What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Bisexual brown MC, brown aromantic secondary character, asexual nonbinary/third-gender secondary character, minor sapphic character, minor amputee character
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
Published on: 7th April 2026
ISBN: 9781250364746
Goodreads
Humanity has scattered around the universe, in fits and starts.
On hostile planets, isolated groups of settlers eke out hardscrabble lives, second class citizens to the network of massive ships who mark their only link to the greater galaxy. John, a doctor from one of these outlying worlds, and Sudharma, his distressingly handsome Jain translator companion, find a world of absurd alien biologies that dazzle the mind… and utterly backwards people.
John’s homeworld developed a communal, matriarchal society to cope with their deadly surroundings, but here, he can’t even go for a walk with a woman without provoking public comment from the powerful religious authorities. His very survival is dependent on maintaining his status amongst this closed, unwelcoming group whose future is not guaranteed, with terrifying Earth, under the thumb of the “aiyi”, developing a looming, alien presence and threatening them all.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~all the cool things are out of sight
~bugs that are mammals that are plants
~killing a tree makes you hetero
Here is the description this had on Netgalley when I requested it (and still has at the time of this writing);
From Cameron Reed, the acclaimed author of The Fortunate Fall, comes a soaring novel of queer hope and transformation, perfect for readers of Ann Leckie and Amal El-Mohtar.
On the planet Scythia, plants give birth to insects and trees can drag you to your death. Artificial monsters stalk the desert, and alien basket-men have wandered into town.
John Maraintha has been abandoned here, light-years from the peaceful forests that he loves.
The desert is harsh and the people in thrall to a barbaric custom called marriage.
He must find some way to make a life here.
But on Scythia, survival means transformation—and not everyone is willing to change.
Having now read it, What We Are Seeking is not a book I would describe as one of ‘queer hope’. And I am so tired of books promising that and just delivering a set-up as bad or worse than what we have in the real world right now.
Which, to be clear, is a failure (or lie) of the book’s marketing, not the author. It’s not Reed’s fault I went into this with the wrong expectations. But whose fault it is doesn’t change my reading experience, unfortunately. That being said, even if the publisher had not called this a queer hope book, I would not have enjoyed it. It was dull and depressing and did the thing of teasing me with seriously interesting things at the edges of the story, but focussing on other stuff I couldn’t care less about instead.
John is unwillingly dropped onto the planet Scythia, a dry, dusty environment populated by settlers from two different cultures, both of them deeply conservative. They don’t trust him because he comes from a matriarchal culture that practices free sex and doesn’t have marriage; he thinks they’re all insane because from where he’s standing, marriage is a barbaric practice. (Very little in the book proves him wrong.) John’s responsibility is caring for Sudharma, a deeply lovely man on Scythia to try and learn the language of the native aliens and determine if they’re another sentient species. John makes friends, learns a bit about the aliens and Scythia’s strange flora and fauna, and is peripheral to the tensions around a teenager who wants to take the vow to become a jess, a nonbinary gender found in the culture of some of the settlers.
And that’s kind of it. There isn’t a big plot, and there’s no impetus, no driving force moving the story along. On a line level, the prose is graceful and lovely; there’s some fantastic asexual and aromantic representation (not the same character, for once!); and the life that’s evolved on Scythia is nicely unique and weird. But the book itself drifts and waffles and meanders, introspective and philosophical rather than having a plot. And normally that wouldn’t be a huge problem for me; the anthropologist-esque eye John turns on the settlers is something I usually quite enjoy. But the settlers’ cultures are deeply boring, patriarchal and Christian and maddeningly conservative. The history and culture around the jesses was fabulous, but we got so little of it, and all of it via being lectured by the one jess character.
Scythia is boring and dry and the people living on it painfully familiar, and I was left longing to explore John’s world, or the delightfully strange culture of the star-ships, instead. I would have been very happy to read a book about jesses on their origin world. To have all this interesting worldbuilding dangled in front of me, but set the story on the dullest of all the worlds we hear about instead…wtf?
