Angel Martinez - Writer, Reader, Woman about town

I didn't realize how bad this was until I actually created a shelf for it. (I've never done shelves before, just "read" and "want to read" which is strange for me. I like things in order.)

But in creating a shelf for Gay Science Fiction - I found I had 6 books to place there.

6

"That's nice," person who doesn't know me says. "Sounds legit to me."

Except that a huge part of my life has always been SF - books, movies, TV, my own writing. It doesn't make sense that this shelf, this one, would be so sparse. Until i really thought about it.

I'm afraid of Gay SF, almost to the point of phobia. To be fair, I should really say I'm afraid of Gay Science Fiction Romance, but since there's so little Gay Mainstream SF out there, this is where the majority of the stories are, in romance and erotic romance.

This all stems from my time working for online review sites where, again, most of the stories were romance. I expected space opera. I expected fluff and playing fast and loose with the laws of the universe as we know it. Sure. I wasn't really looking for serious, mind-blowing science fiction.

I just didn't expect the stories to be so...bad. So many were. Just awful. Thrown together angsty romances that should have been contemporaries or fantasies but the writer, for whatever unholy reason, decided to set "on another planet." Because it was cool and fashionable? I don't know.

So I became gun-shy, so to speak. Hesitant if the story was billed as M/M science fiction. I have, since then, found some wonderful exceptions. There are some incredibly inventive minds now writing in the genre, writers who understand what SF means and what it is and how it's NOT the same as fantasy, thank you very much.

I'm expanding slowly. Maybe someday I won't be embarrassed by that shelf any longer.