a bit more slippery: he sees not just what will happen, but what could happen. This leads him to align himself with the rebellion against his government”¦ and against Mokoya, who serves it. Throughout the story, Yang demonstrates an incredible knack for characterization even in the midst of complex worldbuilding, and their full Tensorate series (which starts with Black Tides) only affirms their perfectly balanced technique.

5. Claudie Arseneault (author of City of Strife)

Arseneault’s niche is aromantic and asexual characters, reflective of her own underrepresented experience as an aro/ace woman. In City of Strife, many of the characters are explicitly asexual and aromantic, with the narrative emphasizing and celebrating their close platonic friendships. However, this is by no means the focal point of the story, which is an elaborate political fantasy about a city crumbling under the weight of various power struggles. In terms of social issues, City of Strife and its sequels deftly address everything from labor practices to racial profiling. However, Arseneault’s inclusion of ace/aro characters (and her provision of resources for readers and authors hoping to learn more) make her a sublime role model for the “A” segment of the LGBTQIA community.

6. Akwaeke Emezi (author of Freshwater)

Emezi, whose widely acclaimed debut Freshwater came out last year, says that they wrote it “specifically for people who are inhabiting marginalized realities” “” in terms of more than just gender/sexuality, but on a mental, spiritual, and overall experiential level. After reading a few pages of Freshwater, one cannot deny that this has been impeccably accomplished, as the story about a young woman battling dysphoria, trauma, and her (literal) inner demons is like nothing you’ve ever read before.

A particularly interesting aspect of Emezi’s work is their use of POV: Freshwater is narrated by the ogbanje, or malevolent spirits, that haunt the consciousness of the main character Ada. The ogbanje refer to themselves as “we” and Ada as “she,” a nod to how marginalized/isolated people often feel that their lives are out of their control “” which Emezi drew from their own experience, and which many others will surely relate to as well.

7. Carmen Maria Machado (author of Her Body and Other Parties)

Already a well-known name in literary circles, Machado published Her Body and Other Parties in 2017: a masterful fusion of science fiction, psychological thriller, horror, and weird fantasy that elevated her to speculative fiction royalty. This anthology will target all of your most primal and abstract fears, including a blood-curdling retelling of the infamous “green ribbon” ghost story, the tale of a woman whose obsession with her weight that has very unintended consequences, and a surreal series of Law and Order episodes with phantasmagorical horror elements inserted. The common thread here is the objectification and subjugation of women, which Machado presents as both universal and particular, especially through the unique lens of queerness.

8. Kameron Hurley (author of The Mirror Empire)

Even darker than Machado’s work is Hurley’s Mirror Empire, a bloody, carnal, grimdark (no hopepunk here) work of fantasy that’s not exactly palatable, but still incredibly engrossing. Why? Because Hurley turns established tropes on their heads to create a groundbreaking new world. In this book, not only are women leaders and warriors, they far outnumber their male counterparts. You could call it a matriarchy, but even that’s not a strong enough word. The women utterly dominate the males, using them as slaves and sexual objects”¦ which can be disturbing at times, but given the profusion of the reverse dynamic in fantasy, is also quite bracing. Of course, Mirror Empire cannot and should not be read uncritically (that’s the point of having morally gray characters), but Hurley’s done a stand-up job of creating a totally radical world that will especially appeal to GoT-weary female fantasy readers.

9. C.M. Spivey (author of From Under the Mountain)

Continuing in a similar vein, C.M. Spivey’s From Under the Mountain is another excellent recent addition to the high fantasy canon. It revolves around nineteen-year-old Guerline, who is thrust into the role of empress before she’s even got to grips with her non-royal identity”¦ and how she feels about her lower-class companion, Eva. But personal matters are soon eclipsed when an ancient mystical evil rears its ugly head, and Guerline alone must decide how to proceed.

Spivey himself is a longtime writer of speculative fiction, and as a panromantic asexual trans man, he is “committed to queering his favorite genres” (according to his bio) “” which clearly comes across in the unconventional fantasy novel that is From Under the Mountain.

