Fluent in gender studies

Sex changing and sex-agnostic fiction stir imagination but are famously hard to masterfully discuss in SF; even harder are they to develop in such manner that backdrop society would seem natural in its inbred strangeness.

When it’s been done in haphazard manner, according to social agenda, the promisingly-big picture sheds scales (in both meanings of the word) as if papered over the cracks. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and short stories linked to it provided nutritious crop from that field in times just before the Sad Puppies incident, but she stopped receiving awards hence, despite her gender.

Might such absence be an indicator of higher-quality fiction now, in contrarium.

As Janet and Isaac Asimov once might have said, it’s important to never have to write what you yourself disapprove because of being unable to make for a living in another way than writing.

LoadedDice