At twelve, I began to keep alert for queer male characters[1] in the genre fiction[2] I was reading, after some book or other (probably by Judith Tarr) gave me the idea that such might appear. At thirteen, I took advantage of the fact that my mother worked down the street at Toledo University, and I spent long afternoons in the shining tower of the library, scouring for books relevant to my interests. There, I discovered Uranian Worlds, by Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo: a bibliography listing speculative works inclusive of “alternate sexualities.” It specified which alternate sexualities, too, and whether this constituted a major theme or just a mention. I read this book slowly and closely, and then—reading it again, but this time with a sheet of paper and a pencil on the table before me—wrote down all the likely looking titles with queer male characters. A dozen books? Fifteen? A couple of them were easy to find but the rest cost me years. I kept that paper quarto-folded in my wallet for nearly two decades, referring to it as I trawled used bookstores from Poughkeepsie, New York to Berkley, California; from Atlanta, Georgia, to Ketchikan, Alaska.
Image credit: Tor.
If you’re much younger than a geriatric millennial, you can have no true understanding of how huge the world used to be—how inaccessible most information was—before the internet. I ought to take a moment to try and evoke that bygone era for you. But it will have to suffice to say that my piece of loose leaf disintegrated before Amazon dot com, in all its glory and depredations, appeared on the scene—before I ever found every title I’d written down.
Now it’s been long decades that I’ve kept a weather eye on depictions of queer men in speculation fiction. And so, as well as offering a straightforward list of recommendations, I will say a bit here about the representational politics and evolving market surrounding these books in the genre we all love.
In Philadelphia, I went to high school within walking distance of Giovanni’s Room, when that gay bookstore was perhaps the best in the world. Throughout my latter twenties and early thirties, here in New York, I loved to drop forty or fifty dollars I didn’t really have at A Different Light or The Oscar Wilde Memorial, when those bookstores still existed. I—a techno-optimist up until recently, I’m ashamed to admit—used to believe the internet would revolutionize discoverability for every kind of book that anyone might ever be searching for. I was naïve, however, and boolean operators haven’t been a boon to all of us.
If you’ve ever spent a long hour, in vain, wielding next-level Google fu against unremitting waves of exploitation pulp written about queer men but not for or by us—unable to find a single book displaying any knowledge of or interest in your actual lived experience—then you know that gay bookstores were far better friends to us than today’s internet.
My list of recommendations is the sort I’m always hoping a Google search will turn up: someone else’s lifetime of reading, sieved through good taste and distilled to a manageable number, with ample reasons why the book is supposed to be extraordinary.
In my crotchety middle age, I find the quibbling that arises whenever a particular book is designated to a particular genre starts off tedious and swiftly becomes unbearable. Even so, I assign each recommendation to a precise genre, as such information helps readers to pinpoint, I believe, what they’re most likely to enjoy.
All my recommendations belong to some species of speculation fiction, and all of them to different species, but it will be noted that they tend more toward fantasy and horror than hard or soft science fiction. That’s because science fiction—except for the very near future sort—mostly doesn’t do it for me anymore since Samuel R. Delany mostly stopped writing it. This is my failing, my own deficit, and not meant as a knock against the practitioners or aficionados of science fiction. All literature inevitably encodes and memorializes the specific prejudices and preoccupations of the time period in which it’s written, but in the case of futurism—well, I’ve just lost my taste. I say more about this in my recommendation of Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand.
I’m as often thrilled by books I don’t entirely understand as by those I do. Half of these recommendations, then, are for works accessible to any fan of genre, but the others are heady stuff that went over mine—sometimes by a lot, sometimes a little. Half were published in the last ten years, but the other four in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or Aughts. Not all the books I recommend were written by “genre writers,” not all by whites, not all by queers, not all by men, not all by Americans, not all by cis people, and not all by uncanceled persons whom you’d be pleased to invite home to meet your mother. Every book impressed me mightily, but I did try to mix things up. I hope you’ll find at least a couple you’ve never heard of before no matter how widely and deeply you read (or that, if the title vaguely rings a bell, it’s only now being brought to your attention as a rare jewel).
