We’re all just trying to relate.

Active in the community

I have more favourite authors than favourite books. I’ll read the book of a favourite author just because they wrote it, not because I’m necessarily interested in the book’s subject.

I saw the following question in an author interview: ‘You could’ve dealt with these themes in a piece of realism: why did you choose sci-fi?’ I’m thankful for the author’s honest response: ‘I like sci-fi.’ When people proclaim that ‘We need intelligent horror/fantasy/sci-fi/weird stories’, when you remove the genre, they’re right.

Fiction writers—people who make shit up as a profession—are often “forbidden” from writing in genres they aren’t known for. You might get better material from non-savants who don’t know how to conform.

How is speculative fiction a clearer label of anything? All fiction speculates: none of it happened. I’m not being facetious. Genre-labelling may well stem from the desire to feel part of a community, to create an identity to defend wherever possible. This is YouTube comment-level anathema.

My audience is not a fan of a genre but of me as a writer. This is a tougher way to go. I’ve sent loads of stories loads of places and can confidently tell you that the main issue I face is that of genre.

I hope one day my writing gets widely recognised for what about it is unique. For now I receive a lot of messages dismaying my failure to fit, but I crack through sometimes, and if I do this enough, the dismay will become celebration.

I went to this wine-tasting once: a guy came round the tables with various bottles and talked about the vintage and the year etc. One woman asked if the red wine she was drinking would be considered science fiction. While waiting for his answer, I asked myself this same question. I said, ‘This wine is science fiction’, ‘This wine is horror’, ‘This wine is fantasy.’ I couldn’t change the taste. I forget the expert’s answer, only that he ended his response with ‘It’s just like anything, really: you can get as geeky about this stuff as you like.’

Passive in the community

I recently sent a story to a publisher looking exclusively for stories from “Women, queer, trans and POC writers.” I probably shouldn’t have. After fifteen I thought I was done getting called queer and now here I am doing the work myself. The term to me implies I would have anything illuminating to say about LGBT people, because what else about me as an author would have me at a disadvantage if not that something about my minority had percolated into my stories?

I don’t want to be granted entry to a community I know nothing about and therefore cannot represent. I guarantee the community has no interest in me. “Community” has started to read “animosity” for me. We rarely mean anything offline by it.

I was once advised to tell an NHS psychologist I was gay so I could get “bumped up the waiting list”, which is British slang for shagging your psychologist (not quite as good as “badgering the witness”, which is having a wank while on jury duty.) I was so repulsed by the idea that I didn’t even end up going.

The outer appearance of a dude gets me invited to guys’ nights out; the inner lack of attraction to the opposite sex allows me more intimate friendships with women. I tune out countless references, implied or otherwise, to heterosexual sex, on a daily basis. But it suits me better to live in a world that does not as frequently compete for my attention. If anything the gay experience has suited me quite well, but I don’t have a non-gay one to compare it with.

Most people aren’t as tall as this guy, so it doesn’t make sense to design environments for his size. He clearly accepts that with good grace and humour.

Gay relationships in fiction give me the same intuitive heart swell of connection that straight people receive from the default relationship type depicted. Do we only engage with art to see ourselves in it? Don’t we enjoy considering how other people live? I don’t have to have an unwanted pregnancy to understand how that might impact someone’s life.

Art exists only if the following is true: we don’t need to be it to gain understanding from it.