And the series isn't really about sexuality - it's just a Chronicles of Amber/The Tempest crossover fic high fantasy
Oh My God, how did I miss the Amber elements? *head desks* I got the super-obvious Tempest elements, but I think my teenage brain was too busy being O.o so wrong, yet so tasty in it's angstiness over the Freya/Dewar sort-of-incest. I own A Sorceror and a Gentleman and, um, the second/third one, whatever it's called, somewhere, but it's been years since I read A Well-Favored Man. I need to pick it up again.
it says *something* about the SF genre that there are a lot more books on the list with genderqueer or non-gender-binary characters than there are with cisgender-but-not-heterosexual characters. I guess part of that could be that if you're working with historical conceptions of gender and sexuality, the two do blend in to each other a little. I suspect a lot more of it is that some SF writers will write about trans characters as a purely speculative thing without ever actually connecting that to trans *people*, though....
I have an uncomfortable feeling that that might be the case - Bel Thorne in the Vorkosigan books amd the Tarnakep/Niles thing in Price of the Stars were my first exposures to any degree of genderqueerness in Sci-fi, and neither Bel nor Beka/Tarnakep is really trans - one's a form of intersex that's created by handwavey future science, and the other is mildly genderqueer in the "women assumes male identity, likes it, falls in love with guy that way" vein (though with the nice twist that Niles, the love interest, is very clear about the fact that he'd be just as happy sleeping with male!Tarnakep as he would female!Beka).
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reposted reply down here where it belongs
Date: 2010-02-09 10:54 pm (UTC)Oh My God, how did I miss the Amber elements? *head desks* I got the super-obvious Tempest elements, but I think my teenage brain was too busy being O.o so wrong, yet so tasty in it's angstiness over the Freya/Dewar sort-of-incest. I own A Sorceror and a Gentleman and, um, the second/third one, whatever it's called, somewhere, but it's been years since I read A Well-Favored Man. I need to pick it up again.
it says *something* about the SF genre that there are a lot more books on the list with genderqueer or non-gender-binary characters than there are with cisgender-but-not-heterosexual characters. I guess part of that could be that if you're working with historical conceptions of gender and sexuality, the two do blend in to each other a little. I suspect a lot more of it is that some SF writers will write about trans characters as a purely speculative thing without ever actually connecting that to trans *people*, though....
I have an uncomfortable feeling that that might be the case - Bel Thorne in the Vorkosigan books amd the Tarnakep/Niles thing in Price of the Stars were my first exposures to any degree of genderqueerness in Sci-fi, and neither Bel nor Beka/Tarnakep is really trans - one's a form of intersex that's created by handwavey future science, and the other is mildly genderqueer in the "women assumes male identity, likes it, falls in love with guy that way" vein (though with the nice twist that Niles, the love interest, is very clear about the fact that he'd be just as happy sleeping with male!Tarnakep as he would female!Beka).