Guest Post: Read the Room: Nonbinary Writers on the Future of Sci Fi

Today’s guest post is actually an interview, and it’s unlike any we have ever conducted ourselves. First of all, it’s a conversation with twelve (12!) authors, second of all, it has a very clear-cut focus, unlike our more general chats, and finally thirdly: because it’s over fifteen thousand words long. Fair to say, you should prepare yourself an excellent cup of your beverage of choice, before you sit down to read it!

Read the Room is a project created by Arina, and originally posted on the blog she co-ran: Wyrm’s World. You can follow her on Goodreads to stay up to date with all her reading.

The feature was a multi-author interview series focusing on non-binary authors in science-fiction. It was so much fun and I found a lot of new authors to read so I hope it does the same for your readers.

Part 1: Inspiration and Creation

Q: Hi everyone and welcome to the blog! It’s a pleasure to have you all here for Sci-Fi Month, to celebrate this amazing genre we all share in. First, can you tell us a bit about yourself; your name, your pronouns, which color would your lightsaber be,…?

Joseph Tomaras (JT): My name is Joseph Tomaras. Pronouns are they/them (preferred) or he/him. I only came out as nonbinary (genderfluid) a few months ago, so a few months shy of my forty-third birthday. Thus most of my science-fiction stories were published before I came out as such. Though there is one story, “Sokal,” which will appear in the forthcoming issue of Lackington’s. Depending on the timing of when this is posted, that may be in readers’ hands before they see this, or after.

My lightsaber would be lavender.

Erin Barbeau (EB): I’m Erin Barbeau (ze/zir), your local friendly nonbinary entomologist, SFF writer & reviewer. I mostly write science fiction revolving around (often gross) biology, transness, and queer trauma.

I run a review blog, Insectoid Reviews, where I focus on queer science fiction & fantasy but also write about science fiction history, community, and science in speculative fiction. Outside of SFF, I am also published in the academia realm. My lightsaber probably would be green because green is my favorite color. 

J S Fields (JS): I write under the name J.S. Fields, and my pronouns are they/them/theirs. I’m nonbinary but also intersex, which adds a fun little layer to everything. I’m in my late thirties, have two partners and a kid. I write science fiction (most notably the Ardulum series) and science nonfiction (mostly about wood and fungus). I’m agented, and work full time on top of that as a professor and sculptor. My lightsaber would also be purple-but like a bright, shocking purple

E S Argentum (ESA): I’m E.S. Argentum (they/them or he/him), an enby/trans masc-leaning nerd. I’m just starting on my self-publishing path, but I have a few short scifi romance stories and four books in a co-written series available as of this writing. I’ve taught workshops at local writing conferences about writing queer characters, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I had a cishet protagonist. As far as lightsaber color goes, I’m going to go with turquoise because no one said it had to be a canon color. 

Matt Doyle (MD): I’m Matt Doyle, and I’m genderfluid. When it comes to pronouns, I’m happy for people to take me as they find me. If you think I’m more masculine, he/him is fine, she/her if I’m more femme that day. Or, they/them if it’s easier. Honestly, as long as you aren’t trying to cause upset, I’m fine with anything. I write hybrid genre fiction with a sci-fi grounding and diverse casts, and my lightsaber would be green because… well… I’m from an Irish family.

Judith Vogt (JV): Hey there, I’m Judith Vogt, I’m a science fiction and fantasy writer and RPG designer from Germany. My pronouns are she/her in German, but I’m trying out they/them when I have the opportunity to be at an English-language event. My lightsaber is a bright yellowish green. 

Alex White (AW): I’m Alex White (they/them), and I’d definitely want a nice sea-foam lightsaber… or maybe one that changes color a little, depending on the angle. I’m nonbinary, genderfluid, and I write space operas for Orbit Books, as well as licensed novels for Alien and Star Trek.

Anna Everts (AE): I’m Anna Everts, an autistic and non-binary writer from the Netherlands. My pronouns are they/them, or die/diens in Dutch. I’m mostly writing comics and short stories in the sci-fi, fantasy, superhero and detective/mystery genres. I’ve been writing stories ever since I was little, but decided around four years ago that I’d like to make a career out of it. I’ve already published one short comic and more comics are in the making, so that’s exciting! My lightsaber would change colours like a mood ring.

Kiya Nicoll (KN):  I’m Kiya Nicoll, and I guess I’ll try to self-describe as some nebulous flavor of vaguely transmasculine nonbinary.  Now accepting all major pronouns, they/them is a solid default if you actually need a concrete and specific answer, and I am exceedingly fond of the Victorian-era neopronoun “thon”, which is a contraction for “that one”.  My lightsaber would almost certainly be blue even though Guardian is not my preferred class in KOTOR, because it is the local custom that All The Blue Things Are Kiya’s.  I write broadly within the speculative fiction umbrella, and it often smacks of gender, neurodivergence, or stealth theology.

Dominik Dyer (DD): Hi! I’m Dominik Myles Dyer, a disabled, non-binary writer from the UK, and my pronouns are he/him. I write fiction podcasts (still in production, currently!) and short stories, primarily, and love mixing genres together. My favourite genre to work in is horror, but I also love to expand and challenge myself. I write my experiences into my work a lot, which means there’s a lot of exploration of gender, sexuality, and disability (including neurodivergence, as I’m ADHD & autistic) in the things I create. I think it’d be cool to have a hot pink lightsaber, although I must admit that I’ve only ever seen A New Hope, so my Star Wars knowledge is severely limited.

K B Wagers (KW): Hi all, I’m K.B. Wagers (they/them) non-binary science fiction author of the Hail Bristol novels and the NeoG Adventures. I live in Colorado with my partner and a houseful of cats and plants. I have a number of swords, but oddly enough not a lightsaber (I should rectify that) which if I were going to get one I think I would go with a darker green.

J Patrick Jones (JJ): I’m Jojo, I publish under a variant of my full name which is J. Patrick Jones, I use they/them pronouns, and I’d have a yellow lightsaber in a zweihander style.

Q: What are some of the inspirations behind your work in sci-fi and how is your writing influenced by them?

KW: I grew up pretty heavily influenced by science fiction, most notably Doctor Who and Red Dwarf which is what happens when you only watch PBS as a kid. In that same vein Sesame Street had a huge influence on me as did the Muppets and while it’s probably not technically science fiction I think it does fall nicely into the speculative space. I didn’t read a lot of science fiction as a kid, with the exception of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – a book that remains one of my favorites and probably set the tone for my own wacky sense of humor. Star Wars also had an undeniable impact on my writing.

DD: A lot of my childhood was spent hyperfixating on Jurassic Park and Doctor Who, so I’d say that those series have a fair amount of influence over how I interact with and write about sci-fi. One of the first times I saw an LGBT character on screen that wasn’t the butt of the joke was Captain Jack Harkness, and I distinctly remember how overjoyed I felt when I saw him kiss both Rose and the Doctor in the Season One finale, which I think definitely impacted me, even back then, because it felt like sci-fi was a genre where I was welcome to explore ideas of identity and who I was and wanted to be as a person. As I grew older, I became more heavily influenced by franchises like Alien, The Matrix, and Blade Runner, and the idea of exploring humanity and what it means to be a human being in this world became more and more attractive to me. Space and space exploration have also always had a special place in my heart, so I love mixing cosmic horror in a sci-fi world to mull over big questions that don’t quite have answers.

KN: For dealing with gender in fiction in specific I absolutely have to shout out Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and not just because it is a heavy influence on a poem I have coming out next year in her memorial poetry anthology. There’s a lot of Le Guin deep in me, in weird and subtle ways, and the Gethenian culture of gender-fluidity fascinated me long before I had any sort of handle on my own identity. I’d also like to mention a sort of weird sideways one – Lisane Norman’s Sholan Alliance books, which I loved in part when I was younger because the female Sholans only developed mammary tissue when necessary for breastfeeding, like the panthers they’re modeled on, and then that nonsense goes away when it’s no longer functional. Long before I figured out I was nonbinary I rather envied them.

I feel like the most overt influence on me is probably C. J. Cherryh, though, because she, like I, often writes about protagonists who are in some way isolated and alienated. That sense of rupture is one that I feel keenly, myself, and thus it’s a perpetual story engine, whether it’s a literal alien in the company of another species or someone displaced and looking for a home.  Cherryh also does a lot of things with identity – the entire development of the azi in the Union/Alliance series is absolutely about the nature of what a person is, without even getting into the psychogenesis plot of Cyteen.  The Cherryh I keep going back to is actually Forty Thousand in Gehenna, which I have never seen on anyone else’s favorites list, because of the exploration of an entire culture who see the world aslant of everyone else, because of their symbiotic cultural development with the alien.

EB: The biggest influences on my work are Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, Star Trek particularly Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9), Diane Daune’s Young Wizards series, and my background in biology. DS9 and Young Wizards really shaped my sensibilities when I was a kid towards SFF that was character driven, not afraid to tackle trauma and social issues, and unabashedly compassionate and emotional. DS9 was one of my first brushes with queerness in fiction, but Imperial Radch was the first SFF I had found a narrative with people like me. This series gave me the confidence to return to writing and experiment with queer narratives. Since I was little, I have been immersed in the natural world and a lot of my work is a love letter to the organisms I’ve touched, the ecosystems I’ve explored, and the science that has become a deep part of my identity. Also I just want to write about worms sometimes, you know? Imperial Radch was the first SFF I had found a narrative with people like me. This series gave me the confidence to return to writing and experiment with queer narratives.

JS: I was influenced heavily by 90s era sci fi on Fox, like M.A.N.T.I.S., VR-5, Time Trax, etc. Hence I like camp, and tropes, and how those can blend together to make science fiction yes, sciencey, but also comfortable across a wide variety of readership. I always hoped it would be a bit gayer, to be honest (hello Xena, but with on page stuff, not just implied) so I always wanted to write sort of dime-store, 8:00pm comfort sci fi but with queer people.

ESA: I’m going to echo Erin here–Star Trek is a huge influence for my scifi. I grew up on Next Generation and Voyager, so that sort of utopian society that gives rise to exploration and attempts to gain knowledge of different people/groups is something I love. Farscape and Dune have definitely affected how I see worldbuilding and cultural development in my stories. I don’t know if we’re counting steampunk under the scifi umbrella or not, but Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series has been a big influence lately, too, as I turn my focus more toward romance-heavy plots and humor.  