Because this whole discussion stretched nearly to seven thousand words, there's no need to plough through it all in one go! Rather than exclaim, “Man, I ain’t reading all that shit!” you might consider checking out the rec for just one book, and then, as curiosity returns, the rec for another… This is meant anyway to be more of a dip-in-and-out reference than a cohesive essay. The first four books to be discussed:
WEIRD: Cities of the Red Night, William S. Burroughs
HORROR: Drawing Blood, Poppy Z. Brite
EPIC FANTASY: Water Horse, Melissa Scott
SLIPSTREAM: Hawthorn and Child, Keith Ridgway
Cities of the Red Night, William S. Burroughs
This is a case where one probably ought to admire the work more than the author. Morbidly curious persons may further investigate by Googling the various accounts of what went down at that drunken party in Mexico, the night when William S. Burroughs picked up a shotgun and told his wife to balance a whisky tumbler on her head, just before he, er ah, “somehow occasioned her demise,” and then absconded to live his best gay life among the hustlers of Tangier. Reports on events differ significantly, so each investigator will have to reach their own conclusion.
Cities of the Red Night is the first book of a trilogy that doesn’t have to be read in any particular order. Indeed I probably, in the first place, shouldn’t have mentioned that it belongs to a trilogy, since for genre readers that word sets up expectations of continuity and form that Burroughs egregiously flouts. He writes with perfect clarity where character and event and prose are concerned—each chapter being individually gripping and easy to understand—but across the length of a novel his narratives are infamously nonlinear. It’s almost as if he shuffled scenes at random, or chose the order of events for onieric resonance rather than dramatic unity. However, you don’t need to “understand” this book in order to “get it.” It’s a vibe, it’s a trip, not a homework problem.
The Red Night trilogy develops a mythos as trippy and creepy and world-spanning as anything to be found in Lovecraft. As I try to describe it, I wish it were still possible to make recourse to the idea of “counterculture”—but that concept, unfortunately, has lost all meaning, now “the culture” has decisively won the war for our hearts and minds and souls since Cities of the Red Night was published in 1981.
First edition cover
Once upon a time, there used to be an effective resistance against the great demon that seeks to turn all humanity into zombie drones striving toward planetary destruction. The politicians and CEOs have been its elder vampires, the billionaires its lich lords, and the rest of us its zombie drones. Neatly dressed heterosexuality, obedience to the rules, compliance with the police, avoidance of substances, and worker-bee-like grinding from 18 to 65 years of age are tell-tale signs of Cthulhian lobotomy. Invert these descriptors for an idea of who once were the counterculture. In Cities of the Red Night, culture and counterculture wage a supernatural war across the multiverse.
Hopping time and space, a pack of oversexed twink sorcerers known as The Wild Boys do battle against the eldritch manifestations that would doom us all. The Wild Boys are headquartered in the cities of the Red Night—Taaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufauna, and Ghadis—which existed 100,000 years ago in the Gobi Desert. They can teleport across dimensions by means of erotic strangulation, reincarnating upon their terminal orgasm in a new time and space. You aren’t ready for the ways that magic in this book mixes eros and thanatos. We see the Wild Boys as guerilla anticolonialists in nineteenth-century South America. We see them in a Noirish 1960s waging weird hex and counterhex shoot-outs with the witches and warlocks of the American Feds. We see them elsewhere/when, now indisputably the heroes, now rather villainous, as they maneuver the chess pieces of their various black-magic gambits. This is by no means the battle of good and evil you’re used to. One side embodies free will, vivacity and pleasure, while the other side is all about omni-annihilative obedience to the state. And since, as I said before, the culture won in the end, most readers will wish that the Wild Boys fucked less, did fewer drugs, and got a Goddamn job. (I’m Team Boys, needless to say).
Because I first read Cities of the Red Night at a very impressionable age—tabula rasa in a historical dispensation that no longer obtains even slightly—it’s hard for me to think about this book in terms of offensiveness and content warnings and so forth. To me, it’s always been an energizing and trenchant cri de coeur against conformity and the whole extinctive machine of late-stage capitalism. Nevertheless, I’d urge readers who’d center ideas of what’s affirming or harmful, appropriate or problematic, when they’re evaluating the worth of a book, to give this one a miss.
