Jupiter Ascending - Screen Graphics
i don’t want to read lgbtq fiction i want to read genre fiction with lgbtq protags
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alright friends i was thinking about this earlier and so i put together a list of some good genre fiction with lgbt main characters:
LESBIAN
- the abyss surrounds us by emily skrutskie (sci fi/dystopian, woc protag)
- ascension by jacqueline koyanagi (sci fi/space opera, disabled woc protag)
- serenity rose by aaron alexovich (paranormal graphic novel)
- everything leads to you by nina lacour (contemporary, but not “about” lgbt issues/coming out/anything like that)
- afterworlds by scott westerfeld (contemporary/paranormal, woc protag)
- beauty queens by libba bray (not sure on the genre; not sure how good this is, haven’t read it myself)
- sword of the guardian by merry shannon (fantasy; warning for attempted rape scene)
- huntress by malinda lo (fantasy, woc protag)
- the dark wife by sarah diemer (fantasy)
- seven by jennifer diemer (fantasy/fairy tale retelling)
- bleeding earth by kaitlin ward (horror/fantasy; haven’t read this either, not sure how it is)
GAY
- proxy by alex london (dystopian, moc protag)
- more than this by patrick ness (dystopian i guess? not sure how to describe the genre tbh)
- the star host by ft lukens (sci fi, haven’t read)
- hero by perry moore (superhero)
BISEXUAL
- god’s war by kameron hurley (post-apocalyptic/sci fi, bi woc protag)
- coda by emma trevayne (dystopian, bi guy protag)
- adaptation by malinda lo (sci fi, bi girl protag)
- beauty queens by libba bray (see above, major bi characters)
- ash by malinda lo (fantasy/fairy tale retelling, bi girl protag)
- the young elites by marie lu (fantasy, lots of bi characters all around)
- the scorpion rules by erin bow (dystopian, bi girl protag, haven’t read but i hear it’s awesome)
TRANS
- beauty queens by libba bray (see above, major trans woman characters (i think))
- the left hand of darkness by ursula k le guin (fantasy; haven’t read this either, not sure how it is)
- love in the time of global warming by libba bray (dystopian; haven’t read this one either yikes)
that’s all i’ve got right now! i’m a lesbian so the lesbian section has the most books in it lol, but if anyone else wants to add some more books for gbt people (especially trans because Yikes that section is small), that would be awesome!
To be fair, humans and trolls are so biologically incompatible putting them all together would create a huge mess. Just the fact that trolls are nocturnal and humans are not would create issues.
See I just don’t buy that when countless other fantasy and sci-fi works have made fascinating hodge podge cultures and cityscapes where the cultural and biological differences of all the citizens is to the benefit of the society. People with different skills and interest and subspecialties and quirks that makes them excel at some things and need help with other things (and what luck! OTHER species has many members who excel at exactly that!).
And as a former long term night shifter it had some awkward impacts on how I interacted with the day walkers but I wasn’t literally INCOMPATIBLE with broader society. In fact, society NEEDED me (or someone like me) in that role because (for example) death isn’t a thing that happens only on the 9 to 5.
yeah an actual subset of humans, us night owls, are hardwired for a much later sleep schedule. there is no long-term way to learn to be comfortable with waking up around dawn, it’s a constant struggle to keep to early bird hours because it’s just not natural for us. but there’s a significant benefit to have a small population of semi-nocturnal humans around, because like historically there’s lots of medical, military, and maintenance jobs that needs to be done at night, preferably by people who are alert and comfortable.
anyway, human societies have always done best when they integrate a wide variety of behaviors, preferences, mindsets, and cognitive types. we also do great when we work with other species like dogs and cats and horses, and even non-domestic partners like those guys who fish with wild dolphins, or the people who team up with wild honeyguide birds to raid beehives.
a multispecies society would present a lot of challenges for everyone to accommodate everyone else and there’d probably a lot of species tension, because humans tend to be clannish dickbags and who knows what weird hangups the other species have too. but it could and probably would work out way better than four segregated kingdoms. i’m kind of side-eying that part of the ending too.
