From: anonymous
I was recently put in charge of the sf/fantasy section of a large independent bookstore in Grand Rapids MI. The section had become rather staid and conservative over the years - lots of Jordan, Goodkind, and so on. I would like to change that. You are one of the ways I would like shake things up a little bit. As such, I would like to know which book(s)you think would be best to introduce Grand Rapid readers to you? The books should be fantasy oriented. Gay and Lesbian themes are fine, but remember this is a very conservative area (much to my regret). Also, are there any other authors you would like me to take a look at?
Through no fault of your own your question comes at a time when I'm really tired of talking about lesbian and gay people and things (writers, readers, publishers, booksellers, fiction) as Other. Please don't take the following rant personally. If you like, you can skip the next couple of paragraphs and go straight (no pun intended) to the end where I make sensible suggestions.
It's unclear to me what you mean by "gay and lesbian themes." Do you mean books whose sensibilities are essentially, undeniably gay and lesbian? But what might they be? Shopping? Coming out? Softball? Drag? Oppression? Fabulousness? Porn? Fashion? Most people I know could spend a year disagreeing on this. Or do you mean books about being gay or lesbian--which I find about as thrilling as books about being grey-eyed. But perhaps you mean books with some gay or lesbian characters--which is where most (oh, okay, all) of my stuff falls and which, needless to say (but I'm saying it, and I'll keep saying it, because one day someone will listen), I think most readers, lgbt and straight (blue-eyed and grey-eyed, Catholic and Protestant, cat owners and dog owners), find the most interesting.
I don't know why I've had so many variations on this question lately, but I do know I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the whole idea of categorisation, whether the subject under discussion is sex, race, age, fiction or non-fiction, good literature or bad, evil regimes and good. Every now and again I get so frustrated by the world's need to put everything in a box, stick on a label, and walk away--assuming it will never change, never need revisiting--that I want to go out and hit someone. What is this obsession with categorisation? Does it make sense to divide books into those written by or for men and those written by women, or those with orange covers and those with green ones, or those with fifty year-old characters and those with thirtysomethings? Life is fluid. So is fiction. So are writers and readers. It's all a matter of perspective.
But you asked a question in all seriousness, so I'll give you the best answer, given your premise--which seems to be the world's premise (that books should be divided and subdivided into genre)--that I can.
For those who love those honking big sword and pony adventures with a bit of magic and young-person-with-a-destiny plot, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence (Silver on the Tree, The Grey King, Greenwitch, The Dark Is Rising, Over Sea, Under Stone) is great: very atmospheric and family-oriented. Also atmospheric, but weirder, are Alan Garner's novels, such as The Owl Service, and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Both of these authors are British, and write for young adults (but are certainly good enough for grown-ups). Another YA writer I really like is Robin McKinley. A good way to begin would be with The Blue Sword, which is set in a fantasy world called Damar, with a nomadic desert people with strange powers, some evil mutants, and a young woman coming of age. It's also a bit of a romance. She's also written some novels not really suitable for anyone under fourteen, for example Deerskin (which is quite brutal in a fairytale way). There's C.S. Lewis, of course, and his Narnia series; there's lots of Christian allegory in these, but those of us who aren't religious can pretend it's not there.
Still on the fantasy series trail, but getting a bit more grown up, we have Mary Stewart's Arthurian novels, begining with The Crystal Cave (damn, I love those books), and Gillian Bradshaw's trilogy version of the same legend, beginning with Hawk of May (also extremely good: well written, interesting, historically accurate--given the fact that the whole thing's a legend anyway). None of the above have any sex in at all that I can think of. The same can't be said of Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History. This novel (or novels: in the UK it was published as one huge volume, here in the US it was split into four books) is actually science fiction masquerading as historical fantasy. It's gritty and earthy and wonderful. Every time you think you've got things figured out, wham, Gentle pulls the carpet from under you. The Chronicles of Tornor, Elizabeth A. Lynn's fantasy trilogy, begins with The Watchtower, the story of a young woman who fights to inherit the northern keep where her family has ruled for generations. She and her companions are not afraid to do things differently in order to beat both the barbarians and the expectations of their compatriots. There's no magic, unless you count some of the martial arts scenes, and no explicit sex, but there are lesbian relationships.
One way to expand the reading habits of Jordan junkies might be to get them to pick up some anthologies of short fiction. Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling have edited the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for years, and they also have several volumes of fairy- and folk-tale variations, for example The Green Man, to their credit. If you want the trappings of fantasy--the ruffled shirts, and the swords, the young bloods--with gay characters, then your best bet is probably Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner. (She and her partner, Delia Sherman, have also collaborated on The Fall of the Kings, set in the same milieu--the short version of this story appeared in Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, an anthology of gay and lesbian fantasy stories I co-edited with Stephen Pagel. Sherman's Through a Brazen Mirror is pretty good, too.)
Much more grown up territory is covered by Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House: ghosts, psychological terror, bisexuality), Joanna Russ (Extra ordinary People: aliens, gender, lesbianism) and Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Dart: a lush and nicely written tale of a woman who gets sexual pleasure from pain, with men and women, whose destiny is to change the world. The sequel, Kushiel's Chosen, is not nearly as good). Books that feel like fantasy, but are in fact science fiction (or maybe it's the other way round--see what happens when you try stuff things in boxes?) include those by Gwyneth Jones (Divine Endurance: amazing novel of a bandit and the woman/construct who loves her), Octavia Butler (Wild Seed: the tale of shapechangers in history, and the man who bred them--she also write an incredible novel of time travel and slavery, Kindred, that everyone should read), Mary Gentle again (this time with Golden Witchbreed, a huge book about an envoy sent to a distant planet, where the natives are ungendered until puberty; this novel owes a great deal to Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness), Suzy McKee Charnas (with her series of books, beginning with Walk to the End of the Earth, about a post-apocalyptic future where men and women are literally at war, so women mostly fall in love with women, and men with men--this one's not for the faint of heart), and Vonda McIntyre (Dreamsnake: a great novel about a young healer roaming a post-apocalyptic earth). The only novel of mine that comes remotely near fantasy, Ammonite, is in fact science fiction. It's the story of Marghe, an envoy to a planet where a virus has killed all the men and most of the women.
Others that don't fit any category I can think of (thank god) are Emma Bull, Neil Gaiman, Tim Powers, Theodore Sturgeon and Gregory Maguire. And then there's totally gay fantasy, like Keith Hartmann's The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse, and Richard Bowes's Minions of the Moon. The Bowes is rather adult, the Hartman is a romp (stupid title, though). If you ordered all the above (most are in print, I think), you'd have a truly fine selection, and anyone who couldn't find something from it to like should be set on fire and then shot.