Drawing Blood, Poppy Z. Brite
“Poppy Z. Brite” has evolved into the pen name of Billy Martin: a trans horror writer I first discovered in high school, many moons ago. I often hear readers say that they never re-read. Well, I frequently do, and have surely re-read this book more than any other. Drawing Blood kept me going during a long and arduous decade, as I turned to it every few months for more trauma and catharsis. Imagine if Stephen King were a gay man from New Orleans, a generation and a half younger, and he’d concentrated all his talent into one blazing magnum opus. Hot, right?
At first I was shy to tell you about this book, because I haven’t reread it since my teens and twenties, and have now grown terrified of the suck fairy.[3] But Sam J. Miller, queer author of international fame, recently told me that he’d just read Drawing Blood for the first time and reckoned it the best gay horror ever. Now, if Sam says so, and Eye say so, then it must really be so! This book has all the virtues any good horror novel should, but let me hype up a couple of its superlative qualities in particular.
Image credit: Penguin Random House
First-rate horror must give me a sense of place, incredibly evocatively, or it must go home. (Be thrown against the wall, I mean). Horror is about are you going to make it? It’s about am I dying tonight? And the author must take me there. I want to be in the place, with the characters, feeling everything. No! don’t spare me the pain. Give it to me! I want to suffer! Drawing Blood takes place during the summer, in the deep south, in a rural town far out of the way. There’s a creepy abandoned house where some shocking murders happened more than a decade back, and where our two newly-in-love heroes—gorgeous and dumb ass—are going to squat for a couple of days. The book doesn’t stint on either the scares or the romance.
But tastes can change radically over the years, and in the intervening decades since I first came upon this novel, the queer horror that reaches broad popularity usually strikes me as … PG-13ish. A bit weaksaucey, frankly. I personally turn to horror fiction for stronger fare than “appropriate for the barely pubescent.” Yes, there are scares and sex scenes as you might expect, but Drawing Blood is R-rated—a hard R—and never shies from blood and gore, fucking and semen. Just so you know what you’re getting into.
Water Horse, Melissa Scott
This novel isn’t just a “best of class”; it’s alone in its class. I can’t think of another old-school epic fantasy book with a straightforwardly gay male protagonist. By “old school,” I mean a fantasy written in a deeply literate, elevated style, completely unbeholden to modern YA, fan fiction, or the first-draft-of-a-screenplay kind of novel that’s presently à la mode. It treats violent encounters and erotic ones with discretion, without wet and roseate description, and there’s none of that sassy, fourth-wall-breaking, “ironic” banter which Joss Whedon, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, specifically, have diffused so widely throughout contemporary SFF media—movies, TV, books.
Image credit: Candlemark & Gleam
Further to this “deeply literate, elevated style”: be assured that it’s accessible and not Tolkienesque at all, in that Scott doesn’t raid other languages or the elder canon of English literature for abstruse vocabulary and archaic locutions. But if you’re an Anglophone who reads only recently published books, then you’re probably not aware of the shocking extent to which formal, literary diction in English has atrophied over the last hundred years. There was, once—and still is in most other languages with a long literary tradition—a great and beautiful distance between what you speak in the street and what you compose for publication. In contemporary English, this distance is nearly gone. So, again, if your tendency is always to read the new new thing, published just yesterday, then the register Scott employs for this novel may strike you as stilted, distancing, and “unrelatable” in its considerable remove from the demotic. (The demotic is the sort of English you and your best friend speak to each other on the telephone). I loved it, though! Nobody writes English this way anymore! While gobbling the novel up, I honestly often felt emotional and even teary-eyed, reading prose of such felicity deployed in service of a thoroughly queer adventure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah: but what’s the book about? Well, as I said, it’s an old-school epic fantasy, so if you’ve ever been around that block before, then you’ll quickly find your footing here. There are two closely allied kingdoms which a third is invading, I almost want to say subsuming—whatever it is that the Borg in Star Trek do to free people after claiming, “Resistance is futile.” What’s particularly interesting in Water Horse is that the culture of the allied kingdoms is significantly more egalitarian than our own present-day culture, while that of the invaders is unreconstructedly patriarchal. As you read about the conflicts between these cultures—one ahead of us, one behind—the exact boundaries of our own culture vis-à-vis the stymieing and success of feminism and queer liberation come into stark relief.