AW: I’ve always been a cinema fanatic, so I often look to directors when I need inspiration. I love the dark futures of Ridley Scott, the clinical eye of David Fincher, the dazzling color palettes of the Wachowskis and on and on. Video games and anime were critical influences on me in high school, and served as a gateway into the broader world of science fiction. A lot of my inspirations come from outside science fiction, such as historical events or music, so it’s really hard to pin down. I sample from everything.

AE: Growing up I wasn’t really into sci-fi as much because I wasn’t exposed to it. I definitely feel like living in a country that’s not the US or the UK causes you to miss out on some of the classics.

The earliest sci-fi movie I can remember watching was the first X-Men movie. That sparked my love for superheroes and things that are not set in this reality. I was around 10 years old when I watched this. After that I stayed in the superhero genre, specifically Marvel movies. Another movie franchise that stuck with me is Transformers. I was also around 10 when I discovered that. Later, around the age of 14, I also started watching TV shows like Doctor Who, Sanctuary, and many other series that only fueled my love for sci-fi. Maybe it was escapism at the time, but I just loved everything that wasn’t set in this world. I still do. And I think my work is influenced by that feeling of “anything is possible”.

I like writing things that bend reality. I also really like writing superhero stories, but with some sort of twist. I like to toy with the idea of what makes you good or evil.

JT: Franz Kafka was a genius, and I am not interested in gatekeeping debates about whether his writings are science-fictional or not, and if so, which are and which aren’t. Julio Cortázar’s writing dances between and among genres. It’s writing as a dialogue between texts, a description that applies even more so to Jorge Luis Borges. Stanislaw Lem helped me get over a snobbish attitude toward science fiction, balancing between a rigorous understanding of how scientists go about investigating the universe with anarchic humor at their, and everyone’s, expense. Though in terms of how I go about writing, I would like to think–I hope–that I am more in the vein of Ursula K. LeGuin, in terms of politics and thematics. When I need help thinking about how I go about writing, though, I refer, and defer, always to Samuel R. Delany.

So to sum up: I wanted to write like Kafka, Cortázar, and Borges, without being derivative of them. Lem showed by example that science fiction might be the genre in which that would be possible. LeGuin is the writer whom I most consciously emulate in that effort, and Delany is who I turn to when I need to take a critical, reflective stance on my own writing.

JV: I was mostly into Star Wars and cyberpunk for a really long time. So, I didn’t particularly like stuff in space that was not Star Wars, and I was really into cyberpunk-Earth, like in “Shadowrun”, “Neuromancer”, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” and so on. Thoughts about the self and how it manifests and in which ways it can be artificial or merged with other selves are tropes that I still think a lot about, not only in SF but also in fantasy and steampunk. What is “artificial”, what is “human”? How do we define ourselves, stuff like that.

And apart from that I really like the simplicity of a space opera like Star Wars, with its grand scopes and an overdose of mythical powers. 

In the last couple of years, I’m working as a SFF journalist and I’ve been diving deeper into old and new feminist science fiction, so, finally, my understanding of science fiction and its importance for envisioning utopias and post-binary and post-patriarchal societies has deepened a lot.

MD: Crikey, that’s a tough one. I grew up with a steady stream of sci-fi on TV and VHS. I always loved the message of hope in Star Trek: TNG, and that influenced me to look at sci-fi as a way to explore what could be. Farscape too was a big thing for me, as it made me more inclined to value characters that felt real. And, of course the bleakness of Alien. We all love a little darkness, right? The thing is, this mostly just shaped what I like. What I wanted was to see more people like me in those settings though. That’s why I write so many LGBTQ characters. I was never really into coming out stories either, I wanted more stories where I could see that future, and what could be. That’s why you’ll find my characters are always out already and living their lives.

JJ: Most of my inspiration comes from video games, which feels a little embarrassing to say.

The Halo video game franchise was really my gateway into science-fiction, more so than any of the ‘classic’ sci-fi gateways (Star Wars/Trek, Dune etc). From the moment I started playing it on my very first Xbox, back when my age was still in single figures, I was hooked. Some elements of the Halo universe have influenced my work – space-faring civilisation by fairly mundane means, questionable government, and a galaxy littered with relics of a now-extinct civilisation.

Another big influence was Borderlands, another game, which brought in themes of humanity spread across the frontiers of the galaxy, eking out a life in the dust of far-off planets, while corrupt corporations threw their power around. 

One of my few non-video-game influences was the TV series Firefly, which gave me a wonderful insight into sci-fi that was far removed from the high-stakes, galaxy-spanning plots of franchises like Halo and Star Wars – it felt like a slice of life, semi-dramatic comedy, which just happened to take place on spaceships and on alien planets, and followed a small crew of ordinary people rather than some doom-driven hero destined to save the universe. I adore Firefly’s presentation of spaceships and futuristic technology as humdrum and everyday, and it’s something I try to emulate in my writing.

In a more meta sense, my single biggest writing inspiration is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I love the concept of a lot of individual books and small series in a shared universe, with frequent overlaps but their own stories to tell. The Discworld series evolved in a wonderful way as its timeline progressed, and that’s something I want to emulate in the Starlight Series.

JT: Just chiming in to add that one of the weirdos I follow on Twitter jokingly coined the word “genrefluid,” and I unjokingly decided that it was the best word ever to describe my writing. So that’s what it is: genrefluid.

KW: Okay, I love this a whole lot and am stealing it. 😊

MD: Ha! I like that. I normally go with ‘hybrid-genre’, by ‘genrefluid’ sounds much more fun!

DD: I do love that term a lot! I’m definitely going to be stealing that.

Q: What is it about science-fiction that calls to you?

JJ: I’ve never really asked myself this question before, but I think the best way I can describe the appeal is that it feels… possible. I enjoy fantasy as well, but there’s a key difference for me – fantasy is something that’s fun to read but couldn’t happen in the real world. No future human is going to set foot in Rivendell, or climb the Seven Thousand Steps to High Hrothgar, but a future human will set foot on Mars, or climb the slopes of Mount Olympus. Science-fiction is a chance for me to envision a better future for the world I live in.

AW: It represents possibilities that simply don’t exist within reality. It’s both a form of wish-fulfillment and a reflection. Like a song, it starts with the things we know, filters us through a variety of modes, and returns us breathless to ourselves. For me, personally, science fiction provided the first easy lens to glimpse non-binary characters.

Hailing from rural Alabama in the 80s and 90s, there wasn’t a ton of representation, and the culture was profoundly heteronormative. Periodic doses of Aeon Flux, Deep Space Nine and other shows featuring gender diverse characters helped me better identify queer needs inside myself. Show a high-school kid Ranma ½, and don’t be surprised when they begin to question the meaning of gender.

AE: In the beginning it was definitely escapism. When I was younger I really struggled with the fact that I’m autistic. I didn’t really have any friends, apart from my best friend who lived 30km away from me. So watching or reading things that made me forget about reality for a moment felt nice.

But now that I’m older, accepting myself and now that I have plenty of good friends, sci-fi feels more like home. It’s no longer another world I escape to, but instead a place I can come home to. It calls to me because it’s creative and inspiring. It gives me so many ideas that I can work with.

If you write stories that are set in the real world, you’ll always get restricted by the question “is this possible?”. Whereas in sci-fi that question becomes “What can I invent to make this possible?”. Because in sci-fi you have the space to be super creative and write your own inventions. And that’s what I like to do; I like creating new things. 

JT: I am not certain it’s calling to me right now. Or if it is, maybe I have been missing the calls. Much of what I have written–and a higher proportion of those items that have been published–has been near-future. At a certain point, though, in or around 2016, world events got too strange for me to feel confident in my predictions. I do not intend my stories as predictions–they would be failures if I did. But I need confidence in order to be able to creatively build worlds.

Only one of the stories I have written since then was science fiction, and it has since been overtaken (and surpassed in absurdity) by events, so it needs to be thoroughly rewritten. I have had ideas for science fictional stories, but none yet have been insistent enough in their calls for me to sit down and write. “Sokal” is a story that I mostly wrote in 2013; it’s taken that long for it to find the right home for publication.

The novel I am writing straddles the genres of crime and romance, and it has several trans and nonbinary characters. It has one element that could be read as speculative, though more in the vein of fantasy than science fiction. And even that element is ambiguous enough to have a naturalistic explanation.

What I like in all fiction, of all genres, is ambiguity. For the moment, I am most interested in exploring the ambiguities of the recent past, the temporal horizon we usually think of as the “present.”

Science fiction can be a means of doing that, and it has been for me in the past, and it might be again. Who knows?

EB: Science fiction for me has always been a means of escape. It was something that let me forget the present and look towards the future where things would be better, less dysfunctional. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always felt somewhat like an alien. SFF was a place where my otherness — my mental illness, my neurodivergence, my general weirdness, my queerness — was the norm because there were other aliens. Otherness was accepted and even cherished and loved.

KN: I don’t think it calls to me, so much as “this is where I grew up, why would I leave”?  I was in my teens somewhere before I realized there was something other than speculative fiction (and romance, which I knew existed from supermarket checkout lines) in the world of books; I grew up watching Doctor Who and Star Trek with my Dad.  For me, the nature of story is the experience of strange people in unfamiliar places, and I read and watch everything through that lens. I wouldn’t begin to know how to write anything else.

JV: Apart from the afore-mentioned escape I think that only speculative genres like fantasy and science fiction empower us to shape new ideas of societies.

In crime, contemporary, history novels, you are bound to our present or past. Of course, every writer can carve out spaces that might feel utopian, that might challenge the status quo and give room for possibilities. But SFF can create whole new worlds – and can combine this with escapism. But science fiction has long missed a lot of opportunities, as it was shaped by white cis men who didn’t need the break from reality that marginalized people need. Thus, few SF escape routes do allow us to escape from sexism, hetero- and cis-normativity, ableism and racism.

I think what calls to me the most is that SF has so much more to tell and often fell short in telling it. We have so much more to create!

KW: It’s just always been a part of my life. I grew up on a farm out in the middle of Eastern Colorado where on a clear night you can see galaxies spread across the sky. We used to lay out for hours just staring up at them, or looking through my father’s telescope. I love space and have always been fascinated with the idea of what else is out there – other life, other worlds. I also have been a writer practically all my life and while for a good chunk of time though I wanted to write fantasy, I eventually cycled back to the space thing. I love envisioning the future as something better. Plus spaceships!

