rec me more things to read/watch/etc

[eruthros]

Yuletide nominations came up so fast this year that I didn't have time to finish (re)reading/watching/listening to all the things I wanted to finish before nominations, so I have set this whole weekend aside to check things out and decide what to nominate. It's just me and Mark O'Brien's poems and N.K. Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and Sleep Dealer and Whale Rider and that vid about how Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki broke up because Steve Nash would be able to fly with Amar'e Stoudemire. (Which was totally my mid-aughts basketball love story involving many sexy assists, but maybe I should nominate the 2007 Warriors team instead? That was a pretty great year, and J-Rich and Baron Davis were just awesome.) Decisions are hard guys.

And because I apparently don't have enough to re-read/watch/listen to (hahaha), I thought I would ask for some recs.

The criteria:
If I'm going to read/watch/listen to it before nominations are over, I need to be able to get it from my local small bookstore or library or netflix, or I need to be able to ahem it. (If it's something awesome that I can't get that way, tell me anyway and I'll see if I can find it before signups. Or I'll put it on next year's list.)

It should be created by chromatic or disabled or queer folks, or include chromatic or disabled or queer characters.

Things I like:
Speculative fiction! I like spaceships and robots and evil computers and good computers and aliens and AUs and space opera and time travel and clones and telepathy.

Stories that think about bodies. I really love it when things like shapeshifting make a difference in how people think about their bodies, or when there's a real sense of bodies moving through space, or double-embodiedness when people are connected to robots by cables, or whatever.

Nifty worldbuilding. And sources get bonus points if there are complicated politics and multiple religions and internal struggles and things.

Apocalypses and post-apocalypses.

Canonically kinky attitudes.

Things I don't like:
Celluloid Closeting. Or the equivalent done to chromatic or disabled characters. Nobody should end up dead or evil.

Vampires. I'm so done with vampires. Also succubi, and most demons, and just generally I'm less interested in supernatural themes.

Srs bzns real-life grittiness. Unless it's on a spaceship.

Heterosexual love and/or babies as the answer to all speculative fiction plot problems. If a book suggests that heterosexual love is going to save the world, or that there's hope for THE FUTURE now, I am likely to throw it across the room. Ditto any book that suggests a return to "natural" gender relations, "natural" states of being human, "natural" politics or whatever.

Comments

[trobadora]

The Island in the Sea of Time trilogy has a black lesbian heroine.

[eruthros]

Oh, cool! I'll check those out.

[thefourthvine]

Have you read The True Meaning of Smekday? I am totally a broken record on this book, but it's fun! Funny! Fabulous! Intelligent! With humorous pictures! And an alien named J.Lo! And it is that rarest of YA (but not that kind of YA - no one worries about kissing, what with the aliens taking over and having to save the world and everything) beasts: SF with a mixed race female heroine. And no guy there being manly, unless you count J.Lo, who is not equipped to be manly, since he's a three-foot-high alien. (From a race with seven genders, so "he" is probably the wrong word.)

[eruthros]

That sounds awesome! I've seen a lot of people rec that in passing, I think, but that sounds like I really do have to check it out.

[marina]

"Lost Girl" - Canadian urban fantasy show with two girl BFF detectives who fight crime and kill monsters and one of them is a bisexual succubus. By bisexual I mean she has IN CANON a male love interest and a female one. That's not counting all the random threesomes she (gleefully) finds herself in. Yes, I'm serious.

Seriously, I get the succubi hate, but trust me, you'll want to at least give this a try: here's a primer (with ahem links) and here's a fanvid for checking-out purposes. Only 4 episodes aired so far!

[eruthros]

Oh man, I think your earlier posts sold me on Lost Girl even though I'm so sick of vampires etc. Because, threesomes and canonical bi characters!

[ryca]

I fail at ahem... do you have any other tips for finding this show? I'm so curious now!

[marina]

Leave your email after the beep and some ~other ways~ will magically find their way into your inbox.

[ryca]

Why thank you! Without the spaces, it's "r y c a 1 3 AT g m a i l DOT c o m".

[marina]

Sent!

[gloss]

Agents of Atlas! One of my favorite comics. A six-issue miniseries, then 12+5 more issues, about a team of mid-50s SF comics characters - including Gorilla Man, an Atlantean sea princess, the goddess of love, and a sentient robot - who fight a vast conspiracy that isn't what it seems. There are secret empires and talking dragons, and the team is led by a Chinese-American federal agent named Jimmy Woo.

Basically: the comic revives some characters actually published in the 1950s, when comics were trying to find their post-Code feet, and imagines that they reunite from the team they had formed to save Eisenhower. So it's fairly meta in terms of its stock characters and pulp legacy, which appeals to me. The author and artists are white and Latino, and the work engages with Orientalist stereotyping fairly successfully (and never totally failishly though it could sometimes do better), but, godDAMN. Jimmy Woo is an amazing hero and just utterly great. And there's no romance, just fantastic ensemble teamwork and constructed-family stuff.

Obtaining it can be aided, if you're interested. *shifty*

[isagel]

I don't know about Eruthros, but I think this sounds deeply awesome! *wonders about the shifty obtaining*

[gloss]

Sorry for the delay - I made a sharing post here. I hope you enjoy!

