20 of the best LGBTQIA+ works of science fiction

Bone Dance (Cover image via Orb Books)

10. Bone Dance

For all that everyone has talked about sexualities in science fiction, gender is a historically unexplored topic. That is to say, characters are more often set to identify as either female or male. But, that doesn’t mean science fiction is devoid of agender, genderqueer, androgynous, or otherwise non-binary gendered characters.

Take 1991’s Bone Dance, for example. Yes, this novel by Emma Bull is sometimes categorized as “urban fantasy”, but there’s plenty of technology and bio engineering to more than qualify the book for inclusion on this list.

It all centers on Sparrow, the book’s agender protagonist. Sparrow is a kind of trader (or, to the less sympathetic people they deal with, more of a hustler), dealing in pre-nuke artifacts from “old Earth”. They first awaken with no memory of the preceding three days and go on a kind of odyssey to figure out just what happened.

Along the way, Sparrow deals with both the technology of a war-ravaged, dystopian planet and some mysterious magical and religious practices in their city. A friend gives them a strange Tarot reading, followed by an encounter with a dead man who has apparently been inhabited by a loa (a Voodoo spirit).

Sparrow also crosses paths with the mysterious “horsemen”, who can seemingly jump from body to body while maintaining their own consciousness. Do they have anything to do with the war that has ravaged the Americas for decades?

Halfway through the book, it’s also revealed that Sparrow is a bio-engineered being. They are only halfway down their path to becoming “fully” human, a journey that takes up a fair amount of the second portion of the novel. In all, it’s a journey that is both energetic and delightfully deep.