fffriday | Entries tagged with science fiction

If I had a nickel for every sci-fi adventure graphic novel I've read that started out as a webcomic and featured a young lesbian protagonist running away in search of the girlfriend she was separated from, finding aid and a new home on a spaceship piloted by an older mixed-race butch4butch couple engaged in an itinerant profession, [takes a deep breath] I would only have $0.10 but it's funny that it happened twice.

The first is Hannah Templer's ongoing series Cosmoknights, which I've written about previously on my personal journal.

The second is Tillie Walden's completed On a Sunbeam, which was actually published in print form quite a few years ago -- I just hadn't seen it because I'm casually oblivious and it was shelved in the YA section. But I took a dip round there before my recent roadtrip and I'm glad I did! While I was ultimately left wishing that it had dug a lot deeper into some of the interpersonal conflicts and worldbuilding elements, it was a fun and aesthetically-stunning read that made great narrative and visual use of non-linearity.

Despite the amusingly shared elements, the two comics really read very differently from one another; Cosmoknights tends more toward straightforward adventure with lots of id-forward thrills, while On a Sunbeam embraces a much dreamier, bildungsroman-y vibe. On balance, I'm more into the former, but YMMV!

Both comics are still available online in full :)

hebethen

(Novellae?) (It's still Friday somewhere, right?)

I recent(ish)ly read a couple of sci-fi novellas featuring f/f couples and enjoyed both, each for different reasons!

The first was Malka Older's The Mimicking of Known Successes, a murder mystery set on Jupiter, featuring an academic and a detective who had dated, then broken up, when they were younger. Being a book by Malka Older, there's of course a bit of thinking about systems and institutions and situations where there may not be a right answer (but there definitely are plenty of wrong ones).

The worldbuilding was, I thought, presented in a way which would not excessively put off either "jump right in"-style enthusiasts like myself nor those who prefer a more explicit style, and the dynamic between the two leads also struck a satisfying balance between conflict and comfort. I found it a fun read and hope there will be more about these two.

The second novella was Lee Mandelo's Feed Them Silence, a near-future hard sci-fi story featuring a married couple who are going through a really, really rough patch. Our POV character is a workaholic neurobiologist who's been neglecting her home life; her wife is an anthropologist who's sick of her shit and also feels that her current research -- putting a special implant inside a wolf's brain so that a human can "see" from the wolf's perspective -- is unethical and not an effective approach to conservation.

This was a difficult story to read -- the arguments were very real, our POV character often very wrong, the sense of impending doom with the wolf research project appropriately icy and foreboding. I found it well-crafted but very dark in a realistic way -- not grimdark or utterly hopeless, but very uncompromising. The well-written wolf POV sections only made it harder!