badrockbookrecs

[badrockbookrecs]

The entire original discworld audio book catalogue

[badrockbookrecs]

omg!?!? thank you for writing it, it's amazing

Timeloops and trauma

Guys. Just -- read this. (Or listen to it in the podcast -- you can find the link on the page.)

Short story about timeloops as a metaphor for trauma, mental illness, and how it's viewed across cultures and history. Trust me on this one.

[badrockbookrecs]

hey book nerds (and other media nerds) -- this isn't actually me arguing for piracy (i'm not taking a stance on that here). this IS me saying: you should NOT purchase digital media that is DRM-locked if you can possibly help it.

use libro.fm. buy ebooks that are sold without DRM. etc etc. if you're *going* to buy the media -- vote with your wallet and don't pay for something you can't actually own.

funimation is shutting down as part of its merger with crunchyroll, and any digital copies of anime funimation users bought won't carry over. you can purchase something outright and corpos will still turn around and say you don't own or control it.

anyway piracy is good and necessary and perhaps even an imperative.

[badrockbookrecs]

Timeloops and trauma

Guys. Just -- read this. (Or listen to it in the podcast -- you can find the link on the page.)

Short story about timeloops as a metaphor for trauma, mental illness, and how it's viewed across cultures and history. Trust me on this one.

[badrockbookrecs]

for my murderbot fan followers... and honestly everyone else too. the vibe of this series is not like murderbot at all, but it's BRILLIANT and i think you'll like it.

Found an Easter egg in the book The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older!

It's the second (and latest) book in her mystery series The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti. I can highly recommend both it and the first book, The Mimicking of Known Successes.

The simplest way to describe the series is that it's very similar (I'd say intentionally so) to the Sherlock Holmes stories, but if Sherlock and Watson were reimagined as lesbians with chemistry that was more than just potential subtext, and they lived in a future post-apocalyptic colony in space with definite Victorian-type/steampunk world building, but with a healthy amount of foods and other cultural aspects from many different cultures around the world.

In fact, one thing that surprised me at first was that the books' vocabulary commonly uses not only formal/older English words, but also words and expressions from many different languages, only some of which were familiar to me, but most of which can be understood from context. It's a choice that makes sense, though, for a society that's been removed from Earth for a long time, and what it would look like for different Earth cultures to synthesize into totally new cultures and groupings of people over time.

Anyway, these are the kind of books that you're likely to enjoy if you like TMBD. As a matter of fact, in the first book's acknowledgments, Malka Older listed Martha Wells first among the other authors she was thanking for their writing and how it impacted her. So if you're looking for a fun and interesting scifi read, these books are worth it! :)

[badrockbookrecs]

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennett, Witch by Melinda Taub

Oh. My. GOD. Read this book. Please. Even if you aren't into Pride and Prejudice or that whole genre of novels. Do it.

Lydia is a witch, Kitty is her familiar who used to be a cat, Wickham is a demon, and of course like any book that sucks me in this hard, there's a *lot* of questions around mistakes and responsibility and redemption.

The first bit is slow -- still definitely witchy, but mostly country slice-of-life. And then it accelerates. Hard. Addresses feminist topics as well as colonialism, racism, and slavery, really interrogating the hell out of British society at the time. As well as going deep into the relationship between Lydia and her family, and friends.

I'm obsessed.

Also, there's queer characters who don't feel shoehorned in there. And the original characters are just as compelling if not more as the reinterpreted canon P&P characters. Also I would die for Georgiana Darcy. My perfect baby child.

SPOILERY QUESTION BELOW CUT:

Anyone who read it -- what do you think happens afterwards, with Carmen?!? If the sea can turn witches into Selkies, Carmen might be the only person on that boat that Maria *didn't* kill. I wonder if she wants to see her again. I wonder if she can forgive her. Oh god I need a sequel.