ESA: I love the possibility within SFF. In universes that can be entirely developed from the imagination, there’s nothing that won’t work if you get creative enough. It’s a place where anyone can find themself in characters and worlds, and nothing’s off-limits. I feel like SFF is also a great place to plant those subliminal messages of acceptance and compassion for marginalized folks. If we can get people to feel compassion and root for non-human characters, we as authors can also encourage those feelings for our fellow human beings. 

MD: I think it is just that hope for the future, whether near or far. Most of my writing is near future, and I like to research current tech and where it’s heading, then try to figure out what it would be like in however many years. Sci-fi gives me a glimpse at what’s to come, and what could come. I like looking forward like that.

DD: I think I agree with it feeling like hope for the future! I love exploring what could be in fiction, even if I end up being way off. Even if I explore it through a dystopian lens, it’s nice to give an exploration of our reality that can have a bit of a hopeful note to it.

Science fiction has always felt like freedom to me. There’s so many arbitrary rules and considerations to take when writing a very grounded, real story, and although I think there are bonuses to writing that way (including for someone like me, who enjoys writing explorations of my own experiences through fiction), there are limits to what it can do.

Exploring topics through the lens of something just a few steps to the left of reality makes it feel, somehow, more honest. There isn’t room in the world we live in for the things in my head, you know? They’re thoughts and feelings that are almost impossible to put to words, but if you can humanise them, make them manifest, then they become more tangible to even those that have no idea what you’re talking about. It feels like I’m letting out a deep breath and can just exist.

I feel like the genre also has so much room to explore things we present as possibilities, but where we ask the question “what if that was real?” We don’t know for sure if there’s something out there watching over us, but you can create that, and you can think about what it would be like to know and have that comfort, or if it would even be a comfort at all. 

JS: I’m a professor in the sciences so for me, science fiction means I get to see the science I work with stretched in ways I couldn’t do in the lab (without substantial grant funding, anyway). I like to have that sort of sandbox, where science can be toyed, flipped, and shone in new and interesting ways. And I like how SF has always been a vehicle for the political. There are a lot of stories you can tell with alien allegory you just can’t do (or get through to people) in a contemporary story.

Part 2: Gender and Genre

Q: What does being non-binary mean to you?

Warning for a slang word ahead that has been used as a derogatory term for LGBTQIA+ people. The writer’s intent is far from it, merely to exemplify a point.

JS: For me, being nonbinary is a natural extension of being intersex. I am neither male nor female, but a combination and rearrangement of the two. In the same way my gender is neither woman nor man, but like someone took a random selection of stereotypes, shook them up like a cocktail, and poured a glass of me. Being nonbinary is freeing, it’s a way to shuck gender norms and live who you are, without labels like ‘tomboy’ or ‘sissy’.

JT: I spent 30 years trying to be a man and having doubts–I am dating this back to my Bar Mitzvah, because I’m Jewish. But I did not see myself as essentially a woman either, and in relation to the cultural scripts for transgender identities that were readily available as I came of age, in the 1990s, that seemed to dictate that I “wasn’t trans”. So making a go of being a man seemed like the least bad option. But the pretense was grinding away at my sense of self, my ability to even keep in touch with reality.

I have been aware of nonbinary genders for some time, but to own that for myself required that I have some kind of certainty. My approach to life tends not to be experimental, but deliberate. I know and then I do, rather than doing in order to find out. 

It took longer for genderfluid, as a mode of identity, to come to my awareness, and then even longer for me to have a long enough span to meditate upon it in order to attain that certainty. But once I did, I’ve resolved to be quite public about it.

EB: Nonbinary is really an expression of the otherness I have felt my whole life. Most of my life there was a lot of pressure to conform to “good christian girl”. I really just felt like an amorphous blob that was getting smashed and squished into a mold I didn’t choose. Growing up isolated from the queer community, I didn’t know there was more than two options. Both options didn’t work for me, but at least girl was easier to fake even if I was just a blob like a dead jellyfish on the beach. It wasn’t until undergrad, I encountered nonbinary which took awhile to click. I still feel like a blob, but at least now I’m not getting smushed as much because gender is a costume that I can take on and off.

MD: Initially, it meant a lot of confusion. I’m 36, and we didn’t have the term genderfluid when I was a teen. So, when my identity fluctuated, I was so confused. Especially because the closest we got in the media at the time rarely covered the topic.

Most of what I saw was TV making it clear that if you’re biologically male and you wear women’s clothes, you’re homosexual and want to be the ‘woman’ in the relationship. Given my own confusion around my orientation at the time too, it all got a bit mixed up. Now, it’s something much more positive.

I was never a typical male. I did some masculine things – or rather things that were viewed as masculine at the time – but I was also drawn to doing things that were seen as more feminine. Now that I’m older, being genderfluid is a big part of what makes me so comfortable with myself. I know who I am now, and that’s a wonderful thing.

ESA: I love Erin’s description here. I wasn’t exposed to the queer community until high school and that was still pretty heavily focused on cis folks. The first time I started questioning my own gender was in college, when I organized our school’s first drag show. I spent days developing me masculine persona and it felt so good when I finally slipped him on. But at the same time, there are aspects of the societally-enforced masculinity that don’t appeal to me, either.

For me, a lot of gender is performative and presentation-based–and my ideal presentation has always been androgynous. For most of my life I kind of swung between “girly girl” and “tomboy,” but I’ve recently come to feel comfortable at both ends of that and in the middle. I like to think of it as schrodinger’s gender sometimes: both there and not; in and out of the binary at the same time. Being enby is one of those things that I struggle to describe, but I know that it’s right for me.

AW: I feel no particular attachment to my masculinity. It fits me terribly, and being non-binary means I’m free to make my own path. I have always been drawn to so-called feminine things–dresses, makeup, etc.–but I wasn’t able to properly articulate that framework as an ignorant child. I was in my 30s when a friend explained queerness to me, and a lifetime of pretending came roaring back.

JV: I love all your descriptions, because they are different and yet, I guess they speak to everyone of us. I spent decades trying to fit into binary drawers: “A lifetime of pretending came roaring back” describes it very aptly, Alex.

When I was a kid, there was no possible way for me to understand myself. I’m married to a man and we have three kids, I’m “read” as female and I’m not totally uncomfortable with that. It’s okay, I think of myself as “politically female”. There are all the struggles of being a female SF writer, of being an outspoken female feminist. When I first discovered that non-binary fits my understanding (or, more precisely: not-at-all-understanding) of gender, I thought that it was possible for me to be non-binary in an, I guess, private way – politically female, privately non-binary.

But few things are more political than being queer in any way, so I was quickly aware that my feminist struggles and my understanding of being political are pretty much tight to my genderqueerness as well.

There is a constant struggle in Germany for non-binary visibility (for example on Wikipedia), for gender-inclusive language, for neo-pronouns (German only knows binary pronouns)… Still, I sometimes feel like an imposter, which also is an experience that a lot of non-binary friends share, I guess.  

KN:  Ooh, put me in the “expression of otherness” bag too.  Though I’m still entirely vague on how much of that sense of otherness is a matter of gender and how much is a matter of neurodivergence (and have a lot of sympathy for the other autistic folks who coined “autigender” for what I’m guessing is something like this experience). 

I’ve had people make comments to me over the years that I was “butch” or “carry a lot of male energy” and I’ve never been quite sure what they mean, even when it tickled me to have them see that in me. Years ago I saw a Ru Paul quote, “We’re born naked and the rest is drag,” and I’ve sort of cherished that thought, even as there have been times when putting on one gender or another or the experience of being seen incorrectly have caused me pain.

AE:  For me, being non-binary is feeling comfortable in who I am. Ever since I was little I wasn’t really a girl. My mom would show a pair of pink glittery shoes to me and I would go “No, those are for girls”, because I didn’t see myself as a girl. But when I was asked if I’d rather be a boy, the answer was no. So I guess I’ve always known, but never had a name for it. When I did find a name for that feeling, it immediately felt right.

Being non-binary to me is just to be. It feels like being sort of detached from gender. Because I don’t really see myself as any gender in particular. I’m just me and I don’t want a female or male label. And while non-binary itself is a label, to me it feels more like neutral ground. It feels less heavy, if that makes sense.

KW:  I was 42 before I realized that all my life I’d been trying to perform being a girl and that I didn’t have to anymore. And that sense of relief was so overwhelming I sometimes wish I’d had the terminology so much earlier in my life, but what can you do? *laughs* Besides give away all those dresses and heels you wore and were miserable in most of your life! I still struggle on a daily basis with body dysmorphia, like everything else it’s a work in progress. Like all the others have said this “expression of otherness” has been with me all my life and it’s comforting to know there’s a community of us for support and guidance and comfort. 

DD: I feel a lot of connection to everyone else’s answers here. And I think, in some ways, many of our experiences speak to one another.

Gender has always felt very elusive to me, like a question that I didn’t quite have the answer to, or as if everyone else was born with this manual that just told them how they were supposed to behave and feel, but I’d somehow missed the memo. Even after coming out as, initially, a trans man, something didn’t quite feel right, and it took me years to really come to terms with and understand myself enough to say I was non-binary.

In fact, it was Juno Steel from The Penumbra Podcast, which my brother recommended to me, that really helped me come to terms with it, in the end. It feels like coming home, honestly. Like a place where I belong and can be myself among people with similar experiences and feelings as me.

JJ: I’m having trouble coming up with an answer for this. I’d like to say something poetic, like it’s a rock of identity I can climb onto in a sea of uncertainty, but honestly that’s far too dramatic. If anything, I identify more as agender than specifically nonbinary, but I guess anything other than Man or Woman is nonbinary by definition… I’m writing myself in circles. It’s an escalator that takes me away from Gender and all the expected performances of it.

Q: Touching on exploration, what are some of the ways gender plays into your work, if it does?

KW:  I started writing the Hail Bristol novels before I really figured out what was going on, so she’s a cis bisexual woman, but the world she lives in treats gender as a natural spectrum so I was able to put a lot of secondary characters in who just exist as they are, no questions asked.