There are little hiccups of interest here and there – there’s Vo, the wonderfully odd human from mysterious Earth, joined in some way to the eldritch aiyi, who may just wipe out the humans on Scythia if the aliens turn out to be sentient. John’s relationship with her was refreshing and really fun; Vo is probably my favourite character in the book, functionally neurodivergent because of her connection to the aiyi, but still fully capable of connecting to and caring for other humans. And Sudharma’s quest to understand the basket-men – the aliens – was…intellectually interesting, even if it wasn’t gripping until very near the end of the book. But we barely glimpsed the aiyi, and what they and Vo could do; and the most fascinating aspects of the basket-men’s culture and understanding of the world were dropped on us in the very last pages, with no time to explore them or see them in action. Sudharma is concerned that the settlers might come to enslave the basket-men, but nothing happens in that direction (thankfully, but it still feels like a massive waste of potential plot). Sudharma is also prepared to alter his own brain to better understand the basket-men and their language, something John frets over for much of the book, but View Spoiler »
A big chunk of the book is devoted to the situation around Tali, the teenager who wants to become a jess. Iren, the adult jess, is very on board and supportive, but Tali’s culture isn’t the one that has jesses and there’s an enormous amount of queerphobic pushback. This is all tied in with how many people, especially those living on the star-ships, do not want jesses to exist at all, and definitely don’t want them to reproduce for fear of passing on the gene they believe makes people jesses. There’s a lot of exploring the patriarchal views of the settlers, and the currents around Iren and Tali, including Tali’s family, and eventually John helps uncover a deeply gross and evil conspiracy to keep jesses from existing on Scythia – but it’s a silent conspiracy, violent but invisibly so, and if you’re expecting some kind of dramatic overthrow of the Bad Guys, well, this isn’t that kind of story.
What kind of story is it? Honestly, I don’t know. I find it hugely depressing to look at far-future settings, thousands of years in our future, that are still homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic af. Sure, baby steps are made over the course of the book, but they are very much baby-steps: What We Are Seeking ends with a lot of grinding misery in the future of all our characters, with the promise that in a couple of generations things are going to get even worse when the sci fi tech eventually fails. Queer hope? What queer hope? View Spoiler » Like: thanks, I hate it! Every single bit of it!
And like I said: it’s so, so boring, so not only is this book not hopeful or inspiring, it’s not even entertaining. I really can’t emphasise enough how many amazing ideas and concepts were teased or glimpsed, only for the book to be about none of them. I cannot STAND storytellers doing this: stop it!
On a technical level, it’s great. The characters are very alive, leaping off the page; the prose is sleek and silken. On every other level, I have no idea what the point was. Fortunate Fall, Reed’s debut, was pretty grim, yes, but a) it presented itself as a dystopia from the get-go, so we knew what we were getting, and b) it took all its epic ideas and ran with them! What We Are Seeking is so much bleaker to me because it’s set so much further in the future, and it’s maddening because it seems to deliberately avoid its own coolest bits.
I genuinely want to know why so many people – authors, publishers, and reviewers – are happy with queer SFF that offers queer characters and readers crumbs, why they’re so quick to call stories like this hopeful. I do not know if Reed intended What We Are Seeking to be a book of queer hope, but I am side-eyeing hard all the reviewers calling this uplifting and inspiring and all the rest of that rot. It isn’t. The jesses are the only queer people allowed to exist openly in this setting, and they exist under sufferance: what kind of mental gymnastics are you doing that you think that makes for a happy ending? In real life, yes, change often happens in tiny increments, incredibly slowly – but this is set THOUSANDS OF YEARS IN THE FUTURE. And apparently a sizeable chunk of humanity has gone backwards when it comes to queer people being allowed to exist. How is that not depressing as fuck?
Just – urgh. There is no one I would recommend this to. It’s not fun, it only teases being interesting, and it’s bleak. I had to force my way through the second half. I should have just DNFed.
oh no! I loved this one. I loved it so much that I’ve read it twice already. I found it very Le Guin-ish, especially The Dispossessed, which is one of my favorite books. For me, that queer hope came from showing a parallel to the now followed by the planted seed of new beginnings–that so many children were ready to live as Jesses and that society would be changing because of a few people’s courage and the inevitability of the truth of their existence.
Ah, but you see, I can’t stand Le Guin either! Although that’s more an issue with her prose, I love her ideas.
I just can’t get behind stories where the world is more queerphobic than it is now, but I’m supposed to find it hopeful. That’s never going to work for me. Especially such a far-future sci fi. Yay, humanity has gone BACKWARDS, brilliant.
I’ve written half a dozen versions of this comment trying to phrase this right XD And it got angry, but I’m not angry at YOU. I want to be really clear about that!
But basically: asking me to find this book hopeful requires me to find it hopeful that for centuries/thousands of years, humanity went backwards. NOTHING about that is optimistic, and it really angers me that publishers et al want me to think of it that way. It’s throwing crumbs at queer readers and telling us to be happy about it. This story is only BARELY hopeful in a really tight context (and seriously, asking the wider population to accept that nonbinary folk exist seems like the bare minimum, not something to be excited about in 2026); the second you look at the wider worldbuilding, it’s anything but hopeful. (And that was entirely a writing choice that could have been mitigated pretty easily by minor changes in the setting, and actually I am mad at the author about that.) We don’t even see anybody’s queerness being accepted! The book ends before we see how everyone reacts to the new jess etc! Like – how can you call it hopeful without showing us at least some of the population being supportive/accepting? We don’t see any bigots change their minds or ANYTHING. Nothing’s really changed at all, except that yay they won’t sterilise jesses any more. ?!