10. Noelle Stevenson (author of Nimona)

You might know Stevenson from her work on Lumberjanes and the super-cool She-Ra reboot, but did you know she also wrote and illustrated the fantasy webcomic-turned-graphic-novel Nimona? For those who didn’t, a quick synopsis: Nimona is a spirited young shapeshifter who serves as a supervillain’s sidekick. But as the story unfolds, we see that Nimona and her boss, the knight/mad scientist Lord Ballister Blackheart, are not all they seem “” and that their purportedly “good” nemeses are hiding something. Indeed, much of Stevenson’s work involves deconstructing shallow first impressions and creating fully three-dimensional characters in their wake, breathing life into them with her artwork.

11. Larissa Lai (author of The Tiger Flu)

Rounding off our list at #11 is Larissa Lai, whose 2018 sci-fi novel The Tiger Flu was her first in 16 years! The women of this story are parthenogenic, meaning they can reproduce asexually, without men; however, they do suffer from chronic organ failure, which means they depend on a “starfish” among them to donate and then regenerate her various body parts. And when this starfish woman dies of the titular flu, her lover Kirilow has no time to grieve “” she must venture into a fully infected city to find another starfish, so she and her sisters will not die. A thoroughly original, unadulteratedly feminist work of speculative fiction, The Tiger Flu has been described by Lai as a definite challenge to her writing, but praised by critics as her best work yet.

This guest post is from Savannah Cordova, a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors and publishers with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. She’s very interested in content marketing trends and hacks for creators. In her spare time, Savannah enjoys reading contemporary fiction and writing short stories.”

#SFWAAUTHORS

In my backyard, I have a tree whose fruit is colored bottles, and it serves a useful purpose. The bottles trap and kill evil spirits. During the night, evil spirits wander into the bottles, and they can’t find their way out””basically like a lobster trap for spirits. Then, when the morning sunlight hits the bottles, the evil spirits, which don’t like sunlight, are burned away. Poof!

Skeptical? Where’s your sense of mystery? The bottle tree legend is believed to have originated in Africa and been brought to the states with African slaves, which is why you’re more likely to see one in the South. Being a transplanted Yankee, I’d never seen a bottle tree until I experienced one years ago at The Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham, Texas. It was a thing of beauty, and a sign nearby explained the legend. I thought the idea was so cool that I wanted to have one, but I needed the right structure. Some people use welded metal rods, but I wanted something more organic. So, when our Majestic Indian Hawthorn tree died last year, I saw an opportunity to have a bottle tree although I knew it would take some work.

With its dry, rust-colored leaves and green lichen, the tree still had a unique beauty, but it wouldn’t have lasted. Something needed to be done. I could have cut it down and planted something else, but the surrounding live oak trees had caused this area of the yard to become too shady for most trees to grow. I think the shade is what killed this one. But every morning, sunlight climbs over our fence, around a large magnolia, and underneath the branches of the live oak, and it illuminates the dead tree for at least an hour. The morning sunlight may have been what spawned my idea of turning it into a bottle tree. I saw an opportunity to take a dead thing and turn it into””I hoped””an attractive lawn ornament. And maybe, I thought, I might even eliminate some evil spirits wandering around the neighborhood””at which point, my left brain started screaming at me, “Are you #$%&ing kidding me? Evil spirits? What is this? Pre-enlightenment?” To which, my right brain answered, “Really? Every culture has stories of good and evil spirits, so how do you know that they don’t exist?” I imagine my left hand went up to rub and soothe my left temple.

Seriously, as a scientist turned fiction writer and visual artist, my left brain and right brain war with each other constantly. My left brain would like to think that we live in a world where physical phenomena can be explained, and we humans are in control of our destiny. And then my right brain feels trapped and constrained. It asks why we have crowded out life’s mysteries with data and facts, and it points to the many, many things we don’t know and can’t explain. It liked a book I read recently called We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe, by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, which is about the physics of the universe and what we can’t explain. My right brain is also currently having fun reading a couple of fantasy books: D. L. Jenning’s Gift of the Shaper, and Cat Rambo’s Hearts of Tabat. Both of these books have taken me to places and given me adventures that I wouldn’t have imagined. My right brain also points to the classics in metaphysics, told through mythos, because this is the language that explains our major religions, which all wrestle with the clouds of unknowing and mysteries larger than ourselves. I have come to realize that this war in my brain is why I like to write and read science fiction. I get to use both sides””when they cooperate with each other. Good sci-fi and fantasy books build worlds believable within the texts, yet either delve into or create their own mysteries, things not known or understood. Yet this exploration of and embracing of mystery is not for everyone.