[badrockbookrecs]

sometimes a family is a bubbly lady who was raised by an eccentric gay vampire, her french engineer lover, a practical minded lesbian, a werelioness with an affinity for tassels, an academic redhead who gets pegged, and a female doctor with an assassin mother.  plus the bubbly lady’s cousin who tried to kill her and his trans woman interpreter/spy wife

[badrockbookrecs]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[badrockbookrecs]

literally my favorite book of all time. Got a tattoo inspired by it. Might get another one. But damn it hurts.

One thing about le guin is that i can trust her to write a book that makes me go "wow that's fucked up"

[badrockbookrecs]

PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here

Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn

[badrockbookrecs]

Snarlbear

Another completed webcomic (that you can buy as a book!). Has the same sort of whacky adventure becomes (is revealed to be) morally grey energy as Adventure Time, to me. (I mean this as the highest compliment.)

https://www.snarlbear.com/

[badrockbookrecs]

A long passage from Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, concerning the anti-sexuality current in the mainstreaming of queer literature, and in particular a detailed account of the 1994 censorship case surrounding the Canadian Little Sisters bookstore. 

I think it’s valuable not just for its description of the double-bind queer folks are put in when we’re asked to sanitize or disavow our own sexual realities in order to gain mainstream acceptance, but also for its glimpse into the mechanics of what exactly the process of implementing censorship criteria looks like—who has the power, who gets silenced, and how that can intersect with systems of oppression. All bolding mine.

The truth—that queer, sexually truthful literature is seen as pornographic, and is systematically kept out of the hands of most Americans, gay and straight—has been replaced with a false story of a nonexistent integration and a fantasized equality. […] In my own experience, the [mainstream] equation of queer literature with pornography is undeniable. […] Of course, in gay time, “recent” quickly disappears because so many participants are dead, and others have been silenced. It’s hard to have collective memory when so many who were “there” are not “here” to say what happened. Once the recent past is remembered, then the Amazon “glitch” [in which LGBT titles were automatically removed from Amazon’s listings during a porn purge in 2008] becomes all too consistent. So, here is just one example, exhumed from memory.

In 1994, a coalition of feminists and right-wing politicians in Canada passed a tariff code called Butler that was designed to restrict pornographic production. Instead, it was applied in such a way that it allowed officials at Canada customs to systematically detain and destroy gay and lesbian materials at the border. A gay bookstore in Vancouver, Little Sisters, had so much of its product seized that it could no longer operate. As a result, Little Sisters decided to sue the Canadian government. 

My friend John Preston had just died of AIDS. He was the author of some iconic leather and S/M novels, many with literary bent. His novel Mister Benson had been serialized in Drummer magazine, and created a subcultural phenomena. Men would wear T-shirts asking Mister Benson? Or asserting Mister Benson! While he had a less explicit series called Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, John was perhaps best known for his book I Once Had a Master. Since he was newly dead, I was asked by the Little Sisters legal team to come to Vancouver and testify on John’s behalf. And because I was very clear in my opposition to state repression of gay materials, I had no problem agreeing. 

The Canadian courthouse was quite shocking to this New Yorker. No metal detectors, no armed guards at rapt attention in every corner. The building looked like a Marriott hotel, with lovely plants, comfortable seating, and a coffee bar. But do not be fooled, the Canadian government proved to be a vicious animal with a demure exterior. 

Tensions were high in the courtroom the day I arrived. The trial had been going on for weeks and many writers had testified. Patrick Califia, who at the time had presented as female with the name Pat, had been on the witness stand the Friday before and had done so well that the Crown had refused to cross-examine him. Interestingly, “Pat”—who was known as a butch leather dyke—had taken the extreme step of wearing a brown corduroy dress, which impressed me. We were, after all, trying to win. I, and I assume many of the women testifying, had agonized over what to wear on the stand. The only nice dress I owned in 1994 was black velvet—kind of a parody of a dress, and something to be worn to the opera. Anyway, I wore pants. Becky Ross, a Canadian academic, testified before me. She wore a dress, but I think she always wore a dress. Anyway, the Crown had been pretty hard on her, asking her to define “fisting.”