And when there are so many other books to read, why on earth is THIS one that gets called hopeful? We get more queer sci fi all the time, where queer people are allowed to exist and be people. THAT’S hopeful and optimistic and wonderful. This is ‘oh, you should be happy people will let you exist’. I will not be grateful for that, that is OWED to everyone. That’s the baseline and I will not give points for it. I don’t want to be told ‘ah yes, queerphobes will begrudgingly allow that you exist, and there are generations of misery ahead of you, and you should be grateful for that much’. That makes me furious. I don’t understand why it doesn’t make you, and everyone else, furious too.
Gah. I really don’t mean this as an attack or anything. I just hate this framing/mentality SO MUCH. I’m sick and tired of it.
Putting aside the queer rights aspect of it, what do you think of the concept of humans facing society setbacks in the journey to space? Like a generation ship arrived on a habitual planet but the journey to get there was so long and rough that technology and scientific understanding has regressed to before it was when the ship left earth. That’s a plot point in a story I’m writing but I’m not wedded to it, and I’m curious of your thoughts.
I think it makes perfect sense for society to regress in a lot of ways under those conditions, and I have no objection to it from a writing perspective. My only issue is when someone presents me with that premise and wants me to find it hopeful!
My personal preference isn’t for stories where humanity regresses, UNLESS it results in societal changes that seem interesting to me – weird new religions, or maybe gender roles shift, or new family structures evolve, things like that. Too often it seems to be an excuse to write boring patriarchy stuff instead, or very fundamentalist new religions, and that’s been done to death, imo!
I would love to see a community that struggled with regression but didn’t devolve back to brutality and misogyny, that managed to hold on to more hopepunk values even as they lost things like scientific knowledge. I think that’d be really interesting, trying to work with the information/knowledge of a few centuries ago but with reasonably modern values. Maybe encoding some knowledge in religion, actually, that might be one way to hold on to some things. I don’t know, there’s lots of ways it COULD be interesting, but I rarely see it done thought-provokingly, alas! (If you know of interesting examples though, I’d love to hear about them!)
Aww, this was on my ‘upcoming 2026 books I’m really excited about’ list for a while now. [Because of course I have one of those.]
I guess the best that can be said is that the cover is fantastic; a work of art. I’d put it on my wall for sure.
It’s especially disappointing since ace and aro rep are still so hard to come by.
“(Very little in the book proves him wrong.)” Ha! That got a laugh out of me. I really like the way you write.
“dull and depressing”; yikes. I want an escape from reality when I read, not more of it!
Oh, well. There’s plenty of other books in my reading list. I’ve got loads of recommendations if anyone wants some.
I absolutely want your recs, and also would love to know what’s on your list of 2026 books you’re excited about! So curious to see how it lines up with my Unmissable list!
And delighted I made you laugh. It’s always so lovely to hear someone likes how I write :D
Here we go! The whole list of 2026 books I’m most excited about, plus books that are already released that I’m also excited about. This isn’t even close to half of what I’m reading this year. I have pages and pages of books to read this year. @.@
2026 Specific:
Aurora Vol. 2 by Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions
Trove by Danie Stirling
Espiritu by Aiden Thomas [1]
The Radiant Dark by Alexandra Olivia
The Disco at the End of the World by Nathan Tavares
As You Wake, Break The Shell by Becky Chambers
Code and Codex by Yoon Ha Lee
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie
Heaven’s Graveyard by Grace Curtis
The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell
The Goblin Crown by Brenna Raney
This Wretched Beauty by Elle Grenier
The Flame That Sings by Cedar McCloud [already read this back in January; absolutely loved it]
Startup Hell by Caitlin Rozakis
Previously Released:
White Space trilogy by Elizabeth Bear
Upon This Rock quartet by David Marusek [2]
Time to Orbit: Unknown duology + Child of A Wandering Star by Derin Edala
The Salvagers trilogy by Alex White
Craft Sequence series + Craft Wars series by Max Gladstone
City of Spires quartet by Claudie Arseneault
The Raven’s Trade duology by Marianne Gordon
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy
Lockwood and Co. series + Scarlett and Browne trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
Wolfish by Christiane M. Andrews
The Girl of Ink and Stars by Kiran Millwood-Hargrave
The Hands of the Emperor + At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanne Clarke
This Princess Kills Monsters by Rhy Herman
When the Moon Was Ours + Deep and Darkest Red by Anna-Marie McLemore
Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vaishnavi Patel [reading this one this weekend!]