My new series was my first opportunity to have even more rep in a near-future Earth where people’s pronouns are a part of a digital handshake that pops up when folx first meet and the book coming out in the summer “Hold Fast Through the Fire” was my first opportunity to write a non-binary main character. Getting to create a character who lives in a world where they truly get to decide their own gender path from birth was amazing. Though it was an interesting exercise in how far I still have to go untangling the binary “default” that was expected when I was growing up.  

MD: That has varied. In The Fox, The Dog, and The King, the second book in my lesfic sci-fi/mystery series, The Cassie Tam Files, Cassie’s client is nonbinary. They don’t feature heavily, but it was a way to put some person rep in there.

More personal was Dear Sis, a short story I wrote for a furry anthology called Roar 9. That was almost autobiographical in nature, and easily the most personal thing I’ve written. I’ve had a few people reach out to me after that story to thank me for it too, which was really nice. Those two made me more comfortable with writing that side of me in stories, I think.

One of the leads in my next book, Ailuros, is genderfluid too. Mostly, the characters are a way to let out that side of me in fiction, and give the characters the chance to be the stars in the cool sci-fi worlds. We all need a hero like us sometimes.

KN: So, both of my published short stories (as of this writing) have trans protagonists.  It’s a bit blink-and-you’ll-miss-it in “Delayed Exchange Deferred”, but it’s a major point in “The Company Store” which came out in October, since that is a story about how an egg cracks. One of the things that I’ve played a lot with writing specifically science fiction is themes of bodily autonomy and modification, which is broader than gender and touches on disability and of course the occasional shoutout to the furries.  I like playing with the idea of technology making it more possible for us to be who we feel we really are, no matter how weird that might be.

EB: Most of my work is either about sapphic and/or nonbinary people since I’m a nonbinary dyke.

I wrote “Blossoming of Callisto” in such a way that on first read, the reader would assume that the narrator was well, a girl, when in truth the narrator has no gender due to being a spaceship. It reflects how I perform femininity. I channel a lot of anger and frustration about living in a cisheteronormative world into my short fiction.

My longform fiction is where I write the characters I wish I had when I was 16 and was tentatively thinking maybe I was trans and shoving it deep down because that was so very silly.

JJ: I try to subvert gendered tropes wherever possible, often just for the sake of doing so. One of the protagonists of my debut novel Sanctuary, and its sequels, is an openly transgender man, and the love interest for the female protagonist of the Sanctuary trilogy is a transgender woman. My current work-in-progress follows a nonbinary teenager, and the most influential individual in-universe is a nonbinary person who uses ze/zir neopronouns.

When I create a character, the first question I ask myself is “Why should this character be cisgender?”

However, I strongly avoid plots where things happen because of a character’s gender – I feel like that’s just lazy writing, bordering on suffering-porn. I don’t write stories about gender, I just write stories in which the characters frequently happen to be non-cisgender.

ESA:  I write a lot of non-cis characters, from the straight trans couple in my smutty short story “More Than Diamonds” to the nonbinary protagonist in my current WIP. The trans protagonist in my co-written Aces High, Jokers Wild series was also a big way to explore my own gender.

I was questioning and exploring myself at the time my co-author and I were working on the first drafts, and being able to explore the potential of being binary trans through the character of Aidan wound up being both really cathartic and turning into a great story.

AW: There’s always a place for people like me in my novels, as well as other folx across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. When rendering these characters, I feel like it’s important to recognize how their lifestyles interact with the world and model how the world perceives them. When people write folks who “just happen to be gay,” but make no other references to it, that feels dishonest. Many of my own early works helped me explore my identity and better understand it through careful rumination on themes.

AE: My stories always have non-binary characters and/or transgender characters. I also just try and leave behind all the gender stereotypes, unless a character is meant to be a stereotype. I like to show people that gender is a very fluid thing. Representation matters, so I definitely try and create more of that. We need many more non-binary and transgender characters in writing.

JT: So many ways, in retrospect. One of my stories which was published before I came out, “The Joy of Sects,” could be retitled “Portrait of the Artist as an Egg in Need of Cracking.” I once referred, on my blog, to the narrator, Lydia, as “my most beloved of Mary Sues.” I would now read Lydia as a transfeminine nonbinary person who utilizes gender fluidity in a tactical manner, in part because she prioritizes other values over assertion of her identity.

What does it mean for someone who, to all public appearances, was male to refer to such a character, even half-jokingly, as a “Mary Sue”? Denial is a powerful river, which carves deep grooves into our psychic landscapes. There are other stories into which it factors, but in more oblique ways.

JV: I love playing with language. German is a very binary language (almost every noun that refers to a person – like professions and so on – is gendered). I love to show that it’s possible to write gender-neutrally in German – and I love to show that indeed it adds to more awareness and visibility of all genders.

The post-apocalyptic hopepunk novel “Wasteland” that I wrote with my husband is the first German novel that avoids the usual generically male plural grammar form (the generically male plural is currently discussed a lot and very hotly everywhere in German journalism and media).

The decision to write a novel without it arose from the setting of the novel itself: It takes place in a queer anarchist-utopian community within a Mad Max dystopia. And once you start, it’s hard not to incorporate gender and genderqueerness into your work!

Our RPG setting “Aces in Space” (one of the few works that’s available in English as well) and the accompanying novel “Ace in Space” deals A LOT with living in a post-binary and post-heteronormative society.

Our next book, “Anarchie Déco” is an urban fantasy novel in 1920s’ Berlin and it’s the first time we wrote a non-binary protagonist. 1920s’

Berlin challenged gender drastically and it’s been as exciting as it’s been sad to learn about that and about all the promises and possibilities it held until the knowledge about and perspectives on gender were literally eradicated by the Nazis.

JT: Just want to chime in that, as someone who has studied, read, and translated German fiction, I am intrigued by Judith’s description of their German-language fiction, and would love to read some. Send me some links!!!

DD: I wrote a few short stories about my relationship with gender before I really came to terms with the reality of being non-binary, but now they feel a little discordant because there’s something missing. I’m working on a short story now that is one of my first works of prose with a non-binary protagonist and feels like an honest exploration of gender.

When it comes to my podcasts, the majority of my protagonists now are some flavour of non-binary, and I’ve had a couple of people reach out and say that they’d had realisations because of the excerpts of scripts I’d sent them while working on it, which is honestly one of the highest compliments I think I could receive.

I love challenging people’s perceptions with my explorations of gender and, like Anna said, representation matters. I think they really did hit the nail on the head with that one.

Creating narratives that have people like me in is something so important to me because it feels like, if I can see myself in them, someone else might be able to as well.

JS: There are nonbinary characters in all my work. Originally it was a way to explore how various nonbinary experiences might be expressed as I worked to define my own identity. But I think more important than that, I write space science fiction. To me it seems ridiculous to have aliens always along a gender binary. On Earth that isn’t even the case. If some species of fungi can have thousands of sexes, what are we doing with blue-skinned aliens in the standard two options? Science fiction allows us to confront societal biases in a ‘safer’ space and really challenge readers. 

Q: And what are some ways gender can play into science fiction as a whole?

JS: Putting nonbinary characters into our work helps SF more accurately mimic the natural diversity of the world. And I think that’s why SF challenges readers more so than any other type of fiction. It has so much reality to it, but allows us to push that reality into a form that is digestible by lay audiences.

JJ: Science-fiction, particularly set in the future, is a brilliant opportunity to explore a more understanding and tolerant society, where an individual’s gender has no bearing on their ability to be involved in a plot. I like to consider it aspirational; we should aspire to explore the galaxy, and we should aspire to be less intolerant.

AW: I mean, SFF is all about reimagining the world through different lenses. I think there’s a huge power in seeing characters like you in stories you love–and as SFF drifts to include more queer and marginalized voices, that power should go to more people. Sci fi helped me understand my gender identity early on, and gave me proto-frameworks that made me feel less alone.

AE:  I feel like a lot of times gender in science fiction is based on how we deal with gender in the real world: rigid. People struggle to let go of the gender binary and gender stereotypes. But non-binary people exist, and stereotypes are being broken. So why can’t science fiction do the same, if not more?

If you for example write an alternate reality, who says that men, women and everyone in between has to be the same as here in this reality?

Just like many others here mentioned, sci-fi used to be dominated by cis men. Now that that is changing, you see that it is that group that is resisting the fluidity of gender in sci-fi works. These people prefer to see gender the way they know it, which kind of defeats the purpose of sci-fi in my opinion.

Sci-fi is a place where you can explore things that also exist in the real world. Because that’s another thing: being non-binary shouldn’t become a “fictional” thing. We exist. Science fiction just gives an opportunity to explore gender more freely, in my opinion.

JT: I need to read more exhaustively before I comment on this fully, because right now most of what I could say about it would consist of footnotes on Delany’s novel Trouble on Triton. So for now let me go oblique.

Nonbinary gender identities are a social reality now. They have been a social reality for as long as there have been human beings, but so repressed in the dominant cultures of the West that up until recently it might have been understandable for a writer to neglect them. No more.

If nonbinary and trans characters are totally absent from your imagined futures, or if your understanding of the technology of gender is fifty years out of date, then your work is as dubious as any all-white science fiction. It amounts to fantasies of the aftermath of a genocide. That is not science fiction; it is Nazi fantasy. And Nazi writing is bad writing, not only morally, but aesthetically as well.

Even more broadly: Gender is the attentional frame through which any experience at all can be said to be lived. The novel, and to some extent, short stories as well, are forms of writing which treat lived experience as their medium. So if you are writing science fiction, or fiction in any other genre, you are writing about gender whether you intend to or not.

How interesting I find your writing is going to vary depending upon how much thought you have put into it, so if you have not thought about how gender conditions your characters’ and narrators’ thoughts and actions, it’s most likely that I will find your writing trite. The gauntlet is down.

EB: I feel like there’s two layers to gender and science fiction.

The first is about how patriarchal and cisnormative structures in society shape who is being published in the genre and who controls what is being published. How many female science fiction writers can you name from prior to 1970? How many trans science fiction writers can you name from prior to 2010?

There have always been writers of marginalized gender in speculative fiction, but their voices were not amplified to the same extent as their male peers. They often had to fight tooth and nail to get their stories heard and to be taken seriously because of sexism, racism, and bigotry.