This is the most recent update I made for my comic. I spent 13 hours a day for 3 months animating it. It was a long journey to say the least. The beautiful soundtrack was crafted by the talented Will Ascenzo.
If you don’t read my comic it’s called Ava’s Demon. It’s a sci-fi fantasy webcomic about alien teens and their inner demons. Give it a read if it sounds cool to you, if not enjoy the vid for the art!
Warning for flashing and bright colors if you are visually sensitive!!!
i love old science fiction because it’s all like “IT’S THE DISTANT YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND THREE AND MAN IS EXPLORING THE DEEP CORNERS OF THE UNIVERSE” like god bless you old sci-fi you had such high hopes for us
It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.
I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.
How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?
Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.
(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)
Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:
- Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you - and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
- Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
- We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty - humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits - but they’re highly functional.
- Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.
In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.
Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.
We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.
And by god, we will eat anything.
- We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
- We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
- We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
- We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
- We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
- Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
- We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
- We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
- On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.
Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us
We drink ethanol (in concentrations high enough to be used as an effective as microbicide or a solvent!) for the express purpose of achieving blood toxicity and disrupting normal brain function… AS A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY!
On the same subject, we also deliberately incinerate assorted substances and then inhale the particulate-heavy smoke and vapor resulting for the same effect. EVEN IN THE FACE OF SAID SUBSTANCES BEING CARCINOGENIC, BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Humans do not have biological castes. Kill their commander and another will take its place. Soldiers left alone on a planet will start farming and manufacturing to survive. Farmers and manufacturers will take up arms and kill you if pressed. Just because two humans look different doesn’t mean they cannot do each other’s jobs.
Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.
Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow.
The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.
Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.
We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it.
Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel.
They lack radio receptors and cannot be brought into compliance with right-thought simply by broadcasting to them. Even after we learned how to translate it into sound-waves one of their hatchlings drove the Great Authority mad by responding to every demand with a single question: “Why?”
#an individual human being is actually a microbiome in its own right—you are dealing with a legion each time you approach them #they carry pathological agents inside their deep tissues and this is advantageous to their health #one of the most widespread and resilient viruses on their planet is treated as mildly hazardous—even though it causes #massive disruption to the body’s homeostasis #(their young offspring endure multiple rhinovirus infections EACH YEAR yet they seem unperturbed by this) #they have developed such long lifespans that now their primary threat is their own body’s degeneration #humanity has literally figured out how to survive so long that their body gives out under them #and they are not satisfied with that #stupid willful vengeful survivalists who treat mortality like a challenge
I am speechless
Reblogging so I can reread in the morning
I think I’ve reblogged this before, but it’s well worth doing again.
This post is AWESOME. Nice to see it on my dash again in 2016.
#their immune systems are so aggressive that in some rare mutations it attacks their other bodily functions #but it DOESN’T kill them???? #they can apparently function with HOLES in their brains and the linings of their nerves shredded off #and all it does is slow them down a little #some of them voluntarily expose themselves to radiation if their cells multiply the wrong way #they voluntarily ingest things known to cause death in other species from their own planet???? #how????? #dislocating their joints only slows them down #they’ll just pop it back into place and keep going #their pain threshold is too high #their cartilige and tendons too flexible #hell some of them have mutated genes that let their joints flex in ways that would break even other humans #they’re STILL evolving in all sorts of directions #being one of the most terrifying predators in the universe is apparently not enough #god help us all if they start growing more than two sets of teeth in a lifetime (x)
Humanity and aliens
So I was trying to sort out just how many different headcanons of “humans in space“ I’ve stumbled across so far. And I’m loving it, because they’re all amazing and so very much “base humans are bizarre“ instead of the old sci-fi cliché of “base human is base alien”.
But yeah, there are a whole lot of them.
- Humans are determinators. Unstoppable and tireless monsters who can ignore broken bones, and whose biology is quite simply put terrifying on multiple levels.
- Humans are ancient giants, whose spaceship are often colonized by smaller species who can live for generations in certain parts of the spaceship before traveling away from there.
- Humans are galactic cats, hanging around on other species’ spaceships and including them in their “packs”.