The Saint of Bright Doors + Rakesfall by Vajjra Chandrasekera]
Fire From Heaven + The Persian Boy + The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
It Rhymes With Takei by George Takei
Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam
Uncomfortable Labels by Laura Kate Dale
More footnotes!
[1] Despite liking Cemetery Boys a lot, I’ve bounced off all of their other books, so I’m cautiously optimistic about this sequel.
[2] This is probably not your kind of book/series, since it does deal with religion and religious trauma to some extent. The premise of “otherworldly entity crash-lands in Alaska and disguises itself as an angel to appeal to a hardcore Christian family” is so wild, though, I’ve been excited to read it for months. It’s in the First Contact category [which right now has nothing else in it], but could also easily fit in Wonderful Weirdness. I try not to fret over my own genre labels, but it’s hard sometimes.
YESSSS, thank you for typing all these up for me!!! So many of these I’ve already read OR are on my tbr too, I commend your taste :D
I’m really bad at reading graphic novels, but the ones you’ve listed sound too great not to add to my tbr, so thank you for those especially!
No idea how long you’ve been reading my reviews, but I LOVED the first book of the White Space trilogy and can’t wait to get to the rest! The Craft Sequence, Hands of the Emperor, both Vajjra Chandrasekera’s books, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell are all favourites of mine too. OH, AND THE SALVAGERS TRILOGY! I know almost no one else who’s read those, so I hope you get to them and love them!
I loved the premise of Cemetery Boys but did bounce off it, and have with the author’s other books too, so I can’t comment there. But I’ve loved most of the Anna-Marie McLemore books I’ve read (most of their YA). Sapling Cage was fun, and the first book of the Raven’s Trade duology was wonderful (I admit I despised book two).
The Upon This Rock quartet I’ve never heard of before but was INSTANTLY obsessed with when I googled it, so thank you XD (I know you said it probably wasn’t my thing but nothing about that premise is off-putting to me, that just sounds epic)
Child of a Wandering Star is one I want to read for the r/Fantasy fantasy bingo this year – do you know it? The bingo I mean.
! I HAVE ALSO BEEN FRETTING OVER GENRE LABELS! I’ve been trying to create+assign new genre categories for my blog, and fretting over what to call what book XD IT SHOULDN’T MATTER BUT SOMEHOW IT DOES???
Auora was [and still is] a webcomic before it started getting print versions [Vol. 1 is Ch. 1-11, and Vol. 2 is Ch. 12-22], so here’s the link to the main site if you’d rather read it that way:
https://comicaurora.com/archive/
Yes, I read your review of Ancestral Night, and got even more excited about reading it! I do want to read Elizabeth Bear’s other books first, though, which could take a few months since I have so many other books to read. I hope you like Machine and The Folded Sky just as much.
If all goes as planned [which is never certain], I’ll be reading Vajjra Chandrasekera’s books this month, JS & MN and The Hands of the Emperor in July or August, and the Craft books in September. Salvagers might end up being delayed a while, since I’m still waiting on random Kobo sales for book 2 and 3.
Oh, that’s great, and you’re welcome! I’ll be reading all four in May, so if I end up reading them before you, I’ll be sure to let you know what I think.
Yep, I do know about the bingo challenge. Not something I really want to do, but I like seeing other peoples’ picks.
Exactly! It doesn’t matter except it totally does.
At this point I might as well share my whole book charts and list with you. :D It’s way too big for a comment post. Are google docs okay for you to read, though? If not, then I can send it in bits through email. The by-monthly charts probably won’t load properly in an email, but I can at least share the actual TBR list.
Thanks! I’m still bad at reading them even in webcomic form, but I appreciate the link :D
I’m a little o.o that you have a SCHEDULE for your reading! I’m such a mood reader, I can very rarely make myself read things to a schedule – though I try with advanced reader copies, obviously!
I WOULD LOVE TO SEE YOUR CHARTS! Yes, I can manage google docs just fine – you can send me a link via email? I have a release calendar I can share if you like, but I use amazon a lot for keeping track of releases – I have wishlists named for each month and add stuff there as I hear about it. It’s the only thing I still use amazon for XD
Such a big disappointment. I was really looking forward to this. It’s so hard to find ace and aro rep, much less both in the same story.
I do have a huge reading list for this year, with even more queer books than last year, so I’ve got plenty of book recommendations, if anyone would like some.
[I’m curious, though–how does killing a tree make someone hetro? Truly one of the oddest things I’ve read today, and I love odd things.]