Major editors of North American SFF, the people who chose what to publish, were predominantly male during from the pulp to the new wave era of science fiction, a period of almost half a century!

Things are changing for the better as society becomes more accepting and there is more pushback against gatekeeping. We are currently in a renaissance for queer science fiction because more doors are unlocking as editors and major publishers see that there is demand for stories by and about marginalized people.

But it’s not that there is just a demand, it’s also that these stories are successful critically. Just look at the past few years worth ballots of the major genre awards. 

The other layer to this is that gender has always been something explored through speculative fiction because gender is something so embedded in society.

Science fiction is a reflection of current society, not just predictions for the future. It presents this safe, nonthreatening space to explore ideas about gender because to many readers, science fiction is detached from reality no matter how much it may be rooted into reality because of the fantastical elements.

There’s this misconception that gender wasn’t something that was big in SFF until the publication of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness in 1969.

Feminist literature from the turn of the century utilitized classic science fiction tropes such as single gender world to show what women’s rights could look like.

Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon predates Left Hand of Darkness by ten years and is undeniably about gender shaped by the anxieties of the 1950s.

Gender is just really an integral to the narratives of the genre whether it be about gender roles or trans experiences.

KN: I  mean, we can go back to Frankenstein to see people wrangling with the way gender interplays with science fiction, and Mary Shelley did a handful of different things there even aside from being one of the modern inventors of the genre!

JV: I think that the time when science fiction was dominated by white cis men is over. They can still take part in it, of course, but the future of science fiction lies with queer folks, Black and Indigenous writers and writers of color, female, trans and genderqueer authors, and disabled and neurodivergent authors. The white male cis perspective has been over-stretched for far too long.

In retrospection, it’s ridiculous to see how rigidly gender roles, gender performance, gender binary have been painted in the science fiction of the past decades. When folks tell you that all stories have already been told, I can assure you that this is only true for a particular kind of story.  

DD:  I definitely agree with this! It’s as if people have higher standards for marginalised creators, where they feel as though everything they create has to be one hundred per-cent original and completely without flaws. There’s nothing wrong with using tropes in your stories because they’re going to be different to someone else’s work simply because you have your own, unique perspective. 

KW:  Everyone’s got great answers and said pretty much what I would have, so I’ll only add that it’s lovely to see actual humans in science fiction who are non-binary both in books and on screen as a “normal” occurrence rather than the usual stereotypical alien. That’s real, inclusive rep and not something that just furthers that feeling of otherness.

MD: I have to agree with KB on that. I have nothing against non-binary alien characters at all, but seeing humans represented this way too, and simply just being who they are? That is so wonderful.

DD: K. B. absolutely has a point. I love aliens and robots, so seeing them be non-binary is kind of a mix of “wow, I wish this was a human character, rather than the idea that non-binary people are something other and non-human” and “oh, cool! I love aliens and robots!”. Don’t get me wrong, I do love seeing them, but I just wish there were more representations of non-binary people that were written as honest explorations of gender, as opposed to the idea of isolating non-binary people from binary people.

Part 3: Past, Present, Exploration

Q: How does sci-fi’s unique perspective on past, present and future break ground for non-binary voices?

JT: I disagree with the premise of the question. As usual, Delany has said what I would say better than I have: 

“Science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present…. Science fiction is about the current world – the given world shared by writer and reader.” – Samuel R. Delany

Where I might tweak Delany is that the writer and reader are necessarily separated in time. I might share a present right now with him, in the sense that I can look at his Twitter feed and see pictures of his lunch, but when I read Trouble in Triton I am reading an historical document in which the future, as narrative convention, included people reading their books on microfiche readers.

When we talk about the present, we are talking about a more or less recent past – whatever is recent enough that we understand it to be, in some sense, present to us, retrievable, not irrevocably gone. In this respect science fiction is not appreciably different from other genres of fiction.

So I don’t think it is more important than those other genres. But because of the function of the future within science fiction as what Delany calls a “narrative convention,” it renders the exclusion of marginalized identities more horrific in its implications. Which goes back to what I wrote above about fantasies of genocide.

EB: I touched upon what Joseph says about speculative fiction being a reflection of current society in my answer to the previous question.

In order for any speculative fiction to be truly effective of a narrative, it has to have some sort of ties to the present. It doesn’t have to be super explicit, but there has to be something. Having that tie to the present is a way of showing there is a place for marginalized people in both the present and future. That our existence is valid and that our voices are heard no matter what society may say otherwise.

I have been mentally ill since I was ten, it’s hard for me to see a happy future for myself. But with speculative fiction where there are trans people, I can start to see a future. Not only that, but stories about and by marginalized groups allows for creation of communities especially in the age of the internet.

A trans person could be isolated from the queer community offline, but make meaningful connections and relationships through reading a queer SFF book and connecting with other fans/readers online. The genre can give so much hope and comfort.

MD: I agree with Joseph and Erin. While Sci-Fi often – but not always – depicts a future far removed from our own in time, it does also reflect the modern world.

There are so many identities out there now that weren’t ever mentioned when I was a kid in the 80’s and 90’s, and it would seem wrong for them not to be represented in these futures now. People are a lot more open, and that’s a wonderful thing, so a future world without LGBTQ people seems somewhat sinsiter.

So, yes, it’s important because it can show a future where being non-binary is just another part of a person, but it also has to reflect the people we see around us. If that means we can paint a world where there’s less conflict about gender identity too, then maybe that will be a guiding light and a message of hope for others that are struggling to find people like them.

DD: I agree with Joseph, Erin, and Matt! The majority of what I’d say has already been said, so I won’t rewrite their answers, but I do think that fiction, especially speculative fiction, is grounded in the present in some way, even if it’s just something as small as the writer’s personal biases, beliefs, and experiences.

JV: Last year, I talked on a panel with the title “Back to the future’s already past” and we touched on that: Science fiction is always about the present. But, yes, it pretends to be about the future and it sure does shape our ideas and perspectives on future. Therefore, you’re absolutely right, the future is a place that’s not yet there, a non-place (utopia means non-place when translated!).

So we can shape a narrative that’s empowering and freeing instead of just “escaping”. We can nourish ideas that may never take place but need at least to be formed in our minds. So, yes, I think that SF is a very special place for nonbinary folks and other marginalized identities. 

ESA: I agree with the above statements as well–all fiction is a reflection of the world in which it’s written and how the author views and interacts with that world.

But I think there is something particularly special about SFF in the greater realm of fiction because so many people do associate it with looking toward the future and reshaping what’s around us right now.

For me, SFF and fantasy tend to be the places shifts happen first because they are so malleable and the reader’s suspension of disbelief is already higher than, say, commercial romance.

It can be easier to swallow for folks outside the queer community to see nonbinary characters in a futuristic world–and if we as authors can make that a norm, then I think it becomes easier to slip us into other genres, too without quite as much resistance. 

AW: Given that it often takes place in the future, queer representation is a way to say that we’ll always be here, no matter what changes. We could be jetting around on hyperdrives, but that doesn’t change the basic facts about identity and love. I’d also like to agree with ESA that the suspension of disbelief enables the appearance of more queer characters without seeming so out of place. It’s hard to critique someone’s makeup when everyone is swinging around laser swords.

AE:  I think I’ve said this in a previous answer, but science fiction is based on the real world, except you have the opportunity to mould it. So adding non-binary characters to science fiction is something you do because non-binary people exist. You can however write about how you imagine the future to be.

Our future is always shaped by our past and present. A good example of this is a story I’m currently writing about some alien planets where humans are involved as well. In this story there are three planets, one of which is inhabited by what used to be humans. After 800 years have passed, they are no longer human as they have their own, new culture, but there are still aspects in that culture that come from our current reality.

So something being in the future doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it being important for marginalised voices. It becomes important for marginalised voices when you decide to represent them in this future narrative, and decide to represent them in a positive and accurate way.

KN: I like the idea of the opportunity to play with material reality that science fiction offers.  (It doesn’t offer it uniquely, but it offers it in a particular flavor.) 

Like Anna’s story – “What if a space colony, which evolves its own tech and cultural shifts” is a classic one. One of the things I think is key in science fiction is not so much the imagined future but the way it shines a light on aspects of the present that could point towards that future.  These colonists came predominantly from this background, and their culture evolved from there; they interacted with this unique experience from their environment, and it changed them this way. 

(Look at me, I’m back at Forty Thousand in Gehenna.  Shhh, don’t tell anyone.) 

Meanwhile, if I write about technologically reshaping the body, no matter what I say, it’s going to be relevant to trans and nonbinary folks, it’s going to say something about ability and disability, it’s going to touch on all the present-day discussions about everything from hair dye to tattooing to cosmetic surgery, at a minimum.

JJ: Oh yes, absolutely. We’re living on the brink of great social change, with greater understanding and acceptance of marginalised people, nonbinary people among them.

If a nonbinary person can pick up a science-fiction novel and read about somebody just like them having adventures in space, the kind that have often been reserved for cisgender characters, that has to have a positive impact, and hopefully it would inspire them to have hope for the future – and even to do their part to make that future happen!

KW: I agree here with Joseph. Contemporary genres, fantasy, romance, etc provide just as much importance to both folx seeing themselves on the page and others learning the important skill of empathizing with people who aren’t like them. Science fiction doesn’t really have a lock on that ideal.

JS: I think others have covered this well. Nonbinary people exist now, and have always existed. Science fiction has a duty to show the real world, but in more fantastical and sometimes more political contexts. The future aspect allows readers to separate themselves enough from the narrative that they don’t get smacked in the face with it, so I think the future aspect is more about giving readers a chance to read and digest more so than showing this is what the world SHOULD be like.

Q: What is it about science fiction that allows for the fictional exploration of an ever-evolving real-life society?

DD: There’s a lot of freedom in science fiction, especially as it’s not just an exploration of what I suppose most schools would refer to as the “core sciences,” and rather it includes the social sciences, which encourages writers (and their audience!) to explore societal issues. It also allows you to carefully slide in those societal issues (capitalism, homo/transphobia, classism, etc.) without people really batting an eye because you’ve also got other things going on that hold people’s attention. They’re essentially being fed your beliefs without even realising it.

