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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3055 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 2026

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I see Adrian Tchaikovsky brought up quite a bit, but can’t shake the irrational premonition that his books are exceptionally gay (probably in concurrent association with the emperor Hadrian and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky). Is this the case? Please advise.

In Shards of Earth he favours a prose style I find a bit convoluted.

Until there's a chapter in a bar where he's describing the crews polyamorous dating habits. It suddenly switches into a perfectly clear writing style.

He goes back to being convoluted when the interesting space stuff starts up again.

I've read Shards of Earth and Ruin, and I don't remember any sex or romance in either of those.

When he does attempt relationships, love, or lust I tend to speed through it on account of a particular prejudice against the traditional sci-fi author's approach to these topics. He fits the bill and that's a good thing. We aren't reading to explore conflicted passions of cowboys on the prairie even if he could do so with unusual sophistication. Sapphic demons, on the other hand, can be mentioned to raise the eyebrow, but only if we get back to the things he really wants to write about.

Progressive gestures do exist in his work but not in an exceptionally gay way. House of Open Wounds, second in a series and the only fantasy I've read outside of Tolkien in decades, has been my favorite book of his.

My impression is that he just doesn't have that much interest in writing any kind of romance. Green City Wars (which I just read and loved) had a murderous weasel as classic noir femme fatale, but while the racoon protagonist had a clear aesthetic appreciation for her, it was very explicitly nonsexual (as a result of the species barrier.)

Most of what I've read from him steers clear of anything sexual. I hadn't really noticed the lack until you mentioned it

I can’t speak for his books in the generality but Elder Race doesn’t have any of that kind of thing, or even any romance.

It’s primarily a story about the (platonic) relationship between an ancient nanoaugmented ethnologist stranded on a colony world that has regressed to medieval tech, and the spunky princess fifth in line who’s going on a Quest in order to make people take her seriously and thinks he’s a wizard.

The other novella I read, The Expert System’s Brother, doesn’t have that kind of thing either.

Elder Race is the only one of his I've read and what I recall is that the spunky princess spends a lot, a lot of time wringing her hands over the possibility that he'll try to make moves on her and due to the power disparity she'll have to go along with it, but in practice he's a perfect fedora-tipping gentleman without any trace of toxic masculinity who would never treat m'lady so.

It's been a while but I recall the whole thing feeling extremely reddit.

Based on the one book I decided I wouldn't be reading anything else of his. We're spoiled for choice anyway.

Elder Race is one of my favourite books and I don't recognise this description at all. There's one bit where she realises she's formally put herself in the debt of an ancient and largely incomprehensible (to her at that point) being. Since she's very sheltered and inclined to think in story plots, she wonders if this is going to be a story about how a princess got spirited away by a wizard. Nothing comes of it because he's a clinically depressed basket case who regards her as primitive, and because he's still kicking himself for totally fouling up a budding romance with her long-dead great-great-grandmother.

The plot is mostly about her growing up and getting a clue, while he reconnects with humanity. (Also realising that being a 'wizard' is much cooler than being a shut-in old man and the Ethics Committee can go hang, they’re all dead anyways.)

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