Our favouite 'sci-fi protagonists from societies with one gender' meet each other:
Breq understands politics enough to hold her own in a conversation with Estraven. She doesn't understand what shifgrethor is, but she doesn't let on. She finds their conversation refreshingly efficient. Estraven leaves the conversation assuming that Breq has a fuckton of shifgrethor.
Seivarden is left trying to talk to Genly. This should be easy. She's dealt with lots of diplomats before. Unfortunately Genly, who has only just barely got the hang of a society with one biological sex and one social gender, is now in a spiralling panic about a society with multiple biological sexes and still only one social gender using feminine pronouns.
On an authorial level the reason Genly is, at least at the start of the book, deeply invested in upholding masculinity to the extent that he expects it of people who have never heard of it is because Le Guin wanted to tell a story about unlearning sexism
On an in-fiction level, though, I think if I was a man, a cismasc, a dude of guy experience, and my space coworkers said,
“hey we think you could go to the androgynous planet, you’d pass really well there, we think you could blend right in, all you’d have to do is get the beard zapped off,”
Books read in 2024: THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. Le Guin
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. It would never have occurred to me before that night that I could hurt Estraven.
ugh etoile i have a problem and a plea 😔 i am a chronic silver-shot-that-man-on-skeleton-island believer despite my best efforts, but there seems to be so much fic and folly on the other side of this interpretation. i can somewhat buy flint staying alive, giving up and becoming a hermit, leading to them meeting again far into the future. but anything involving thomas being alive or flint in savannah in any state humanly responsive enough to narrativize is too much for me to suspend my disbelief. i think i saw that your opinion on the ending leans more towards my end of things, so i was wondering if you have any post S4 recs for miserable fuckers like me, perhaps some that could even convince me of a reality where thomas is alive. u are such a good writer and ur taste is immaculate so i hope u can help me out (also, madi forgiving silver nopes me out of the story fairly quickly as well)
What an absolutely stellar ask, I'm so honored you thought of me and wanted my take. I do lean that way, and I would love for them to have to interact postcanon but only if it was Bad, and absolutely in no way do I see Flint finding peace on the plantation, or Madi forgiving Silver.
However, I have a confession.
I'm not actually great at reading postcanon fic.
I want it, I really do, but for some reason (that has nothing to do with quality of writing) it often doesn't click for me. So my recommendations are pretty limited. However, I still think I can help.
Two things came immediately to mind, that I love and think are perfect:
opportunist (~6k) by Anonymous - the necro-cannibalism fic I try to get everyone to read and no one is brave enough. I will talk about this all day, its absolutely how I see this going. Its so good. Its not mine, y'all know I would claim it. I felt awful afterward, but in a good way.
hand in unlovable hand (~10k) by brinnanza and Jaynovz - this is probably about what you're looking for. Lovingly known as the worst ending AU, I can't say much about it for fear of spoilers but trust me.
the other direction I'm going to point you is this rec list from @jaynovz, its not all postcanon, but a lot of it is, and I think will fit what you're hoping for
Gold eyes: genetically rare. Red hair: uncommon to rare (from what we've seen of character from the Houses).
I think the first Alexandrite to see her would send out an all-hands alert. There'd be an entire platoon trying to seduce her by the end of the first week, and she'd just think it meant that the magazines were more accurate than she expected.
you’ll have one joke post complaining abt old misogynistic scifi blow up and years later you’ll still get people reblogging it with tags like “why i don’t touch scifi.” hey. im at your door with a pile of scifi in my hands. i’ll lovingly read ursula k le guin or octavia butler to you aloud myself. let me in let me in please please please please hello
some ann leckie or martha wells even. samuel delany. nalo hopkinson. vonda n mcintyre. melissa scott. nnedi okorafor. adrian tchaikovsky. becky chambers. kim bo-young. cameron reed. ted chiang. temi oh. ryka aoki. sarah gailey. micaiah johnson. rivers solomon. TAKE MY HAND!!!!!!!!
“I killed wizard’s filth like you all my life,” snarled the Sleeper. This time the object that appeared in her hand was not a gun: it was some sort of fat cylinder. She flicked it downward and a slim black baton, perhaps three feet in length, telescoped suddenly outward with a noise like a bolt going home. “I killed them with guns, and bombs, and knives, and gas, and when I didn’t have any of those I just got in real close and put my thumbs through their fucking eyes. You can flick that little skewer around all you like, boy. I’ll choke you with it.”
anyone else think this excerpt is the hottest thing any character says across the books
made this post in may and i still think awake remembrance of these valiant dead could snap matthias nonius in half like a twig and i would cheer her on
It's so important to me that Breq does not support either side of Anaander Mianaai's civil war. Like given the events of the first book I half expected her to join forces with the side of Anaander who didn't destroy Justice of Toren against the side that did, but that's not the kind of story it is. Her first priority is to find and protect Lieutenant Awn's family. And by the third book her objective is to keep the residents of Athoek System safe (including Station itself). It's just so helpful to me to have this story where the fabric of society is ripping apart on an incomprehensible scale, and our hero is someone who chooses a specific group of people and says, I will keep them safe. Not "I will save the universe" or "I will prevent collapse" or "I will fix it all," just "I will do what I can to keep this population safe amidst the chaos." So even during big action scenes, harm mitigation is central to Breq's calculus. She's trying to establish trade with the Presgr for medical correctives bc she recognizes the need for medical infrastructure independent of the Radch empire. She's pushing for mundane repairs. She's supporting workers unionizing. It's not sexy it's not action packed it's just a grounded response to crisis. She doesn't waste time engaging in the rhetorical stakes of the intra-Anaander conflict, she just gets to work helping people. I think it's a good example of how to handle problems that feel paralyzingly large.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle series)
Voting ended onDec 21, 2024
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
The Murderbot Diaries series (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse, and other stories) by Martha Wells
Endorsement from submitter: "Asexual and agender main character. In later books side characters are revealed to be in poly relationship."
"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."
In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.
On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.
Science fiction, novella, series, adult
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle series)
A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.
Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.