I know! This was easily one of my top ten releases for the year, I was so hyped. I loved the author’s first book so much!
And yes please, I am ALWAYS looking for more recs, especially queer ones, so I would love it if you shared!
(The tree is an alien snake-tree, and by killing it the protagonist inadvertently leans into the community’s patriarchal idea of What A Straight Man Is, so they all decide he can’t possibly be a deviant homosexual if he was capable of killing it XD)
Oops, this comment was my attempt at somewhat re-organizing what I’d already said, so I put the sentence about recs here and in my earlier comment, just re-worded slightly. Oh, well.
An alien snake tree. Now there’s a brand new phrase.
I haven’t read the book so I can’t weigh in on that but I do love Ursula K Le Guin and I kind of wonder if folks are working from different definitions of hope. To me a story set in a future utopia where queerness is just accepted fact and nobody bats an eye isn’t hopeful. Hope is an action you take in reaction to hardship. In a utopia hope is absent because it’s unnecessary. I guess it’s interesting because hope is both an adjective and a verb. But yeah, to me “hopeful” means the act of survival. A re-wilding initiative leading a measurable increase in bird populations is hopeful. An entirely re-wilded world where birds thrive untroubled by outside complications is paradise but not hopeful. Hope is the thing that makes you start the re-wilding, not what you feel after it’s done. You don’t need hope after you’ve won you have satisfaction, peace, completion, joy. I think what you’re looking for is maybe joyful queer stories? What you need are books that celebrate the pleasures of queerness (not just sex but things like fulfillment and community and strangeness). Which are important! Just not what these books are. You need some queer joy books!
I’ve wondered about that too, if I’m just working with a very different definition of hope. I think you make a good point about how, technically, a utopia isn’t hopeful because hope isn’t needed any more. I also really like you making the distinction between queer JOY books and queer HOPE books – that’s a really excellent point and I’ll have to think about it!
I do think this particular book is still not hopeful, though. I just finished reading Shadow Man by Melissa Scott, which is very far from a utopia; intersex people are common but aren’t supposed to exist, and the whole book is about the societal tension of that. And the book doesn’t have a perfectly happy ending, but things are clearly moving in a positive direction; the fight isn’t over, but it’s not lost, either. We’ve seen societal progress over the course of the book, even if things aren’t perfect yet. What I also find important is that the setting of Shadow Man is an outlier; this is a far-future setting, but every other planet thinks they’re backwards for being queerphobic, these bigots are an exception in the context of far-future humanity.
In What We Are Seeking, we don’t see ANY societal progress. The teen who becomes a jess, this nonbinary gender role, wanted to become one from the start of the book, there wasn’t any struggle for them personally, it was just about waiting for their parents to give them their support. And the parents only hesitated because they were afraid for their kid, how everyone else would react – they themselves didn’t need to overcome any bigotry or anything. But the wider community doesn’t react to their becoming a jess at all, the book ends before we can see that. Nothing actually changes at all; jesses were legally allowed at the start of the book, just strongly disapproved of, and at the end of the book, they’re legally allowed but strongly disapproved of. We don’t see change, we don’t see improvement, not even improvement that’s pushed back against like in Shadow Man.
The more I think about it, the more I think you’re right about utopias not being hopeful in this context of hope. Inspiring, maybe, joyful, for sure, but not hopeful. But Shadow Man is hopeful – bitter and kinda bleak in so many ways, but there’s the promise that things will get better eventually. What We Are Seeking doesn’t (imo) do the same thing. And it would have been so easy to change that; we just needed to see some people, ANY people, grudingly tolerate the new jess, even if lots of other people didn’t, and that would have been like ‘well, not everyone gets it, but some do who didn’t yesterday, and that’s progress, that’s hope, slow but steady’. To see NO ONE changing their minds/tolerating/accepting anything is, in context, a weird writing decision that makes this solidly Not Hopeful.
I must ask: do you have your own blog? Or write reviews somewhere? Because you often give me galaxy-brain moments and I’d love to follow you if you write somewhere!
Ha, I used to write fiction (not well, I was young) and I kept a fandom blog long ago but then I ended up spending most of my 20’s sick and that screwed up my brain and the part of my brain that could write pretty much shut down. My doctors kept pushing me to take up journaling but the truth is I just absolutely loathe it. It’s supposed to have health benefits but it made me feel miserable and I kept hyper focusing on how much my handwriting has changed (I also had an arm injury two years ago that didn’t help at all) and then I discovered that a quick cheat to make page count (because the point was just to physically fill pages, my physical therapist told me to just write the alphabet if i couldn’t think of anything else) was to write about books.