KN:  Science fiction also allows for the thought experiment in ways that “realistic” fiction cannot.  The scope of “what if” means that we can – to go back to Cherryh as an example – imagine a society of evolved, intelligent lions like her hani, and play with their gender dynamics based on that different set of behaviors and explore the different chauvinisms that result. “What if there were aliens that are like this” is a way of sneaking in thoughts about how people are like that, too, at least sometimes.

EB: There’s a freedom to science fiction since in other genres, readers are less willing to suspend their disbelief. But in science fiction, readers expect for there to be whacky and fantastical elements.

The fantastical elements are what at least to me makes the social commentary more digestible and often more thought provoking than someone just being like here’s why x thing is bad. It’s more of an immersive experience.

If you want to write about an alien worm trading SSRIs for candy with a human, no one is going to bat their eye if you also are writing about capitalism as a roadblock to mental healthcare since hey it’s science fiction! It’s gonna be weird!

JT: I think for science fiction to do this best, it needs to engage with the full breadth of the sciences, including the social sciences.

A lot of science fiction is primarily about technology. Technological development is far from the entirety of science, as is clear to anyone who spends any time with scientists. And such science fiction, including some of my own stories, is not necessarily bad!

Some language play, I think, illuminates how this works. The word technology is derived from the ancient Greek work tekhnologia, which can be translated as, “words about how to get stuff done.” In most European languages, the word for literature is derived from Latin, but in modern Greek, they reached into the ancient roots to coin their own term, logotekhnia. In other words, “how to get stuff done with words.”

When we write science fiction that focuses primarily on technology, we are doing things with words to understand the words that people use to understand how they get things done. Done well, that can encompass, if not the entirety of human endeavor, then at least many of the motive forces that lead our societies to change over time.

JV:  I’m really happy with the answers Erin and Joseph gave: social sciences are so important to incorporate in our idea of SCIENCE fiction. SF fans are so used to having descriptions of fancy machines and interstellar travel, but please, don’t you touch capitalism, patriarchy and gender binary, cause they wanna keep that!

AW: I know the others have said this, but any rule reality forces upon us can be broken in SFF. Its second-world nature enables writers to critique without explicitly attacking a modern group. The nice side effect is that while my books might be attacking, say Trumpists–because I filtered them through an allegorical lens, the next group of clowns will also get automatically attacked. That’s nice. SFF lets you set things up in timeless ways.

JJ: Calling back to an earlier answer, I think it’s because it’s all possible in the real world. It’s speculative fiction, to an extent, but not as speculative as, say, a colony on Mars, or aliens coming to Earth.

Non-cisgender people already exist in the real world, so by extension they exist in science-fiction and speculative fiction.

Sci-fi allows us to picture the progression of social change in our own near future, as understanding and acceptance of gender identity and sexuality grows and becomes more widespread, in a way that I don’t think any other genre does.

ESA: To kind of reiterate and expand on both Erin’s answer here and my comments in the last question–the suspension of disbelief that readers bring to SFF can work hugely well in our favor as authors exploring our society.

Despite what certain groups would have folks think, SFF has always been at the forefront of social critique and change. Logan’s Run and Soylent Green explore the issues of overpopulation and dwindling resources. Silent Running is discussion about climate change, and 2001: A Space Odyssey delves into what it means to be human. (Yes, I know, they’re all movie examples, I’m sorry.)

Audiences are willing to accept these deeper, sometimes unsettling concepts within the scifi genre because there’s enough buffer between them and this fictional world that they can walk away thinking “oh, that was a good story” while their subconscious chews on the underlying themes and messages. I think there’s something interesting about retrospective scifi, too: using our ideas of the future to compare and contrast with both where we are while creating it and with what past creators imagined.

AE: Science fiction gives people space to step away from reality and explore what’s possible in our imagination. Not only that, it also sometimes inspires people to make parts of fiction reality.

For example, I know that Adam Savage ended up building a functioning Iron Man suit (minus the high-altitude flying, but it did fly low above the ground). There have been other things from science fiction that ended up becoming reality. But aside from the technology, sci-fi also just inspires people to think outside of the box and look at things from a different perspective. I also agree with Erin and Joseph on the social science part. It’s just as important!

JS: You can hide so much in SF under allegory and alien species. Writers have been doing this forever, and it offers a way to examine our world with enough space that readers don’t feel attacked. SF writers, as many have noted above, are very aware of this and make strong use of the tactic. And it’s very effective!

Q: Can you tell us about your favorite experience with this genre?

JJ: As I mentioned earlier, most of my introduction to the sci-fi genre was through video games, which – to my mind – feel like more of an in-depth experience of the genre than movies or TV, since you’re actually in the setting. One of my favourite things is exploring my favourite sci-fi settings beyond the scope of their original games, films/shows etc – such as through extended universe books, pen-and-paper RPGs, and so on.

A particular favourite experience of sci-fi is the Kilo-Five Trilogy, a short series of novels set in the universe of the Halo video game franchise.

It’s the first to take a critical look at the “good guys” of the setting, and examines the fallout of in-game events in a very compelling way, expanding on the lore of established individuals and species. Very much my cup of tea.

AW: SFF gave me worlds to inhabit when mine was small and terrible. My favorite experience with the genre has to be sneaking tie-in novels to my 7th grade English class because I didn’t want to read any more Jack London. Aliens and Predators, yes. Arctic cold, no.

AE: In sci-fi I found friends when I had none. Well, I have one best friend, whom I’ve known since childhood. But for a good couple years she didn’t live near me and I wasn’t at all popular in school. No one had the same interests as me, so I felt like an outcast.

So I went online and found friends who liked the same TV shows, films and books as me. All of those things were in the sci-fi/fantasy/superhero genre, so being able to connect with people who shared those interests was huge for me. It made me feel a lot less alone and I’m very grateful for those experiences, even if some contacts ended up in the water, so to say. Sci-fi just gave me a place to belong.

JT: Probably the best experience so far was having my story “Ruins of a Future Empire” edited by China Miéville. He is the fiction editor for the heterodox Marxist journal Salvage. His editorial notes are sensitive; I followed most of his suggestions, made a few additional changes in slightly different directions in response to some of his other comments, and the net effect was to significantly improve the story. Yet he saw something in it in the first place, which considering how amazed I have been by those of his novels and stories that I have read, was quite flattering.

EB:  I’ve sort of touched on this earlier, but the Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie is deeply important to me for several reasons. It was what allowed me to connect and find my queer community. It was what got me through some of the deepest pits of my mental illness. It was what finally broke the dam allowing me to accept my queerness. Because of this, I named a species of wasp after Ann, Eadya annleckieae.

I went to 2018 Worldcon in San Jose with my Imperial Radch friends and I got to meet Ann. She was so incredibly kind and gracious with her time, not only signing my species description paper for me, but hanging out with my friends and I where she gave writing encouragement.

I had only started submitting my short fiction for publication a few months prior so it really was a huge confidence booster.

Ann is really a big role model and inspiration for me when it comes to being a part of the science fiction community. 2018 was a really rough year for me in many ways, but getting to meet Ann Leckie was honestly one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had in the genre that I’ve loved since I was seven.

KN: I used to spend a lot of time in the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition, which was honestly an amazing experience. Here were a bunch of actual professional authors hanging out and talking shop, with an assortment of fans, wannabes, and up-and-comings in on the conversation and part of the community. 

I made friendships there that lasted even through the years I was basically out of fandom and the writing circuit because I’d given up on writing fiction.  (I got better, obviously.)  For the sort of alienated and lonely kid I was at the time, that sort of acceptance – and acceptance as a potential professional – was amazing.  I learned a lot there, and got a lot of encouragement that meant I could come back.

JV: I’m very happy about my bubble of stubborn, brillant, rebellious writing and publishing colleagues. We may not look like much, but we’ve got it where it counts, kid.

ESA: Yeah, community is a huge part of the SFF experience for me. I have to say, though, I think my absolute favorite moment was at a small, local convention in 2019. My co-author and I were selling our hopeful, queer dystopian series in the vendor room. A young person came up and started chatting with us and almost burst into tears when we told them the series starred a trans protagonist and several other queer characters. They spent a while with us, discussing how much that meant to them, even before reading the book, and it was such an incredible and humbling experience. 

JS: I love all the other authors I have met and how many new books I have been exposed to. The SFF writing community is small and tight-nit, and an extremely wonderful group. I couldn’t have asked for better friends.

Part 4: Craft and Future

Q: Let’s talk craft and future. What projects are you currently working on and what’s one of your favorite completed projects?

(This part of the interview was originally published on Dec 1st, 2020, so this question may be a bit outdated.)

JS: My ARDULUM series continues on on my Patreon, and is my favorite body of work. It explores so many SF tropes but with a more nonbinary gaze. Newer work: I have written three new series books since then, all of which are with my agent. The first is a YA fantasy with a nonbinary alchemist and a blacksmith princess, in a world of dangerous and magical fungi. My other two are adult books, one a science fiction story about a pair of sisters on a tidally locked world (one intersex and coming to terms with being nonbinary, though the planet is supposed to be ‘ladies only). And the third is a fluffy, fun fantasy about a thief, a princess, a prophecy, and a dragon. 

JT: “Sokal,” the story that is about to be published in Lackington’s, is my sentimental favorite of all the short stories I have written. It was worth the wait to have it published.

Once a decent interval has passed with “Sokal” out there, I will compile a manuscript of my stories published to date and shop the collection around to agents. And I am working on a novel, as mentioned, but it is not science fiction.

I had been working on translating a collection of short stories by the Yiddish writer Der Nister, which fits more within fantasy than science fiction. However my progress on that project has been highly intermittent for a while now. Translation and new writing require similar efforts and energies on my part, and now that I have started the novel I am prioritizing it over Der Nister, for now.

EB: I am currently working on my master’s thesis manuscript that’s not at all science fiction. I write fiction very much in spurts and right now is a fallow period because of a variety of reasons.

When I’m back in the right headspace, I’ll be revising my sapphic space romance novella to get it in shape for submission. It revolves around two women coming to terms with trauma and is incredibly self indulgent to write since it’s basically a lot of tropes I enjoy in fanfiction like bed sharing. It’s very different from my usual work because I started writing it as a happy fluffy story for my friend even though it’s definitely marked by my experiences with mental illness…

My favorite thing I have finished is the story I currently have out on submission which uses a whale autopsy to construct a narrative about transness, family, and community. It’s a very personal piece. 