[eruthros]

That sounds great, I'm absolutely interested.

[gloss]

I hope you enjoy! Here!

[starlady]

These sound awesome! Is there a way to *ahem* them?

[gloss]

Oh, yay! They are ahemmable, but I also have a sharing post to which you're welcome. <3

[starlady]

Oo, thank you!

[octette]

A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey. It has a little bit of "now things will be better" at the end, but only for the characters themselves, rather than for the whole world. It's a near-future speculative fiction first contact novel set in Canada, with crime, real life grittiness, and a lot of internal struggles. The queer, polyamorous protagonist suffers from depression; her queer best friend, an artist, is physically disabled (and a wheelchair user). They live in a shared house with several other adults, discuss politics (and the politics of sharing); most of the characters are queer and/or chromatic. The author herself is a queer Canadian poet.

There is a romance (and a more-upbeat-than-not ending), but it's emphatically not a "romance novel."

It's one of my favorite books in the entire world, and I recommend it whenever I think people will enjoy it. The author also wrote a well-received (but inexplicably poor-selling) fantasy novel called Black Wine -- also queer, gritty, stark, amazing.

[octette]

er. i just realized, reading everyone else's suggestions, that i misread part of your entry!

so, to be specific: there is zero implication in the book that heterosexual love and/or babies will save the world/future -- but there is a whole lot of people making connections with each other and many of the characters espouse a "make your own family" kind of philosophy.

[eruthros]

I love found-family and making connections! The novel sounds really amazing, and it contains many things that I like. I shall try to find it post-haste.

[sophinisba]

I link you to my comment on the Yuletide Nominations post at dark_agenda where I mention three movies about chromatic women that are all available from Netflix instant streaming: Leonera, Antônia, and Caramel. None of them are speculative fiction, the first has some gritty realism (but also canon lesbians), and a very minor character who is gay gets killed halfway through the second one, but all three have hopeful or happy endings for the ladies. I'm planning on nomming those three, so maybe it's not an urgent thing for this week, but I wanted to rec them at you anyway!

(And while I'm reccing, this is not related to your post but I wanted to tell you that there's a remix of my Gwen/Morgana backpacking fic and it's lovely.)

[eruthros]

I've heard good things about Caramel before -- I think I know someone else who's planning to nominate it, actually, so I know that you have a buddy who is with you on that one :)

[livrelibre]

Caramel! I also nommed this as eruthros mentioned and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one:)

[fish_echo]

bettinas_fandom (erm, or maybe I'll end up calling it bettinas_kitchen????) (which I have previously talked about on my journal http://fish-echo.dreamwidth.org/tag/bettina%27s+fandom )

So... um, perhaps a 1917 cookbook-cum-storybook is not *technically* any of the things you've listed, except for the fact that it so totally is one could very easily write those sorts of fic for it. But at least the book is freely available?

[eruthros]

Cookbooks are awesome, though -- I'm a big fan of Alice B Toklas's cookbook, actually.

[aris_tgd]

I just finished a picspam post about K-20: The Fiend With 20 Faces. Japanese movie, ahemmable or I think available via Netflix, though I haven't tried. Steampunk late-40s AU, Takeshi Kaneshiro looking pretty, swinging from skyhooks, it's way fun!

I'm also putting together a picspam about The Good The Bad The Weird, which is a Korean western set in 1930s Manchuria. My picspam is probably going to be mostly on the subject of "Park Do-won is one sexy sexy cowboy" but there are other really good reasons to watch the movie. Also available on DVD or from the ahem sources.

[aris_tgd]

Also, enjoy Sleep Dealer and Whale Rider! Those are both fantastic!

[eruthros]

I'd seen Whale Rider before, back when it originally came out, and I thought I should rewatch it to see if I still wanted fic about grown-up Pai! And I do. I'd kept meaning to watch Sleep Dealer and failing to obtain it, though, and I'm glad that I finally tracked down a copy because it was awesome. One of the best scifi movies I've seen in a long time, I think.

[aris_tgd]

Sleep Dealer makes me so happy. And yay Pai!

Speaking of which, picspam of The Good The Bac The Weird is up now. There are unfortunately almost no awesome female characters in that movie (and the one who is in the Korean cut gets what few scenes she has cut from the International version) but it's chromatic and very pretty and I shamelessly love Park Do-won to bits.

[gloss]

Yes, K-20 is ahemmable, as I just finished ahemming it. Thank you so much for the rec.

[aris_tgd]

You're welcome! *glees* I hope you enjoy it!

[eruthros]

I saw your rec for K-20 over on the dark_agenda post, and it sounds like something that's completely up my alley -- Takeshi Kaneshiro + steampunch AU = awesome, I am totally sold.

[glass_icarus]

Oh oh oh! Minekura Kazuya's Stigma is a beloved one-volume post-apocalypse scenario of mine, and it is GLORIOUS and full of gorgeous artses. Also, I totally have er, resources with which to enable you into it. >.>

[eruthros]

I would love to be enabled into it! *makes grabby hands*