Gradually, I discarded more of the journaling stuff until last year I got rid of my journal and replaced it with a notebook where I’ve only ever written about books. I got the idea for just a straight reading journal from Charlie Jane Anders talking about how Lessons in Magic and Disaster started as a relaxing journaling exercise to to help her sleep and I’ll always be grateful to her for inspiring me to quit the parts I didn’t like.
The upside of private journaling is I’ve been rereading The Magic of the Lost trilogy by CL Clark in preparation for reading the third one and I’ve written like 20 pages about how much I hate Princess Luca and probably most of that isn’t very fair at all but it doesn’t matter because no one can read it. (She would support Chuck Schumer as Senate leader, I can feel it.) What makes that relevant is that’s a setting that I think I’ve seen people call queernorm where gender equality is simply universal culture and nobody bats an eye at two women getting married or a lord deciding to become a lady but in a way it means the book isn’t about being queer at all. The whole trilogy is definitely a lesbian love story but because the fact that they are lesbians effects absolutely nothing it almost feels weird to tag it that way. The focus of the books is unquestionably colonization , the removal of gender politics from the equation simply allows the narrative to hone in on what interested Clark most while still being able to write about a romance I’m positive interested them very much.
On the other hand, I thought about the creation of Hopepunk after I wrote to you. Hopepunk was deliberately created to counteract the feeling that culture had given up on the future, and it’s goal was primarily to write depictions of positive futures without too much fuss about the steps to how we got there. That was meant to be hopeful, hope is in the name, and Diana Wynne Jones wrote that the whole point of fantasy is to allow ourselves to dream that change is possible. So you make a good point about there maybe being too many queer dystopias. I still think it’s a reaction to people wanting stories that tell them they will survive, but we should dream of better than survival.
I’ve had a bunch of therapists tell me journaling will help, but it just turns depressing or stressful on me too, so I feel you there. I had no idea Lessons in Magic started as a journaling exercise, but I’m glad you heard that so you could change how you journaled. I’m very jealous of people who keep reading journals, some of my friends do it too, but my hands aren’t up to writing that much, alas.
I think I see what you mean, about how a truly queernorm setting – it becomes odd to pitch it as a queer story, even if it is. I hadn’t thought of that before. It’s almost like…a lot of our concept of queerness is tied up in it being Othered? And if it’s not Othered, can it be said to be queer? It’s like the difference between saying lgbt versus queer – the latter often has, what, it’s a FEELING, a mindset, a philosophy, not just an alphabet soup of sexualities and genders, yes?
So for example, would it feel less weird to call Magic of the Lost sapphic or lesbian or lgbt, rather than queer? Is it just an issue of what words we use?
OR, is it that, in a fully queernorm setting, it’s not queer because – the culture/setting doesn’t differentiate between straight and not? It’s like – if you had no labels for different sexualities, if we just shrugged and said it’s all human, it’s all just people, then can it be said to be queer? I’m struggling to articulate this but I’m hoping you get what I mean?
I’m not sure I get what you’re saying about hopepunk. I’m very big on hopepunk, personally, and I think you could have a dystopian setting in a hopepunk story – Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk springs to mind. Because hopepunk is about (to simplify immensely) being good even when it’s hard, and that effort succeeding. So it’s not that hopepunk can’t deal with big dark themes or anything. Quite a lot of dystopian stories could probably be considered hopepunk, actually.
Yes! That’s what I’m trying to say – we should dream of better than survival. That is the PERFECT way to put it, thank you! Obviously there is very much a place for survival stories, and I understand why some people want them. My issue is when survival stories are misrepresented (at least imo) as more-than-survival. Don’t tell me it’s a hopeful story when it’s actually about survival. I mean, yes, survival IS hopeful, but if you tell me this story is supposed to make me hopeful about the future then it had better be about more than survival, you know?
I don’t think a homophobic setting precludes a story being hopeful. Showing me a terrible setting where change happens can make me hopeful that our world can change for the better too, I get that. But in that case, make it some other world, not our world’s future. It just isn’t inspiring to tell me that in however many centuries humanity STILL won’t be past this nonsense.
I don’t know if you’ve encountered the Magic of the Lost books but that’s exactly how it is. In the book Touraine and Luca are never referred to as lesbians because all of the societies of that world don’t recognize anything different about a romantic relationship between two women or a man and a woman. The big separating barriers in that setting are class and race, and they’re huge barriers, but gender is basically just fashion. Not even the job market is divided by gender. I can’t remember if any men show up to public gatherings in gowns but I don’t think they gender their clothing shops either. It’s just not considered a dividing factor amongst people. The scandal in Touraine in Luca’s relationship is that they’re Belladairan and Qazali, but I think the thing that primarily offends everyone is that Touraine used to be a soldier, worse a *conscript*, meaning she had no promotion opportunities. No one ever really gets over it either. I would definitely describe the novels as sapphic.