MD: My next one is Ailuros. That’s coming next year from Fractured Mirror Publishing. It was a hard one to write in many ways, because it’s an experimental piece.

Most of the book is written as a mix of prose and audio transcripts, and it plays out as a queer homage to Alien. About a third of the book is written as footnotes though, and these tell a near future story about a world where negative emotions are suppressed via vaccination, with VR sims being used to let them out in a controlled manner. The notes are a Freudian analysis of the Alien-like story, and switches up the character roles in terms of heroes and villains.

Then there are seven hidden passages that alter both endings… honestly, I had a big House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski) influence when it came to planning the layout and I’m super excited to get it out there. 

As to a favourite that I’ve completed, that would probably be The Cassie Tam Files, just because the entire five book series is available now. It was so fun to work on, and the response has been almost entirely positive.

Writing the five books so that each was an enclosed story that still advanced the arc brewing in the background was new territory for me, because I’ve historically tended to just wing it and write individual tales. This took a lot more planning, and let me show off a nice, large cast. Cassie and Lori is probably the most clear romantic arc I’ve written too, and I was really happy with the slow-burn of it over the books.

DD:  I’m currently working on a medical horror fiction podcast. It’s a really fun project for me, especially as it stemmed from what was originally a one-off script, but so many people were interested that it inspired me to write more episodes and it has become a season-long project now, rather than just a single one-off episode. I’m also working on a short story that sort of explores surrealism and my own personal experiences, which is very fun. I think my favourite project that I’ve finished is my short story “a ballad to a rose,” which is one of my more personal pieces of writing.

JV: I already mentioned “Ace in Space”, accompanying our fighter pilot RPG “Aces in Space”, and also “Anarchie Déco”, the 1920s Urban Fantasy. 

At the moment, I’m translating one of last year’s Hugo winners into German which is fun and exciting.

After that, I will start a new project which is already under contract in a big German publishing house (hurray!) and which is (at the moment) called “Skjaldmær – Schildmaid” (Shield Maiden). It will be a feminist fantasy version of a Nordic saga and my husband and I are calling it lovingly  #GirlsWhoViking on social media. We’re very much looking forward to it. Viking stuff is so soaked in ideas of white nationalism and toxic masculinity, it will be a pleasure to shatter that thoroughly and shape a modern progressive inclusive narrative (out of frozen white male tears, muharhar).

ESA: It’s a relief to hear a bunch of you are working on fantasy, too haha. My current WiPs are a gay fantasy romance I’ve had banging around in my head since high school, a trope-y magical girl urban fantasy with Norse mythology elements, and the next book in the Aces High, Jokers Wild series (though that’s mostly in my cowriter’s arena at the moment).

As far as favorite finished projects, I honestly think I have to go with my short story “Astral Heat.” It was the first short I self-published, my first scifi erotica, and I got to make some hidden references to my favorite video game. Because I’m that nerd.

AW: I’m currently working on “HIT IT!” the beginning of a trilogy for Orbit Books. It’s about a nice jazz pianist, his enby glam rock joyfriend, and giant robots in a quest to save the galaxy.

I’m probably proudest of my Salvagers trilogy for Orbit, which just concluded this year. I love all of those characters dearly, and it was so strange to say goodbye to them!

AE: I’ve recently finished a 4-page comic called Forgotten Reality, which was published in the third issue of The 77, which is an anthology. For that same publisher I’m currently close to finishing another four-pager.

I’m also working on a comic run called Valero, which is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2021. The very talented Scotty from 2hotty7art is doing the art for that.

On top of that I have two other comics that I’m working on in between. One of them might get picked up by a publisher, but nothing is certain yet. If it falls through, I’m probably gonna end up publishing it myself. So let’s just say I’m keeping myself busy!

KN: Most of what I’m working on at the moment is fantasy, though I have a couple of sci-fi stories I’m shopping around and hoping will land somewhere.  I think my favorite unsold science fiction is the one with space marines where I did a whole pile of research about the culture and ethos of the actual Marines in several nations, so I could get it right.  I should find somewhere else to get that rejected, actually. 

“The Company Store”, my cyberpunk dystopia story that just came out, is very personal and dear to my heart. 

It being NaNo month I’m banging away on a science fantasy duology that I want to finally get finished using the competition as a useful impetus.

JJ: I’m presently working on the fourth novel in my Starlight Series, entitled ‘Song of the Morning’, and I have several ideas for future novels bouncing around the old noggin.

I’d say my favourite project I’ve finished has to be Sanctuary, my debut novel – it was the work of over 10 years, and the last three of those (2015-2018) were spent on the final draft. It set the groundwork for my entire series!

KW: I am in a brief period of rest, which is both a relief and kinda strange. *laughs*

The final chapter of the Farian War, “Out Past the Stars” will drop February of 2021 to finish up Hail’s stories. It’s a bittersweet feeling to say goodbye to characters you’ve been working on for more than a decade.

I’m also wrapping up the last few pieces on the next NeoG book, “Hold Fast Through the Fire” which will be out in the summer of 2021 and am currently in talks about new stories there.

Meanwhile I’m letting my brain play with an idea for a new space opera that I’m hoping we can convince someone to take on – politics and fashion, friendship and betrayal, and a search for an end to a generational war. I’m very excited about it!

JT: So, now I’m going to gainsay myself. I recently decided that my novel is untenable, and I am getting increasingly disenchanted with my own past short fiction, so I may not actively pursue publication of a collection. I will continue working on my Der Nister translations, and I’m going to start writing some strange prose poetry. I have no idea if the latter will ever be publishable.

Q: Many times, creativity doesn’t satisfy itself with just one outlet. What other crafts besides writing are you into and what works have come out of those interests?

JT: Writing is my domme, but I come when she calls. A more reliable outlet for my creativity, in that I need to engage with it every day, is cooking. The works that have come out of that have been tasty meals for myself and my kids.

DD:  I’m also someone who finds an outlet through cooking! It’s just unfortunate for me that my chronic pain and executive dysfunction so often stop me from being able to do it. I love cooking for others most of all. It’s one of the ways I express my love for people!

KN:  Whoof.  I am a giant katamari ball of half-finished projects.  I’m an artist without a studio right now, though I got myself a really splufty drawing tablet as a “yay, we finished my office renovations, I can has office nao” celebration so I’ve been doing a little digital art.  Some oil paints, I really want to get my kiln set up so that I can get back to clay.  I’ve also done a little Twine-based game programming, used to dabble in Infocom-style text adventures, neither of which have produced finished results.  I’m technically doing a game programming EdX course right now for the values of “technically” that mean “I haven’t touched it since August because the world is on fire and I have young kids”.

ESA: I adore “giant katamari ball of half-finished projects.” It’s the perfect term; can I steal it? While fiction writing is and always has been my first love, I also dabble in photography, acrylic painting, poetry, digital art, and the occasional half-assed cosplay. A couple months ago, I tried to teach myself how to draw well enough to make comics and graphic novels on my own, but I got distracted before I could make any real progress.

KN:  Absolutely you can steal it, half my dialogue is stolen from someone else anyway. (I can echolalia and so can you.)

AE: I paint things from time to time. Currently I’m mostly painting vinyl records, but I also paint clothes and canvas. Some of those works I put in my Etsy store, others are gifts for friends and family, or for myself. Other than that I sometimes make shitty digital designs. I say shitty because I don’t put much effort in them on purpose. I’m not really an artist, but if I was, my style would be called messy. I just like messy art styles a lot. Last year I drew two messy plants for Christmas cards and they’re called “badly drawn cards” (also on my etsy). I’m surprised people seem to like them! 

KW: I haven’t had a lot of free time to do other projects as writing and the day job eat just about all the hours in the day (and sleeping, always sleeping). But I started tending plants a few years ago and my jungle has grown quite a bit. I also dabble in watercolors and am trying to teach myself how to draw in this newly found non-writing time I have.

EB:  I’m also a book reviewer so I spend a lot of time reading books. I’m currently trying to put together my big review project for next year which focuses on ecology in SFF.

Outside of writing, I’m also an illustrator who specializes in scientific/botanical and character illustration. I mostly work with art markers, but sometimes work digitally. I’ve had a few people commission me for tattoo designs because of my scientific illustration skills which was really cool.

I am a belly dancer, but I haven’t been active lately because of the pandemic. I’m also really into alternative Japanese fashion, particularly lolita and ouji. I do sew and embroider.  Not a creative hobby per say, but I grow carnivorous plants. I’ve gotten my venus fly trap to flower which was pretty cool. 

AW: I’m a musician, and I love working with all kinds of instruments, from piano and guitar to samplers and synths. I thoroughly enjoy straddling the old and new, and I’m always trying to pick out the things that hook people in a song.

JV:  I love playing and designing RPGs (mostly indie games – I played D&D literally once in my life!) and have a Patreon for monthly mini-games (and short stories). I like designing small games, not only in a fantasy or SF context but also according to the current situation: to help people care for themselves and others during lockdown, for example. I have a (German-language) podcast about feminism in tabletop games. 

I also like historical fencing, but it’s a bit on a hold right now – but it’s wiggled its way into many of my works!

MD: Oh, plenty! I cosplay, and love building costumes. That’s included everything from modifying a motorcycle helmet to building an entire fursuit from scratch. I’ve appeared in a few magazines as a result. My proudest moment with that was a picture appearing in the Sonic the Hedgehog comics. I think I was the first to cosplay as one of the new characters, Tangle the Lemur.

I also run a pop culture website, where I cover everything from comics and books to anime and video games. You’ll see spotlights, interviews, reviews, opinion pieces…I even sometimes write about my own personal experiences. That’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve been quoted in advertising a few times, which is nice.

I used to build video games as a teen, and recently started doing that again too. I’ve released a visual novel already, and am currently working on a 2D horror game. Most of my time on it has been spent building an enemy AI based loosely on the xenomorph in Alien Isolation. Like Joseph, I love to cook too. If I can experiment with spices, I’m happy!

JJ: My main craft other than writing is scale modelling. I collect miniatures for the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000, as well as miniatures for D&D and other tabletop games. Building and painting these miniatures is something I really enjoy, and I also create scenery for them too. Aside from the occasional commission, I don’t really do it to make money or create great works – I just do it because I enjoy it.

