Dear internet, welcome to the first proper post from Starship Fabulous! Things are still in flux around here as we set up shop, and we’re totally open to suggestions for things you’d like to see on the blog. But for today, let’s gather round and talk about that most important of New Years’ topics: the advancement of the queer agenda over the last 12 months. It would take a bigger and more dedicated operation than us to cover *everything*, so here instead is a selection of stand-out moments in queer representation across a variety of media. Thanks to Kate Keen, Siân Fever, Jude Sandelewski and everyone else who chipped in with their suggestions.
Please join us in the comments below with your own picks!
Books/Comics/Short Fiction
2013 was a great year for women novelists writing about gender and sexuality. In science fiction, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie had twitter all a-buzz for months. It’s an ideas-y space opera thriller that pokes at, among other things, cultural notions of gender. Here’s a post from Kameron Hurley on its qualities. In historical fiction, Nicola Griffith’s Hild is the story of 7th-century St. Hilda of Whitby, and explores politics, class, gender, and sexuality in Anglo-Saxon Britain. In fantasy, there was the second instalment in Roz Kaveney’s Rhapsondy of Blood series, Reflections, a history-hopping adventure full of myth and queer heroines.
Queers Dig Time Lords
Some important anthologies were published, too: We See a Different Frontier, edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, is a postcolonial speculative fiction anthology, with several stories dealing with gender and sexuality and their intersections with race, culture and class. Aliens: Recent Encounters, edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, collects 32 reprints of alien-themed stories from recent decades, again with a strong showing for queer and feminist perspectives. In non-fiction, Queers Dig Time Lords, edited by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damien Thomas is ‘a celebration of Doctor Who by the queer fans who love it’, with queer readings a-plenty.
If it’s short fiction you want, check out this list (google spreadsheet) of queer speculative stories first published in 2013. A highlight is Benjanun Sriduangkaew, whose dazzling futures are full of queer love and interesting gender thoughts: try her final story of the year, ‘Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade‘. Another favourite is Alex Dally MacFarlane’s far-future genderqueer story ‘Found‘. Both of these were published by Clarkesworld Magazine, which has been doing a pretty good job with representation in the last year.
Comics
Two noteworthy webcomics, both in their second year in 2013, are O Human Star by Blue Delliquanti – a futuristic sci-fi comic about robots and gender – and Princess Princess by Strangely Katie – a fantasy comic about queer princess adventurers. Check them out! Also, long-running webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court introduced a relationship between two women! Woo!
credit: Strangely Katie
In printed comics, we (somewhat lazily) (who said that?) defer to The Advocate, who have kindly listed their Top 10 LGBT Moments in Comic Books and their Five of The Best LGBT Graphic Novels of 2013 – the latter including stories about human-android love, the lives of queer trans men, and a range of bisexual experiences.
TV
The 2013 TV show that garnered the most attention in terms of queer content was probably American prison drama Orange is the New Black. This is one we feel compelled to stick a caveat on – it’s been celebrated for its portrayal of a range of queer women, but also criticised for its race and class issues. Canadian science fiction series Orphan Black is a new take on the cloning trope, and features multiple characters played by Tatiana Maslany – including a lesbian scientist.
Ymir and Christa, Attack on Titan
The anime of the year was undoubtedly Shingeki no Kyojin/Attack on Titan. Set in a future where humans live in high-walled cities beset by giants, it features a multicultural cast of elite Titan-fighting teenagers – including plenty of cool female characters and a canon queer lady couple. There’s also a scientist character, Hanji, whose gender is deliberately left ambiguous by the author of the original manga.
Podcast
credit: Melissa Shaw
Exploding from seemingly nowhere all over tumblr in the summer, Welcome to Night Vale has actually been running since mid-2012 – but it was around the time that the show’s queer storyline came to the fore that it saw a massive surge in popularity. Coincidence or not, that’s pretty lovely. Night Vale is described by narrator and local radio host Cecil as “a friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep”. The tone is absurd and creepy and charming, but Cecil’s matter-of-fact queerness is played as one of the most normalising elements of the setting.
Games
While mainstream gaming is making steps in the represntation stakes, indie gaming seems to be where it’s at – and 2013 was a good year for output by independent devs. Christine Love released Hate Plus, a follow-up to her popular visual novel Analogue: A Hate Story, with similar LGBT and transhuman themes. Twine, a software that makes it easy for almost anyone to create text-based story games/interactive fiction continued to be popular – a personal favourite in twine games is the fairy-tale inspired The Sea is Another Story by Ruth Jenkins.
Gone Home
Gone Home is an interactive explorer story in which you return to your family’s home to find it empty, and have to piece together what happened. Without wanting to get too far into spoiler territory, one of the stories it starts to reveal is a queer romance that’s viscerally relatable if you were ever a starry-eyed teenage girl falling in love over Riot Grrl mixtapes.
Music
Our album of the year is unquestionably Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist r’n’b-soul-dance-rock jewel The Electric Lady, which follows her android alter-ego Cyndi Mayweather’s adventures as she rises to robot-Messiahdom. Monae has stated that her androids represent the racial and sexual ‘other’; there’s plenty to chew on here if you can stop dancing long enough to tease out the storytelling.
The Electric Lady
Meanwhile, if your favourite music genre is ‘Mythic genderqueer adventure spacefolk’ – and surely it is! – The Mechanisms’ 2013 album Ulysses Dies at Dawn is probably worth a look.
But enough from us – what were your favourite works and moments of the year?
Starship Fabulous 
[…] Hello! If you’ve come across me for the first time, please allow me to introduce myself: I write a lot of speculative things, but this year most of what I’ve had published is postcolonial science fiction with a space opera and cyberpunk bent. It’s been described as ‘dazzling futures full of queer love and interesting gender thoughts’. […]
[…] it’s got an interesting-sounding range of stuff on it, including a bunch included in our own 2013 queer media round-up – Nicola Griffith’s Hild, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and Janelle […]