John’s books were being persecuted on five counts. The questions I had to address were: Is it violent? Is it degrading? Is it dehumanizing? Does hit have literary merit? Is it socially redeeming? If I had had my way, I would have argued that even if the books were violent, degrading, et cetera, they still should be available. However, Canadian courts had already ruled on that question, so my only remaining strategy for protecting his books was to “prove” that Butler should not be applied to him. Not that the law was wrong. 

So many years later, this is the conundrum gay writers faced with the Amazon exclusion. Mark Doty, Larry Kramer, and many other principled gay writers noted online and in print that books like Giovanni’s Room and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit were being falsely labeled as pornography. Once again we were forced by a state or corporate apparatus to claim that our literature was different from that dirty stuff, instead of part and parcel with it. But it is the homosexuality that got the books marginalized in the first place. Not their sentence structure.

[…]

The actual testifying did not go that well. Once I got on the witness stand, the Crown claimed that I was not qualified to be an expert on “harm.” I said that as someone who has experienced “harm” for being a lesbian, and especially for being a lesbian writer, I was quite expert on the matter. I argued that “homophobia is a social pathology that causes violence and destroys families.” I said that gay and lesbian books are a mitigating force against homophobia and therefore are socially beneficial and the opposite of “harm.” The Crown claimed that I was not qualified to make this statement because I am not a sociologist. They won, and I was forbidden from addressing that issue in court. 

This was the first indication I had of our judge’s conceptual limits. As we moved along, I came to learn that Milord did not know what  “deconstruction” meant. And later he revealed a puzzlement over the meaning of the word “enema.” Oh no, I thought. If he has never heard of enemas or deconstruction, we are doomed. 

The Crown read out loud a passage from one of John’s books describing nipple torture. It was a bit surreal. Then he asked me if this was “degrading or dehumanizing.” I did my best.

Through the rest of the trial the government repeatedly made clear their view about any gay sex. They had seized a lesbian anthology called Bushfire because it included the line “she held me tightly like a rope,” which they said was “bondage.” They had also seized a book called Stroke, which was about boating.

In the end, after many more years and courts and dollars, Little Sister lost their case. The judge ruled that Canada customs officials had, and still have, the right to decide which materials are not suitable to come into the country. Interestingly, they quickly ratified gay marriage, while continuing to retain the right to insure that no married gay man will ever go looking for Mister Benson. 

Those two days in court made it crystal clear to me that in the minds of many people, homosexuality is inherently pornographic. And there is nothing that has occurred in the subsequent three presidential terms that has created any other kind of context. The best proof is in our contemporary placement and treatment of sexually truthful gay literature. That John Preston was invited to give a keynote address at Outwrite, the now defunct lesbian and gay writer’s conference, was a sign of the prominent and central role of sexually explicit content in gay literature when it was controlled by the community. Now that gay presses and bookstores have been gentrified out of existence, first by chain stores like Barnes and Nobles, which are now being outsold by Amazon.com, gay literature is at the mercy of the mainstream. […] This puts gentrified queer people in a terrible bind: we can dissociate ourselves from the full continuum of queer literature, that is, from queer sexuality, thereby falsely describing our literature as “quality” if its sexual content is acceptable to straights. But that is a kind of implicit agreement that we only become deserving of rights when presenting as somewhere between furtive and monogamous. 

[badrockbookrecs]

The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven

The Draco Tavern https://g.co/kgs/ci1SdY

Oldie but a goodie. A collection of short stories set in an Earth spaceport bar operated by a human. It’s hard sci fi, in that the light speed limit is obeyed and the alien xenobiology is well thought out. Even almost 20 years after publication it still reads really well and very little of the science is out of date as far as I can tell. Some of the stories deal with sexual topics and reproduction; the only one I would rate as too mature for underage readers (I say, having read the whole book in high school myself) is “Smut Talk”. A lot of philosophy and science bound up into each little story and they’re all very fun.