For example, the gay male protagonist of the novel, who is ruler of one of the allied kingdoms, has a daughter who is his heir apparent. The reader gets the sense that, in a time of peace, this daughter would have grown up and come into her own leisurely, by and by, as do most youth, eventually, if given time and space and support enough. But in a time of war, the daughter must grow up fast. I found it incredibly moving to observe how her father extends faith in her capacities and potential, even as he pushes her hard and supports her throughout. This particular dynamic between elder and youth, man and woman, ruler and heir—past master of war and politics, on the one hand, and a tentative but talented journeyman, on the other—doesn’t resemble any other I can recall reading. And it’s deliciously fantastical, too, in the sense that it couldn’t quite exist in our world on these terms: not because it entails magical impossibilities, but because sexism and homophobia (here in the real world) still militate too powerfully against a father/daughter relationship with quite these social dynamics, quite this quality of mutual and societal respect. It’s lovely when fantasy can help us dream better possibilities. And there’s lots of this sort of thing in the novel, all done with wonderful subtlety. Readers who rush through the pages looking only for blatant wonders (and there are those, too), will miss the best stuff in the book. While I always appreciate a light touch myself, I know that some readers never do “get the point” unless it’s delivered with a sledgehammer. Melissa Scott really has no peer when it comes to what I think of as “digested fiction”—which is opposed to the sort of fiction full of indigestible sermons, polemics, and axes-to-grind. No one else can mix pure story and progressive politics into a smoother emulsion.
One last observation: it is mine and Scott’s shared generational perspective that allows me to appreciate this novel along so many and disparate axes. When you leave queer youth and enter queer middle age, you become accustomed to seeing yourself rarely or never represented in books. This is partly to do with the scarcity of queer characters well out of their teens and twenties—Scott’s novel is, by the way, chockfull of forty- and fifty-somethings helping their sons and daughters and younger dependents come fully into their own—but is mostly to do with rarely or never seeing yourself rendered in familiar terms, as you yourself understand yourself. Like computer operating systems, queer identity updates on a dizzying schedule. Once several decades have gone by since you first came out, it’s pretty inevitable that whatever queer identity you first internalized all those years ago will have grown somewhat or entirely obsolete, and you find yourself cherishing maps and a guidebook for a country that no longer exists. For instance, the main character of this novel quite clearly reads to me as a gay man gracefully resigned to the exigencies of dynastic succession: but mine is a Gen X or a Boomer read. I strongly suspect that Millennials and Zoomers will see him differently. See what you think.
Hawthorn and Child, Keith Ridgway
This novel is slipstream, a genre which I’ll define as having content appropriate to SFF, but not its affect. You’ll read a couple of pages and say, “Oh, this is mainstream literature,” and then, after few more pages say, “Wait, what?” Or the other way around, back and forth, until you exhaust yourself into surrender to the tale: “slipstream.”
The London police are investigating a complicatedly interrelated series of crime taking place throughout the city. They can’t quite seem to get to grips with the exact whereabouts and identity of the kingpin at the center of this shadowy conspiracy because he and his cronies are slipping back and forth from a parallel dimension. While the human beings progress through the gritty stations of a police procedural, there are occasional incursions from an entirely different sort of novel. The reader becomes aware of—but never learns very much about—high derring-do among the wolves, rats, and ravens, characters from a fantasy novel that ought to be shelved next to the Redwall series or Watership Down. Later on there’s a catfishing ghost, and so forth. But do you see what I’ve just gone and done? I’ve made this novel sound like something any genre fan should be perfectly well accustomed to, when in fact ninety-nine point nine percent of it is concerned with real-world life, made electrifying not through sensawunda but consummate writerly skill (and a rare irruption of horrific violence).
Keith Ridgway must be accounted one of the best writers even among the select group I commend to you here. For the last twenty years, his novels and stories have been long- and short-listed for all the most important literary prizes in the UK—he’s Irish—and occasionally won them. His prose isn’t frighteningly fancy-pants, though. It’s simple and crystalline. He has a wide-ranging novelistic eye, whose attention manages always to fall on the salient detail.
One of the novel’s characters, the art-loving teenage daughter of a police chief, who is longing for her first kiss, belongs to a bildungsroman that should have bored the pants off me, had Ridgway depicted the character with less captivating and compassionate verisimilitude. Another significant character is a burnt-out gay cop, prone to inexplicable bouts of tears: the titular Hawthorn. He’s a tough guy and a tender one; traumatized, but not above doling out some trauma to others. The character and situations he finds himself in are exquisitely individual, always not the expected thing, but nevertheless eminently recognizable if you’re a queer man (of a certain age and experience).
