(This is a long post. If you just want my review and not my commentary, stop before the spoiler breaks.)
People keep saying Emily Skrutskie’s space opera adventure BONDS OF BRASS is basically Finn/Poe fanfic, and I disagree. Oh, the pedigree is there, but this story has a much deeper….birthright, if you will.
If you don’t know what Finn/Poe is, I cannot and won’t help you. Employ Google-Fu to understand just what Disney *could have had* with two beloved characters in its Star Wars portfolio and chose not to.
BONDS OF BRASS is what you might get if FIREFLY, the BLACK PANTHER movie, and DUNE got smashed one night in a greasy little dive bar and drunkenly cooked up a M/M space opera adventure.
I’m not going to rehash the story from the blurbs, which by themselves should get you to PREORDER THIS BOOK.
I’m also not going to indulge in overt spoilers in this review.
Because it’s YA the romance between Ettian and Gal doesn’t get too graphically physical, and that’s a good thing. It allows more time for what we fanfiction shippers love best: the psychological beats of a great romance. The highs, the lows, the hard choices, exultant screams, black moments, and forged-in-fire realizations. The good stuff.
There’s a FIREFLY homage in here that is so perfect it made me sniffle in joy and go look for fresh strawberries.
Ettian and Gal’s banter is priceless, and almost always serves two purposes in the story, buying them time to hatch daring escapades while humanizing them even more to readers.
Skrutskie’s writing is clear, vivid, and fast-paced. Some readers have complained that there’s too much political machination in the book, but that is the core of the plot. Others thought there wasn’t enough worldbuilding. For a YA space opera, I thought this book hit the right balance.
There are complaints that Ettian is an unreliable narrator. I would point out he’s a 17-year-old with deeply-buried PTSD from horrific events witnessed early in life. Even acknowledging those events could have gotten him killed in the place of (relative) safety he found.
By the second or third chapter, without reading the last chapter to confirm, I knew exactly what Ettian’s Big Secret would be. I wanted to see how Skrutskie got there, and how her characters dealt with all the ramifications of that reveal.
I thought it was a satisfying first novel in the planned trilogy, and a great experiment boldly taken by the author, agent, and publisher. Along with C.S. Pacat’s CAPTIVE PRINCE series, it adds legitimately well-told and produced LGBTQIA themed stories to modern science-fiction and fantasy publishing.
(End of review)
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And now for the rant portion of this post: why the hell is this trend considered a shiny new thing? And who is at fault for the delay? And can we trust the publishing industry gatekeepers now that they’ve discovered LGBTQIA and #Ownvoices work *sells*?
Gay and bi protagonists in tolerant SFF universes are not new. From the late sixties to the mid 2000s, there have been a lot of writers telling these stories in mainstream SFF publishing. Brilliant authors like Tanith Lee, Jo Clayton, CJ Cherryh, Tonya Huff, Diane Duane, Michelle West, Lynn Flewelling, Ellen Kushner, Sherwood Smith, Melissa Scott, Judith Tarr, Andre Norton, Jim Grimsley, Jacqueline Carey…I could fill another three pages with novel and short story writers who did this.
The genre of Paranormal Romance (PNR) is another commercial area where romance & fantasy combined to groundbreaking effect, and where LGBTQIA characters are making more breakout appearances from the genre’s heterosexual norms.
There is significant overlap in published professional SFF, PNR, & Romance novelists, and fanfiction writers, the latter having really carried the banner of legitimizing and exploring LGBTQIA and other marginalized characters. Over the last 20 years, fanfiction is where many of the groundbreaking and glorious stories have been told. Grudgingly, the pro community recently acknowledged one of the largest fanfiction sites as having a profound literary and scholarly impact on the genre.
But mainstream SFF publishers were getting more timid, and shied away from getting too graphic with ‘gay’ books.
Mainstream Romance publishers were even more cautious of alternative sexualities in romance. (As recently as the early 2000s, the biggest romance authors’ organization in the world proposed a statement that romance should be between one man and one woman. That resolution failed, but the lingering fallout turned into a war that may yet tear the organization apart.)
That left digital erotic romance small-press publishers to go all-out in combining romantic, erotic, SFF, and gay themes.
Sometimes, sadly, with plot sacrificed to maximize the number of graphic sex scenes in a book. Romance writers who came to M/M fiction often didn’t have a background in reading science fiction and fantasy, so their worldbuilding could be sloppy or nonexistent, or they struggled to reinvent plot wheels that SFF writers had managed deftly decades earlier.
Even more sadly, with little marketing and promotion, that left most of these books to earn relatively small royalties for their authors.
But what they had in droves were enthusiastic readers who navigated social media effortlessly, who marshaled themselves as volunteer marketers, who read and loved stories, and spoke about them.
Now that mismanagement, attrition, and market forces are toppling many small-press erotic romance publishers, there’s suddenly room in the mainsteam for these books, authors, and readers.
Now that there’s commercial money in it, SFF publishers and literary agents are lining up new authors and novels showcasing alternative sexualities and marginalized characters.
They are courting fanfiction writers into providing original content.
Part of me is thrilled: I get to read a whole new generation of great books!
Part of me is deeply angry and skeptical. Did these agents and even publishers not know or remember the legacy of the authors I listed above? Will they treat the new generation of authors with the same blunt greed and expediency shown toward their literary ancestors?
I have skin in this game. I tell space opera and planetary romance stories with LGBTQIA characters. I’m out of the running on querying agents and Big Five publishers, because my works are all linked in one big series; now that two of those works have been published via small-press, they aren’t debut catnip anymore. For the whole series, I have no other options than small-press or self-publishing. If I write an unrelated standalone or series, I want to see who is trustworthy to manage it before I query.
I can only hope that the agents and editors investing in this new surge of ‘unconventional’ stories do so with longterm care for their authors and properties.
We can be a Golden Age, instead of a trendy Gold Rush.