- Humans are complete nutters with crazy science and utterly insane experiments, and the scientific leaps they make are a thing of wonder.
- Humans are impossibly lucky for as long as nobody tells them about it. They’re put in charge of everything with quotes such as “leadership”, when in actuality the aliens just want things to turn out fine despite the odds.
- Humans are casually selfless,
throwing their own lives away to save the lives of others for no
other reason than that “it was the right thing to do”. It’s so normal for them that heroics like it are kind of tossed aside when something “more interesting“ comes along a week later.
- Humans will laugh at their own injuries because they honestly consider them amusing.
- Humans will form emotional bonds
with literally everything.
- Humans will attempt to pet even the most infamously lethal creatures in the galaxy, because “it looked cute”.
- Humans will question literally
everything, for basically no reason other than “just because”. But is also fully inclined to believe people at the drop of a hat, despite the absurdity of their claims.
And then there are the more “aliens are not like us“-theories.
- Humans are the only creature with light-based senses, meaning that they perceive the world in an entirely mysterious way, filled with things like “color” and “the speed of light” and “transparency”.
- Humans are the only creature to ever develop a decent throwing-arm, and is as such the only one to instinctively comprehend the concept of “ranged combat”.
- Humans are the only creature with pattern-recognition, and will see familiar things in random patterns, as well as being the only species to understand “camouflage”.
- Humans are the only creature to reproduce sexually. Everyone else is creeped out by how this causes their children to mutate seemingly at random.
- Humans are the only creature with a story-based imagination, meaning that they basically hold the export-monopoly on all produced fiction in the galaxy.
Husband was looking for me all round the house so he could show me something he’d made but he couldn’t find me so he just shouted really loudly, “Fantasy and Sci-fi are the same genre!” and the rational part of my brain doing laundry was like “I’m not responding to a meme, wait where am I going—” as I ascended up the basements stairs like the wrath of god, and he just turned like “there you are” and I’m SO MAD THAT IT WORKED
this delights me
sci-fi episodes i want:
- ship’s computer crashes due to virus acquired during a porn download from a lower decks ensign
- firmware update was pushed out to the fleet, has vital error in the clock program that causes every computer to repeat 2300. translators have to explain to the enemy why everyone is an hour late to peace talks.
- unintelligble message is sent out into the void because someone’s pet cat walked across their keyboard. message is interpreted as a marriage proposal.
- universal translators break, everyone is reduced to hand gestures
- viewscreen has dead pixels in the upper left corner, drives the captain a bit bonkers
- space gps tells us to take a right where we should take a left. plucky recent academy grad on the graveyard shift realizes that this would take us into the sun and makes the course correction. ship’s computer advises her for two hours to make a u-turn when it is safe to do so
“siri, how do I land a space ship” is heard over the ship speaker system.
The densest people on the internet are the ones who say sci fi and fantasy are are getting too political. Why can’t we go back to the good old days of The Twilight Zone, with its various episodes about mob mentality and the danger of mass paranoia that totally weren’t about the Red Scare. Or Star Wars and its genocidal empire of racially homogeneous Aryan men. Or Dune with its religious tribal peoples who live in a desert that contains the galaxy’s most valuable resource and the wars with the foreign colonizers, that was purely from Frank Herbert’s imagination. Can you imagine how much Star Trek would suck if it was packed to the brim with ham-fisted allegories of every societal issue of the 20th century. Not like all this modern ultra-political stuff, like a woman hero.
The densest people on the internet are the ones who say sci fi and fantasy are are getting too political. Why can’t we go back to the good old days of The Twilight Zone, with its various episodes about mob mentality and the danger of mass paranoia that totally weren’t about the Red Scare. Or Star Wars and its genocidal empire of racially homogeneous Aryan men. Or Dune with its religious tribal peoples who live in a desert that contains the galaxy’s most valuable resource and the wars with the foreign colonizers, that was purely from Frank Herbert’s imagination. Can you imagine how much Star Trek would suck if it was packed to the brim with ham-fisted allegories of every societal issue of the 20th century. Not like all this modern ultra-political stuff, like a woman hero.