A lesser writer might have tried to capture the reader’s attention by wreaking all manner of serial trauma upon these characters. Ridgway, however, takes a harder route: writing so excellently and empathetically, the reader gets out of their own head and feels the events of the novel are fraught because they are so for the characters. Some will have preferred the sort of plot where every dangling thread is nicely tied off before the end. But for me, this is the highest sort of writing: full of wonder and skill, doing absolutely its own thing.
*
GRIMDARK: The Steel Remains, Richard Morgan
AFROFUTURIST GOTHIC: “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” in Counternarratives, John Keene
URBAN FANTASY, LATE-MEDIEVAL SECONDARY WORLD: Point of Sighs, fifth novella of the Astreiant series, Melissa Scott
PLANETARY ROMANCE: Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany
The Steel Remains, Richard Morgan
I debated fiercely with myself over whether to include this book, as its author, Richard Morgan, has been cancelled. And y’all were right to do it. Ordinarily, I would have tried to claim ignorance as to whether his cancellation was deserved or not, but, unfortunately, I happen to have watched the whole controversy unfold from lurkerdom. So, I can’t mount a moral defense for my promotion of this novel, only make the aesthetic argument that there’s nothing else like it. You may have noticed that, these days, nearly all queer male representation in fantasy is directly derivative of that which you find in fan fic, with very little to choose from if that’s not your bag. The Steel Remains beams down into this landscape like an away team covered in bright synthetics and chrome gadgets into a stone-age culture.
The Steel Remains is a grisly, cynical, fuck-drenched—that’s the right word, not “sex-drenched”—grimdark fantasy. Please don’t believe for one minute that reading this novel will help you become a better person: No, it’s a nasty and thoroughly unimproving book. The Steel Remains is the first volume of a trilogy called A Land Fit for Heroes, but I tapped out halfway through the second book and never picked up the third. Morgan is about as capable a writer as the avid genre reader can reasonably hope for; he’s no hack. He’s got real chops. But in order for a book of this sort—grimdark—to tackle themes of war and rape, empire and race, gender and sexuality, and not devolve into simple exploitation, the writer needs spiritual resources[4] as much as technical skills. Despite all my caveats, I don’t regret picking up The Steel Remains.
Throughout my adult life reading SFF, I’ve been brought up short anew by how resigned I’ve become to execrable hackwork, whenever I chance upon some writer who doesn’t flail around trying to make competent fiction happen. It’s not damning with faint praise, then, but offering almost my highest, when I say that Richard Morgan plots well, builds his world and characters well, and writes forceful, well-organized sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, chapters. I do not weigh such competence lightly! And it’s exponentially more difficult to find when you happen to be searching for a particular kind of genre book. Say, one with a queer male protagonist, and light on the feels and the tropes, but big on the plot, monsters, and world-building. In that case, years may go by between one rewarding read and the next.
There’s a hot market in genre for books about queers assigned male at birth, but it’s amazing how hard it is to find one written by a QAMAB who has attained publication at a traditional imprint. The books about us aren’t much written by us. Now, Richard Morgan is certainly no queer—God no! he’s the epitome of what you refer to when saying, scathingly, “straight white male”—but wow, is he cisgender! It’s been beyond unnerving to read so copiously and for so long about queer men, and yet so rarely be able to escape the awareness of a lidless female gaze, especially when sex and romance enters the scene. It’s been at times worse than unnerving—creepy and desperate-making, at times, so unquestioned and pervasive it’s become. While I struggle to determine exactly what adjectives apply for The Steel Remains—and by no means wholly positive ones, since Morgan plays the graphic sex in the book largely for puerile shock effect—even so, it blew my mind to read something this raw and powerful where the female gaze never entered.
It was back in the mid-Aughts, I want to say, that for the first time I noticed one of the Big Five publishing a fantasy novel that was fully heir to the conventions of online slash fiction. By now, in 2023, nearly the whole of genre fiction with queer male protagonists derives either all or mostly from the influence of m/m fan fic. The Steel Remains is the rare exemplar that owes nothing to that lineage. It was a mind-expanding experience for me to come across such work by a talented and disinterested author who made no resort to the ubiquitous models. The Steel Remains doesn’t afford what anyone might call good representation, but it’s certainly doing something different, even unprecedented. And given the sheer aridity of the representational monoculture at present, I couldn’t justify omitting a book like this, at once unique and accomplished.
“Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” in Counternarratives, John Keene
I had to restrict my recommendations to certain rubrics in order to achieve any degree of coherence and thematization for this discussion: only works belonging to fantastika, and only works centering the experience of queer men. But as important as it may be to follow the rules, it can be as fun and revelatory to break them. In this instance, then, I commend to you a piece of speculative fiction that doesn’t center the experience of queer men (although it’s written by one). Here, women are front and center. Please note, too, that, although I’ve mostly chosen works easily identifiable as “genre,” and authors who are the usual suspects, this novella by John Keene is not one such.
He won a MacArthur in 2018, picked up a National Book Award for poetry in 2022, is a full professor of comparative literature at a major university, and is decidedly not—apart from this one novella—a genre writer. Look for “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” in Keene’s collection of short works, Counternarratives, in which the thematically-consistent[5] stories, novelettes, and novellas assume diverse literary modes, addressing diverse concerns. For this one tale, Keene enters deep into the territory of speculative fiction. Be forewarned: It’s dark! Who prefer their queer content to be unambiguously consensual and uplifting should steer far clear.
The young protagonist, Carmel, is born enslaved on a Haitian plantation just prior to the revolution. Her father, a gifted painter, and her mother, a feared but respected priestess of traditional African religion, come to grim ends as the paroxysms of insurgency seize Hispaniola. Carmel’s relationship with—and tutelage under—her mother continue post mortem, throughout the novella. Through a series of dizzying and engrossing vicissitudes, Carmel comes to be the personal attendant of a very headstrong, very rich young white heiress, Eugénie de l’Écart. The young women are sent away together to a convent school, the eponymous Our Lady of the Sorrows, in the sticks of antebellum rural Kentucky.
Eugénie is a narcissistic, abusive monster. But her character, for me, anyway, evokes nearly as much pity and admiration as animus. Of course, social forces restrict the young white mistress’s self-actualization with less severity than they do Carmel’s, who is black and enslaved, penniless and powerless, but still they do with very great severity. Eugénie contrives against the social forces arrayed against her with such feral and cunning self-will that I, personally, couldn’t help but root for her a teensy-tiny little bit. Carmel, on the other hand, is so subsumed in her role and work as a slave that, in the beginning of the novella, she barely seems to possess desires, or thoughts, or personality at all. But page by page, desire, thought, and personality—and magic, too: let’s not forget all the black magic!—accrue to her.
It is certainly true that the more versed the reader is in the history of revolutionary Haiti and the pre-Civil War American South, the keener will be their appreciation for what Keene makes of this historical setting. But anyone reading this discussion, in the first place, is of course very well accustomed to stories that take place in wildly estranging environments. So there’s no great need for deep prior knowledge in order to become engrossed in the characters and their circumstances. With forceful specificity, Keene brings home for the reader the hardscrabble danger and tedium of life at a Catholic convent school in Protestant rural Kentucky, and equally for the nuns, the young Misses, and their enslaved attendants. The tale grounds itself in the always gripping drama of adolescents awakening to adult emotion, agency, and moral commitment.
(Off-topic aside: this novella awoke a powerful desire in me to see it read beside Craig Laurance Gidney’s novel, A Spectral Hue; to read an exploration of the correspondences between one and the other, and then suggestions about how these two works begin to limn the contours of an emergent strain of Afrofuturism combining outsider art with ancestor worship. Please, someone? I’d so love to read that essay!)
Point of Sighs, fifth novella of the Astreiant series, Melissa Scott
It would be reasonable to object that, if I only mean to recommend eight works, is it really appropriate to recommend two from Melissa Scott—and another fantasy at that, when she’s written across such varied genres? I will answer your objection by pointing out that Melissa Scott has an enormous backlist, which I myself haven’t exhausted despite browsing through it for decades. The fear weighed heavy on my heart that some bewildered newbie, without an explicit heads-up, might never happen across this spectacular highpoint among a 30+ catalogue of publications. Point of Sighs is a smashing five-star read of pacy adventure, toothy world-building, swoony romance, delightful scares, and total fun.