I recently wrote a blog post about reading the literary great Flannery O’Connor’s book Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. In it, she discusses her thoughts on writing fiction, and one of her themes is the role of mystery in fiction. She says, “It is the business of fiction to embody mystery “¦ and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind” (p. 124). It can be an embarrassment because we humans labor under the delusion that we can know all things if we can just construct a predictive model and work out the mathematics. This premise has worked well for us in the past and brought us pharmaceuticals, electronics, spaceships, and smart phones. But, in the absence of a grand unified theory of matter after decades of trying, some scientists are beginning to wonder if mathematics has its limits. Are there things it can’t do? The answer to this question brings me back to the evil spirits that I’ve been trapping in my colored bottles.

I don’t expect an evidence that I’m reducing the evil spirits in our neighborhood. If I could show evidence, I’d lobby to install several in Washington D.C. But then, the tree would have to be the size of the Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree in order to accommodate the five-gallon jugs required to haul in the spirits that cause discord, the unwillingness to compromise, and lack of empathy. The last spirit is particularly polarizing and, coincidentally, something that good fiction can address.

Recent Trends in Cognitive Science published a study a couple of years ago showing that people who read character-driven fiction are more empathetic. Reading and understanding stories helps people imagine other worlds and other consciences. And these other-person experiences are part of the mystery of good fiction, and in particular good science fiction and fantasy. Experiences and the meaning of those experiences are different for everyone who reads a story or novel. We all as readers ascribe our own meanings to a text.

This experienced meaning is, I think, the reason why I’ve had a hard time reducing my novel Incense Rising to a movie-trailer synopsis. When asked what it’s about, I usually say the genre is speculative fiction or science fiction””but not like Star Wars””and the plot is around a scientist who becomes a fugitive to save a scientific theory; however, in a deeper sense, it explores the commercialization of our humanity. I felt bad about my shortcomings around writing a good elevator pitch until I read O’Connor’s view of experienced meaning in novels: “The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. “¦ When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, “¦” (Mystery and Manners, p. 96). Yes! The mystery of fiction is in the experienced meaning, the many experienced meanings. We authors take readers on journeys, and they end up somewhere different from where they started. I’ve come to understand something of this mystery of fiction and why we like it and why we should read more of it, but I never expected that creating a bottle tree would relate to any of these insights on why I write.

Creating the bottle tree itself was a journey. I started sometime last November by sawing off small or weak branches, removing leaves, and scraping off the lichen. Then I began collecting different colored bottles with openings large enough to fit over the branches. I took pictures of the bottles in the sunlight, moved them around, discovered what they do collect””spider webs, an occasional bug, and condensation””and I even installed a birdhouse. And, somewhere between creating a bottle tree and reading Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, I had an epiphany about the value of nurturing life’s mysteries, why I like to read and write science fiction, and why more people should read fiction. We all need some mystery, empathy for others, and maybe even a bottle tree.

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Nancy’s most recent book is Incense Rising, a near future SF thriller set in a world where consumerism and politics have merged,

Author bio: I have been writing all my life although I began trying to publish my fiction only recently. My story ideas usually start with a “what if?” question. For example, what if we encountered alien life forms with a copper-based oxygen transport instead of hemoglobin? The result: “The Silver Strands of Alpha Crucis-d,” published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2016.

I may have taken a convoluted path to arriving at writing speculative fiction, but now that I have, I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner because I’m having so much fun!

Asking “what if” questions is an important part of engaging in scientific research, which is what I did for many years. After earning a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois, I went to work for a large chemical company and spent twenty-five years engaged in research. In 2012, I earned a master’s degree in English from the University of West Florida (UWF), and I’ve been writing fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry ever since. I teach classes in organic chemistry and writing for STEM majors as an Adjunct Instructor at UWF. When I’m not writing or teaching, I like to do artwork. I’m a member of Quayside Art Gallery in Pensacola, where I work two days a month.

Find Nancy’s website at https://njschrock.com or follow her on Twitter.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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