What I meant about hopepunk is that years and years ago I was reading a lot of fiction websites (back before most of them changed up their formatting and made them absolutely unusable) and I remember at the time there were two major concerns. First books about the future had pretty much dried up, what was coming out was all heavily dystopian, nobody was imagining positive futures any more (this would have been around 2010). The trends at the time were all about “grimdark” and “realism”. The second was people were arguing that every book needed to address the reality of climate change, because at the time books were still largely ignoring it unless the book was about climate change specifically, people wanted to see climate change as part of the background reality of life. These essays eventually morphed into the genre of hopepunk, a deliberate counter to grimdark, and an effort to introduce climate positivity into science fiction.
So I guess that’s the two kind of hope. There’s the hope of a positive example, something that just introduces the idea that the world could be different. Then there’s the equally valid hope of seeing people over come the worst of the worst and still remain themselves. The kind of hope you need probably depends on where you are in your life. I’m a bit more towards the latter than the former but to each their own. “A Half-Built Garden” is probably the most powerful blend of the two I’ve ever personally seen but a book like that is kind of a special event.
I could go off here about “The Homeward Bounders” by Diana Wynne Jones and all the negative aspects of hope but I probably shouldn’t. I’ve noticed this thing strips out the paragraphs when it sends notifications.
I read the first one, Unbroken, so I remember what you mean, that it’s a class issue not a sexuality/gender issue. Which was awesome!
A Half-Built Garden is one of my all-time favourite books, and I agree it’s pretty unique, and does something that is incredibly difficult to pull off.
I think I understand what you mean, the hope of a positive example vs hope of survival/surviving the worst. I do still think that lots of examples of the latter don’t do it well; and I also think that if you market a book as optimistic and hopeful, the impression you are creating is not hope-as-survival. I don’t think that’s how most people understand hope, outside of this kind of context where we’re specifically discussing different kinds of hope.
Or maybe I mean, hope-as-survival still needs to be…inspiring? I’m not sure that’s the right word for what I mean, but I can’t think of a better one. But I think you understand what I mean anyway: just showing me people surviving in a dystopia, for example, is not intrinsically hopeful. I don’t think. You need to show me that they still have lives worth living. Bang Bang Bodhisattva by Aubrey Wood is a great example I think – you have a biracial trans MC and her polycule, living in a pretty bleak future. But there is still joy and laughter and love, to the point that the book does not come across as bleak. Instead the feel is very much – we can have joy even when the Big Picture is terrible.
I think THAT is what I require from hope-as-survival. Or survival-as-hope. Show me that it’s WORTH surviving. A lot of survival-as-hope stories do not give me that. What We Are Seeking was very close to that, we saw John building a life for himself that he cared about and found fulfilment in, but then it nose-dived around the ending (the aliens, the loss of the one character going travelling before she dies, not seeing ANY of the community accept the new jess bar the one teen who had a crush on them). Some of that will always be down to the reader – what someone else thinks is worth surviving for might not meet my standards, etc. But I can’t twist my mind in ANY shape that lets me understand seeing this particular book as optimistic.
Homeward Bounders is not something I’ve read, so if you have the spoons I would love your thoughts on it actually? From what you’ve said I don’t know if you mean it’s something you recommend I read or if I should stay away from it XD
I had this long thing written and the dog I’m dogsitting climbed onto my keyboard and closed the window so I’m trying to re do it (I’d missed doggy dinner time so this was fair).
It’s hard to know whether or not to recommend Homeward Bounders. It’s extremely 1980’s from a different age of children’s literature entirely. It’s on my mind because it’s about a group of eldritch beings, known only as Them, who take over a bunch of worlds in a multiverse for the purpose of using them to play grand strategy games against each other. Their symbol is the anchor, which stands for hope. They use the magic behind the very concept of hope as a means of binding all the peoples of the worlds to their will. They do this through the demigod we call Prometheus, who is bound to an anchor by magical chains which also bind the worlds one the other. They tell Prometheus that one day a Homeward Bounder (their name for game pieces/people who are removed from play because they’ve discovered Them and have been sent into eternal exile between worlds as punishment) will free him, this bit of hope is enough to keep him magically bound. No one who believes anywhere in their heart that following Their rules will get them something can move against Them. Only a person who has completely discarded hope, which is to say the belief that playing the game and following the rules could eventually work for them, can touch Prometheus’s chains and reach Their stronghold. It’s a story about a kid who has to realize the system has screwed him and the only answer is to burn it to the ground, even if that leaves him in a fate worse than death situation personally. Book doesn’t soften it either. Jamie gives up everything he wants for the sake of the worlds and has to live with it, essentially forever. The last line of the book is one of the most genuinely despairing sign offs I’ve ever read. I’ve always taken it as a response to the Thatcher government.