It’s the fifth book of a series I read all out-of-order but understood just fine anyway. The other books of the series aren’t as good as this one, the rest being two- or three-star reads and rather boring to my tastes. I always enjoy Scott’s cultural world-building, and she has a much stronger gift than most writers for evoking a sense of place, mise en scène, bodies in space, and the physical realities of her characters: for that, she always gets at least a couple of stars from me. But the Astreiant novellas are written in the mode of adventure-mystery stories, which mode requires a suspenseful, pacy plotting that isn’t, frankly, Scott’s forte as a writer. For whatever reason, though, she was firing on all cylinders here.
Image credit: Lethe Press
As it’s a short book, I won’t say much about the plot. But I do want to talk about the characters. I love the way Scott writes queer men! I’ve rarely come across work by authors of any gender, sex, or orientation whose characterization of queer men attains such verisimilitude, I literally know the guy from my own lived experience—or have even been the guy, or am him presently. Melissa Scott has such an eye, such a grasp! The novella’s two main characters live in a sort of early-Renaissance-era fantasy city. One, Philip Eslingen, is a cavalry captain recently demobbed from the army; the other, Nicolas Rathe, a member of the city guard. Eslingen is an accomplished warrior but also a pretty boy who may have, erm, traded on his looks in order to advance more quickly up the ranks. He doesn’t object to a little luxury—to nice clothes, to nice things, to a spa day every now and then. He’s emotionally open and all-in from the jump when it comes to love. Rathe, on the other hand, is a taciturn bruiser of a big-city cop: not harsh, but serious, you know what I mean? About the business, not the fluff; a doer, not a talker; not emotionally unavailable, but a let’s-take-things-slow type, a let’s-take-our-time-and-see-where-this-goes type. Their dynamic is so relatable and recognizable and yummy. Although Eslingen is quite a formidable fighter in his own right, his polished cavalry skills are far from the ideal ones for the narrow dark alleys of a big city. He has to push himself hard to keep up with his partner on their urban adventures. And Rathe, by nature, can’t help but convey a bit of tacit—not judgment, but let’s say impatience, when he notes his pretty-boy lover struggling. And so Eslingen, of course, just tries harder, and perilously so, in this book. Oh, Rathe! If I, personally, knew that all the soothsayers agreed that my hot sweet boyfriend was fated to die someday by drowning, would I have begun to countenance his tagging along out onto the flooding river, in the middle of a thunderstorm—in a leaky boat!—to investigate whether it was true that a demon mermaid goddess was snatching beautiful young men, exclusively, down to their doom? Not I!
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany
Everyone, I think, knows that Samuel R. Delany is a black gay man who’s written many, many speculative works. What few people realize, I think, is that Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand is the single time he wrote a black gay man as the protagonist of one those many speculative novels. Delany began publishing as a teenager and as of today (2023) is 81 years old. His long and prolific career breaks roughly into three periods. The first, when he wrote straight-ahead science fiction and fantasy, ended with the publication of Dhalgren in ’75. Thereafter, in his middle period when I discovered him, and which is forever my favorite period, the speculative fiction he wrote veered way off the beaten path. And finally, beginning in the mid-90s, comes this late period in which he writes mostly … other stuff than science fiction and fantasy.
Image credit: Wesleyan University Press (Reprint Edition)
I adore Delany’s oeuvre for the great breadth of empathy and identity evinced in the protagonists of his novels from one to the next. But I’m still really glad that somebody like me got to be the protagonist in at least one SRD novel of speculative fiction. (Not, I rush to clarify, that I’m a remarkably cultured and horny intergalactic economic ambassador for my planet—far from it!) The happy singularity of this book is reason enough to break my rule of “all fantasy, all the time,” and recommend this one work of science fiction. Delany has in fact written so much superb work that there are several of his books I love even more than Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, but those other works are too far outside the remit I set for myself here. Honestly, I think it’s difficult to appreciate this novel quite to the extent I do, if you didn’t come upon it similarly to how I did: in a long-gone intersection of time and space and identity. Since this novel appeared in 1984, our conceptions of sex and gender and sexuality have codified in ways that vitiate some of the power of Delany’s exploration here. We’ve closed off a lot of these trails, abandoning them to overgrowth, and blazed other ones, and paved them into superhighways, too. Me, this novel gifted a dazzling concatenation of insights and epiphany, but you…? Here’s a recent review[6] that I think captures the spirit of the zeitgeist.