JS: I’m a sculptor and woodturner, and so I keep myself busy in the shop most days. I dabble in furniture building, and just finished up a new bed for my girlfriend, which was a big hit!

Q: Thank you, you’ve all been amazing! Before you go, tell us, what do you see in the future of science fiction?

JS: Fewer angry white dudes! Seriously, SF has changed, even in the last few years. We see the old guard finally stepping down and letting in People of Color, women, queer people, etc., and it’s making the SF world so much more beautiful. I think this trend will continue, and through it, we will start getting truly diverse stories that aren’t just the same old narrative with a new cover, over and over and over again.

JJ: I’d hope to see a greater number of nonbinary and transgender authors and creators being given the chance to be a part of it. It’s been dominated by white and cisgender people for too long, and it’s such a rich genre for making diverse stories in.

JT:  In Anglophone SF, we need more influence of writings that have been translated from other languages.

The recent growth of Chinese SF in translation has been heartening, but it only seems like a lot in comparison to the meager availability of such things in previous years. Compared to the output of Chinese SF authors, or the body of untranslated writing in all the many other languages of the world, it barely scratches the surface.

Incidentally, the languages that I know well enough to translate from are Spanish, German, Yiddish, and Portuguese. (I also have French, Modern Greek, and Modern Hebrew, but I haven’t tested those yet to see if my chops are up to doing decent translations.)

So if anyone knows of an author whom they passionately believe should be translated, and they want to commission something, paying jobs preempt all other projects.

JV: Sometimes I think that, at least in Germany, it’s about survival. We translate a lot of English works, but the sales figures everywhere are dire. Small publishing houses, interested in feminism, in own-voices, in empowerment go bankrupt, bigger publishing houses are getting pessimistic as well. 

I have high hopes for science fiction, in Germany as well as everywhere else, but I also see capitalism getting in the way of many art forms. We need to find a solution for that, to decouple creativity from money. We need to work on that and till then, we have to survive as writers, artists, creators.

MD: For me, I’d like to see more own voices authors making a big impact. There are a lot of us out there, and the majority of us are signed to small presses or self-published, I think. I’d love to see more of us become best sellers, or sell adaption rights. It’d be a wonderful message for others to be able to say ‘hey, they’re like me, and they made it!’ It’s things like that that help break down the barriers we face in getting work out there to a large audience.

KN: I’m with Matt on hoping to see more own voices work, and Joseph about translations, and I’d like to expand that into more variety in forms of narrative.  I’ve seen a lot of people comment on how plot structures are very cultural, and I want to learn more about the way plots work in other cultures.  I’ve also seen people commenting on how they’d like to see more, for example, cozy-style work, or ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and I’d like to see the market expand for more of those sorts of stories.

ESA: I’m thirding the own voices and translation comments, but I’d also like to see more ‘soft’ SFF like space operas make a return. Things that don’t rely as heavily on the science side of the things. I feel like there’s been a big swing toward really hard SFF, especially since The Martian, and I’m a reader/writer who just can’t get into the super-intense science side for a variety of reasons. Basically, more character-driven, less universe-ending stakes, I guess. 

KW: Like E.S. said I’m pushing for more space opera. More high-flung fantasy but with starships and character-driven stories rather than detailed breakdowns of how ship engines work. I enjoy the science side of it all, but it can be very overwhelming and easily turn into a “let me show you how this works” lecture rather than a story. So I’m looking forward to more own-voice science fiction that shows readers just how fun and interesting and expansive the genre can be.

EB:  I’ve touched on this before that we’re currently in a renaissance for queer science fiction so I am going to echo everyone here, Own Voices is going to keep on growing and we are going to have more and more queer science fiction published because it’s doing rather well and more publishing venues are open to it.

I also am seeing a trend of more global science fiction too with translation of works from outside of the english speaking world coming into vogue. Basically more connectivity among the different science fiction communities of the world because of the internet because of the growing interest in translated works. So yeah that’s pretty much my predictions: more gay stuff, more translated stuff. It’s a win-win for diversifying the pool of works that readers will have access to.

DD: I agree with all of this! We need more diverse voices in all walks of fiction, and that absolutely includes writers of colour, disabled and neurodiverse folks, and people with all sorts of experiences of gender. So often those sorts of stories are completely swept under the rug for others written by cishet white men. It’s about time that other authors had the chance to be in the spotlight and be published by actual publishing companies because we have such interesting stories to tell.

AW: Wow. They took all the good answers. Can I just say that I also want to see movies–big, mainstream blockbusters–featuring ownvoices of all stripes. I think there’s a lot of cinematic success to be found here, and only more to come. Box office audiences don’t realize it yet, but they’re tired of the same story crammed down their throats over and over again.

AE:  I agree with the others. We need more inclusion. We need to hear different voices and see different faces. Also I’m having high hopes for self-published work and indie publishers. It would be great if the big names of publishing no longer ruled the game. It’s because of them that we only get to see a select range of work with limited representation (I’m not like, accusing them of anything, just saying what I see).

With things like Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sources we as the reader get to invest in stories we want to read about. That way people get a better chance at having their work published. Or at least that’s what it feels like to me!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Joseph Tomaras (they/them or she/her) now lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. Their stories have appeared most recently in Lackington’s, Salvage Quarterly, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the late lamented FLAPPERHOUSE.

When not serving as tech support for remote-schooling children or seeking paid employment, they write strange prose poems and work on translations of stories by the Yiddish author Der Nister.

Twitter | Website | Goodreads

Erin Barbeau (ze/zir) works as an entomologist that specializes in museums and butterflies.  Since zir childhood, ze has been an avid consumer of speculative fiction. Without science fiction and fantasy, ze would not have been able to come to terms with zir queerness. In zir blog, ze is trying to focus on SFF that features queer, people of color, and own voices content/narratives.

Zir is also an aspiring SFF writer, artist, and dancer.

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J.S. Fields (they/them) is a scientist who has perhaps spent too much time around organic solvents. They enjoy roller derby, woodturning, making chainmail by hand, and cultivating fungi in the backs of minivans. Nonbinary, and yes, it matters.

Fields has lived in Thailand, Ireland, Canada, USA, and spent extensive time in many more places. Their current research takes them to the Peruvian Amazon rainforest each summer, where they traumatizes students with machetes and tangarana ants while looking for rare pigmenting fungi. They live with their partner and child, and a very fabulous lionhead rabbit named Merlin.

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E S Argentum’s (they/them) fantasy and scifi romances center on sweet GLBTQ+ relationships with the emotional comfort of a Hallmark movie or a fluffy piece of fanfiction, layered with rich, unique twists. They’ve had short stories published in multiple anthologies under a previous pseudonym, including Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Crossing Colfax and Ultimate Power from Northwest press. When they’re not writing, they’re generally found playing video games, having existential crises, or napping with their cat.

In addition to their solo work, Argentum also co-writes the critically acclaimed Aces High, Jokers Wild series under the pseudonym O.E. Tearmann. This hopeful, queer series has been described as “Firefly for the dystopian genre” and revolves around themes of found family and finding one’s place in the world. More information available at oetearmann.com.

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Matt Doyle (any pronouns) is a pansexual/genderfluid speculative fiction author and pop culture blogger from the UK. Matt specializes in fiction with a sci-fi grounding and diverse characters.

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Judith Vogt (she/her/they/them) is a German science fiction and fantasy author, currently living in Aachen. Besides novels and short stories, she writes essays (for example for the German TOR website and the science fiction annual “SF Jahr“), tabletop role-playing games, she translates, works as an editor and hosts the first podcast in German language on feminism and RPG (Genderswapped Podcast).

Together with two friends, she publishes a quarterly queer-feminist SFF short story magazine called “Queer*Welten” (queer*worlds). Together with her partner, she won several SFF and RPG awards and publishes monthly short stories and mini RPGs on Patreon.

She also published the first German-language essay collection on diversity and representation in role-playing games and does workshops and panels on representation, intersectionality, inclusive worldbuilding and much more.

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Alex White (they/them) was born in Mississippi and has lived most of their life in the American South. Alex is the author of The Salvagers Trilogy, which begins with A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe; as well as official novels for Alien (The Cold Forge, Into Charybdis) and Star Trek (DS9 REVENANT). They enjoy music composition, calligraphy and challenging, subversive fiction.

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Anna Everts (they/them/die/diens) is a non-binary and autistic freelance (comic) writer and sensitivity reader from the Netherlands. They specialise in fantasy, sci-fi and thriller fiction, but enjoy dipping their toes in other genres from time to time as well. They write with an inclusive and intersectional tone, wanting to represent those who are typically underrepresented.

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Kiya Nicoll (all, but if specific- they/them/thon) is a writer, poet, and artist living in a New England oak grove with a large pile of family and an atypical variety of animals.  Their neurodivergent obsessions include archaeoastronomy, cat fur genetics, the scientific-occult scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the mods for Rimworld available on the Steam workshop. When not wrangling cats and/or children, they write things, including The Traveller’s Guide to the Duat (a humorous version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead) and short stories that have appeared in several anthologies.

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Dominik Myles Dyer (he/they) is a writer, content creator, and film student at manchester college. He firmly believes in building positive, intersectional representation in all forms of media. He primarily writes horror in both prose and audio formats and loves using fiction as a tool for discovery and exploration.

Dominik posts some of their short stories up on ko-fi, where they’re up for sale. Any donations are welcomed.

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K.B. Wagers (they/them) is the author of the Indranan & Farian War trilogies with Orbit Books and the new NeoG novels from Harper Voyager.

They hold a bachelor’s degree in Russian Studies and a second-degree black belt in Shaolin Kung Fu. A native of Colorado, K.B. lives at the base of the Rocky Mountains with their partner and a crew of recalcitrant cats. In between books, they can be found attempting to learn Spanish, dying in video games, dancing to music, and scribbling new ideas in their bullet journal. They are represented by Andrew Zack of The Zack Company.

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J. Patrick Jones (they/them) was born in 1994 and resides in Merseyside, in the UK. They identify as agender and prefer they/them pronouns.

They have been writing since early childhood, and other career ideas – archaeologist, pilot, games designer – fell by the wayside over the years, giving way to a career in writing. Sanctuary was self-published in April 2018, and its sequel, Endeavour Part One, followed in January 2019.

Despite being a writer, J. Patrick Jones hates writing about themself in the third person.

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