Have I mentioned how very 1980’s this book is? The intended audience age is about 12. The tone of the book is very light in spite of the subject matter and there’s a lot of topics a modern middle grade book would probably avoid. Like a lot of the worlds in the multiverse practice some form of slavery. One of the main characters is a slave and the book addresses this as part of his personal journey somehow without ever introducing the idea of abolition. Joris, the enslaved person, adores his master but gradually admits (under heavy influence from Jamie) that the idea of being owned like a thing is inherently offensive and demands his freedom, his owner (Konstam) immediately acquiesces and admits that he’s been secretly building up a bank account for Joris on another world so he could flee their world when he turned 18. So it’s a happy ending but no one mentions the fact that Konstam is still from a society that cheerfully owns slaves and maybe there are multiple systems that need to be burned to the ground here. I do enjoy the book, it means a lot to me, but I’m not going to pretend to anyone it doesn’t have massive problems. Like I haven’t even touched on the 1980’s misogyny. I really really like the main three cast members, Jamie, Helen and Joris, but do I recommend the book to you personally…. no?
Hi, I found this review as I was pondering what to write in my goodreads review, and while I don’t agree with you 100% I *have* taken a star off my rating of the book.
I’m a LOT older than you are, old enough that I still feel like “any story where the queers don’t die is hopeful”–I helped run an AIDS Hotline in the 80s, y’know? But now that you mention it, I see exactly what you mean.
And it goes further than that, to the worldbuilding as it becomes clear in the whole second half of the book, especially as the issues with population growth are brought up. Why are the communities on Scythia apparently structured like suburban America, with single-family homes? Why aren’t Laura’s older children living nearby, with their children, like normal pioneers doing subsistence agriculture? Where *are* they getting the materials, if they’re NOT doing subsistence agriculture?
In many ways, John’s culture feels more real and fleshed-out than the culture on Scythia, I have a better sense of how people fit together to live together & raise children.
Though even there, there’s still a lot of weirdness. Like when birth control comes up, and John mentions “silphium” as though that’s the only possible botanic source, when most of our sex hormone meds start by chemically modifying sweet potatoes, yams, or soybeans–and if they’re doing any kind of medical production, making sure their plant-derived medications have reliable strength, etc., they should be able to use them.
But the thing is, of course, since the lives of Laura & the other women aren’t completely dominated by the number of children they’ve had, they’ve obviously been using birth control of some sort all along. It doesn’t have to be chemicals, it could be oral sex!
The upshot is, when Reed switched to writing more about the Scythian colony & how it worked, it worked less well for me … and the more I think about it, the less well it works. Thank you so much for giving me so much to think about!
To be honest, one of my favourite responses to any review I write is that it made someone thoughtful, regardless of whether or not they agree with me. So thank you for telling me, and also for writing out such a long comment about it! (Speaking as someone with disabled hands, I always recognise the effort that goes into that.)
It is easy to see why anyone who lived through, or even was affected by afterwards, the AIDS crisis would see any level of queer survival as hopeful. And if you’ve read the other comments on this review, you’ve seen me grasp how that works: survival IS hopeful. But I resent modern marketing efforts calling a book hopeful when they specifically mean survival-as-hope, because I don’t think that’s what most of us expect when we hear that a book is hopeful. That part’s not on the author, that was entirely the publisher.
Oh I SO agree, John’s homeworld was much more fleshed-out! And interesting, to me. That was a big part of what I meant when I said Scythia is deeply boring to me – the anthropologist-esque approach of the storytelling would have been fine with me IF the cultures involved had not been cookie-cutter Western surburbia. That’s just lazy worldbuilding. Humans living exactly the way we do in the modern West, centuries or thousands of years from now??? Come on. Bad worldbuilding AND boring for me as a reader. I can watch sitcom reruns if that’s what I want to see, you know?
I did not know sweet potatoes etc are a source of sex hormone meds! For some reason that delights me. But yes, a lot more research and detail could have gone into things like the medicine and/or family planning/structuring. Which might have been easier had Reed created a culture not puritanically unable to talk about sex where a stranger (John, and thus the reader) could hear about it.
I remain baffled that Reed chose to write about Scythia when every other setting we heard of seemed much more interesting. Very weird writerly choice.
You’re so welcome, thank YOU for writing this out (and especially for teaching me about the sweet potatoes!)