Now, my great strength as a reader lies in experience and sensibility, not raw intellectual wattage. So, although many of you smarter folks will have no difficulty grasping all of the brain-busting science-fictional ideas that Delany presents in this novel, many of them went way over my head. They escaped my grasp as that of a toddler’s trying to jump from the front lawn and catch a jet plane roaring past 10,000 feet up, even after three or four readings. But please know that even if you read as many passages with as much bemusement as I did, the whole can still amount to a rich, rewarding experience. Stars in My Pocket explores the future of work, family, self-will, and interspecies relations of all sorts. It begins with a magnificent hundred page joke—gripping, hilarious but dry-humored and subtle, too—concerning whether she[7] who is most privileged or she who is most dispossessed will be she who survives the anthropogenic End of Days, to thrive in some after-world.
But plot summaries for this novel are available all over the internet. What I want to talk about is how Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand ruined science fiction for me. With power and conviction I’ve never seen equaled, Delany makes the point in this novel that, just as the past is said to be another country, so also the future won’t be merely different from the present: those differences must necessarily be offensive to us, could we but know them. Future civilizations will accommodate themselves to sociological and technological novums by abandoning taboos that we in the present clutch tightly to our breasts. If we could glimpse how the future moves past such current intractabilities as, per exempla, racism, trans/gender discrimination, and germ theory, we’d screw up our faces in disgust and cry, “No! not like that!”
Delany makes this point by transgressing contemporary comfort zones with respect to gender, sex, and sexuality, as if our most steadfast prudery, mores and taboos were irrelevant to the future’s quotidian function. It’s a book that had to be uncomfortable.
The reader will be moved to wonder how there can be homosexuality at all, in a future where there’s no such thing as gender. Why, the reader shall also ponder, with some consternation, should the protagonist be so hot-to-trot for aliens belonging to one particular sub-sex of a trisexual species, when none of those sexes have anything like human genital apparatus? Delany, among his many propositions in this book, proposes that preference tout court—and sexual preference, notably—comes as an ineluctable concomitant of selfhood and physical embodiment. And as long as humans have preferences, we will also have stringent opinions about what others prefer and we do not. Even in the future, Delany suggests, the dick will want what it wants, and it won’t be persuaded otherwise. I was both squicked and wildly entertained by Delany’s narrative lines of argument in this direction. And I was electrified as I came to understand how it was my very disapproval that helped to render his ideas plausible/possible/fascinating. You’ll won’t find such arguments put to you elsewhere with more vivid and outré intelligence.
[1] A more accurate word than “characters” would be “instantiation”: a passage, or even just a line of text, which admitted of the possibility of queer male desire. In those days, “queer male instantiation” could be far more reasonably hoped for than the desperate rarity of “characters.”
[2] I use “genre fiction,” “the genre,” “speculative fiction,” and “SFF” indiscriminately to refer to the same marketing confluence of science fiction, fantasy, horror, fairy-tale retellings, near-future thrillers, magic realism, slipstream, weird, etc.
[3] https://www.tor.com/2010/09/28/the-suck-fairy/
[4] Attempting to define what constitutes a lack of “spiritual resources” would require getting far into the weeds, but the author Genevieve Valentine, in a comprehensive review of the Land Fit for Heroes trilogy, admirably explicates this deficit. https://www.npr.org/2015/01/25/378611261/for-a-taste-of-grimdark-visit-the-land-fit-for-heroes. I ditto what she says in this respect, although I ultimately reach a harsher conclusion.
[5] All the works in Counternarratives are fiercely, whimsically, disparately, eruditely postcolonialist.
[6] https://www.tor.com/2014/07/01/post-binary-gender-in-sf-stars-in-my-pocket-like-grains-of-sand-by-samuel-r-delany/
[7] The future society of Delany’s novel uses she/her pronouns for all characters, including for the protagonist and his her love interest, although we, in our society, would have assigned them both male at birth. For those of you who’ve read Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, it will be particularly interesting to observe in service of what different ends Delany employs universal she/her pronouns.