[badrockbookrecs]

Alice Grove by Jeph Jacques

Literally it's free to read right here online.

It's a completed sci-fi webcomic by the author of Questionable Content and I just ... love it so much. (Shockingly, the MC is a guilt-ridden bastard who's trying to atone for past wrongs. .... I am so predictable aren't it.) Post-apocalyptic, pastoral idyllic future Earth where things are starting to change again after a millennium or so of stasis.

Honestly, I CANNOT really summarize much of it without spoilers but. Go read it go read it go read it. If you like space operas, or weird physics concepts, or weird METAphysics concepts... (looks at all you Room of Swords folks)... go read it. It's also fairly short!

Jokes with spoilers below cut:

Frfr why do I always simp for the war criminal gays :D What does this say about me (or my wife LMAO).

[badrockbookrecs]

The Unstoppables Series by Charlie Jane Anders

Oh my god. My god. I am so obsessed with these, these are my comfort books, I just ordered them in print. (link to first book of 3)

Queer YA space opera/science fantasy adventure. Reads like a comic book in all the best ways. The setting is ridiculous but the characters are taken seriously. The MC Has A Destiny She Was Born To Fulfill but it ... doesn't work out. All of the characters in this story, human and alien, are so dear to my heart now and forever.

The author also runs a podcast with her partner (also a SF writer -- Annalee Newitz, I highly recommend everything *they've* written also and will probably do a post at some point) about like... literary analysis in science fiction/fantasy? It's even better than that sounds, it's called Our Opinions Are Correct, check it out.

[badrockbookrecs]

Hi–I’m briefly returning from my tumblr hiatus out of spite because i’m lowkey salty disappointed that every list I see recommending SFF novels with queer themes are just the same couple of books over and over again.

Are those books good? Sure! But there’s so much more.

So here’s my list of lesser-known SFF novels with queer characters:

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner: Originally published in 1987, this classic novel is set in a bisexual society and features political machinations, drama and intrigue, and lots and lots of swordfighting. This was the first novel with prominent LGBT themes that I ever read, and it aces the test of time.

Tremontaine by Ellen Kushner, Etc.: This is a serial novel and a prequel to Swordspoint, but they can be read independently of one another. Tremontaine has the benefit of being much longer, so there’s much more to enjoy, and has 100% more lesbians and PoC.

The Warrior’s Path by Catherine M Wilson: All I had to be told to be sold on this book was “historical fantasy based on the bronze age, with a matriarchal society and lots of lesbians.” These are more character-driven than plot-driven, which I think really, really works. Book 1 of 3.

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this book, even though Hurley’s work is consistently too biopunk squicky for me. This is a book about space warfare and intrigue, and there are absolutely zero male characters. It is. Very very icky, though. Lots of blood and viscera and other fluids.

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee: Military scifi. Super interesting technology all based on every world in the empire sticking to the same calendar (no really, but it works). To put down a calendrical rebellion, they turn to a disgraced (lesbian) soldier and an undead traitor (bisexual) general. The sequel, Raven Stratagem, has a trans man as one of the major PoV characters, and it’s worth noting that the author himself is also trans.

Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks: This is a slow-paced character driven fantasy. A country has been overrun by invaders, and though there’s an active rebellion, the situation is desperate. It focuses on three very different (though equally queer) people, who, together, can change the course of history. The sequel, Earth Logic, is also fantastic. (There is a 3rd one but I haven’t read it yet)

 Warchild by Karin Lowachee: This is a space opera, but also a portrait of the effects of PTSD on children. It’s also the book that convinced me that second-person narration is good, actually. There are several significant queer characters in this book, and the sequels, Burndive and Cagebird (PoV character in this one!), though the first book is my favorite. Major CW for child abuse, though.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie: It’s no secret that I love this book and its sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy. If you’re hoping for overt queer romance you’ll be disappointed, but if you’re interested in reading a quasi-military scifi series set in a space empire that has no concept of gender, you’ll love this. Every person in the Radch is referred to as “she,” regardless of what body parts they have or their presentation. The first book is about an AI who used to be a spaceship, on a mission to bring down the person who killed her favorite lieutenant. 

