24 - Queering Desire in American Science Fiction

Summary

The chapter reflects on four approaches to desire present in American science fiction: normalization, displacement, reification, and reimagining. Fanfiction or fanfiction-adjacent novels such as Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014) are set in queernormative worlds and as such normalize queer desire. Feminist depictions of separatist women’s communities, such as Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972), Nicole Griffith’s Ammonite (1993) or Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (2018), displace queer desire, situating lesbian sex and pleasures in the background of the narrative concerned with the social and political implications of a world without men. In Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) desire is reified as it serves as a condition of full humanity. Finally, stories of human/nonhuman encounters seem to lend themselves particularly well to the efforts to reimagine desire. In Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-9) and Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017), alien and robot characters experience desire and pleasure as diffused and independent of binary sex/gender systems.