20 of the best LGBTQIA+ works of science fiction

Shadow Man (Cover image via Tor Books)

6. Shadow Man

One of the greatest debates in science fiction is just how much real-world science creators need to include in their work. Or perhaps it’s not so much a debate as a kind of line, a way to denote preference and difference. There are the proponents of “hard” science fiction, which plays close to the rules of physics, astronomy, geology, and other sciences that are already known to us. Think Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Red Mars novel is the height of the convention.

Then, there’s so-called “soft” science fiction. Here, writers are freer to play with the genre beyond the bounds of science. That means that problems such as how to travel faster than light aren’t really problems at all. At the very least, they don’t produce the kind of barriers and twists that you might expect.

In the world of the Melissa Scott’s 1995 novel Shadow Man, faster than light travel has begun to mess with human gender and biological sex. In order to survive these trips, humans must take a special supplement.

The gender of Hara

However, this same drug has also greatly increased the number of intersex births. Soon enough this leads to a wide variety of body types and notions of gender. Among the Concord worlds, there are five recognized sexes: fem, herm, man, mem and woman.

One world, Hara, has been cut off for many generations. Though Hara has since been reunited with the other planets in the Concord system, it still retains a two-gender structure. Moreover, gender is marked more by expression and performance of gender roles, rather than biological traits. On Hara, people can legally switch their gender, but only from male to female. This is exceedingly strange to off-worlders, who can’t quite grasp the concept.

This is only the setup for the story of Shadow Man, which follows members of different societies as they navigate Hara’s re-entry into the Concord system. It’s a fascinating take that makes gender and sexuality front and center in the story.