Provenance by Ann Leckie: set in the same universe as the Ancillary trilogy, but can be read as a standalone. The planet that Provenance takes place on has three genders, and uses a neutral pronoun for the third gender. Additionally, children are viewed as genderless and choose their gender as part of becoming an adult. The book is about a young woman who comes up with an audacious plan to impress her mother–and how it all goes horribly wrong (and right, and wrong again, and right). She also gets a cute girlfriend along the way!

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson: The titular character is from a small island where homosexuality and polyamory are widely accepted, but then the island is taken over by a deeply repressive and homophobic empire. This story is how Baru plots to take down the empire that destroys her homeland from the inside out. It’s dark but very very good (and yes the main character is a lesbian).

Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott: I confess I’ve only read the first book in this series, but I enjoyed it very much. This is a historical fantasy based on the Celtic queen Boudica, and it seems like almost everyone is bisexual.

The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow: This book is divisive–people either seem to love it or hate it. It takes place in a near-ish-future Earth. An AI has taken over the world, and demands a royal hostage from the ruler of each country. If a country chooses to go to war, their heir is killed. The main character is one of these royal hostages, and her country is on the brink of war. There’s a pseudo love-triangle in this one (m/f/f), but it didn’t much bother me, honestly. I also greatly enjoyed the sequel, The Swan Riders (moreso than the first book actually)

 The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers: This is a delightful, cheerful, and optimistic space opera. Reading this book is a lot like drinking a warm cup of cocoa on a chilly night–it’s just warm and comforting. The crew of the Wayfarer is diverse, loveable, and pretty queer, too. The standalone sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit, is also a wonderful book.

Planetfall by Emma Newman: This is… an interesting book. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about it. It has a plot, but it reads more as a character study on a mentally ill, grieving woman, who loved another woman so much she followed her to a new planet, and then had to learn to live without her.

HONORABLE MENTION TO… Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series: You know I can’t do a rec list without these. Though the PoV characters tend to be straight (with the exception of the Rain Wilds books), there are quite a few queer side characters. Most notable is one very important character throughout most of the books, who is nonbinary and (arguably) genderfluid. I’ve heard the Fitz books in this series described as “one man’s 60-year journey to realizing that gender is a social construct.” It can be frustrating, and heartbreaking, but these are genuinely the best books I’ve ever read. 

[badrockbookrecs]

The Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal. (Link to first book on bookshop.org)

I just found out a new book is in the works!?! About the Mars colony? I’m so excited.

But anyways. The author described this series as “punchcard punk” which as somebody who makes a living working in archaic computing languages makes my brain happy. And the books make my brain happy. (And sad. And other things. The MC has anxiety and the author does a great but intense job of describing it. And the MC of the third book is anorexic.)

The gist is, an extinction level asteroid impact hits the planet in the 1950s just as the space race is gearing up. Specifically, it hits Washington DC. (Did you know Chesapeake Bay is actually part of an ancient impact crater? Anyways.) This results in an impact winter and then a gradual global warming — because water vapor is a greenhouse gas. (I really, really want to run some models for this myself. But the science of it very much does check out!!!)

Worried about humans becoming extinct, space travel gets kicked into gear. The characters deal with the reality of sexism and racism and fight for women and people of color to be included in the astronaut program and space colonies. It’s so meticulously researched and well done.

I love this series so much. I would literally read an encyclopedia about it. More on the evacuation, models and projections for the climate changes, the construction details of the moon and Mars colony, everything. I am OBSESSED. Please read it!! <3