jess

and just what the hell do i mean by a "lesbian spaceship"? read this interview adam & i did with Violet Ballard where i answer that question:

transcript of that question below the break!

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How are you approaching writing these gendered ships? Are there ways that you are hoping to shape things to be more inclusive and informed by Queer perspectives?

Jess: When Adam approached me about writing gender and orientation for spaceships, I was simultaneously delighted, and as confused as many of the people we tell about it. How can a ship have a gender? How can a ship be a lesbian? At the same time, as someone with a lifelong love of spaceships who describes her writing speciality as “scifi & lesbians,” I was delighted by the idea of puzzling out answers those questions. After sitting with it, I realized it wasn’t without precedent: from Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series (and the exploration of whether “ships can love other ships” in Ancillary Mercy) to Arkady Martine’s short story “When the Fall Is All That’s Left,” queer readings of and even explicitly gay relationships told through intelligent spaceships is very much tread ground. The questions for me, then, were:

• What would a new and interesting take on gay spaceships look like?
• How do I concisely convey the meaning and implications of gay spaceships to an audience of TTRPG players who may or may not be LGBTQ, and who will be taking these stories into their own hands?

Discussing these questions with Adam, I laid down some basic expectations. First, for spaceships to have gender and orientation, they must have enough intelligence to communicate—this might be through an AI (even if that AI and their communication looks totally different than human intelligence), or a human mind uploaded to the ship, like Martine’s story. Second, these ships must have some opinionated relationship to human culture.

Using lesbianism specifically as an example, there is a common misunderstanding of homosexuality as an essential, almost biological property of human beings—that if you find any example of two women loving each other throughout history, that is lesbianism. While there is a cultural and emotional value to painting history and ancestry in that way, the truth is that lesbianism is culturally specific. The concept of a lesbian as we know it now is just over a century old, evolving out of women’s “romantic friendships” and sexologists early attempts to categorize human sexualities—rarely did women or non-binary people self-identify as lesbians until the 1950s. Other cultures with different languages use different terms to describe love between women, which may be related to lesbianism, but have their own distinct cultures and way of conceptualizing themselves and their orientation. To be a lesbian is to say that you are in a cultural and communal lineage of people who have called themselves lesbians.

All speculative fiction parallels and comments on reality—whether the author recognizes this fact or not—and to say that a ship is a lesbian (something I am very interested in doing in this project) is to say that lesbianism as we conceptualize it in reality exists in this fictional universe, and that the ship has some relationship to this concept of lesbianism. In adding the fictional elements, we could say that lesbian culture originated with ships, but for my take, I am interested in asking what it means for intelligent ships to say: “I see humans practicing lesbianism, I like and identify with that cultural phenomenon, and I would like to be a part of it too.” As a non-binary trans women & lesbian—who finds her gender more accurately described as lesbian than woman—I actually identify very personally with that relationship to lesbianism. From there, it’s easy to explore other in-fiction implications of this idea: some ships may decide they too want genders and orientations, but “woman” or “lesbian” doesn’t work for them, or they may find that human genders and orientations in general don’t suit them. They might invent all sorts of gender expressions and orientation labels that better fit the sort of expressions and relationships available to and between ships.

Adam commissioned me to write tables of ship genders, expressions, and orientations, and to explain their meanings. I plan to fill these tables with both human genders and orientations these ships might want to adopt, and those which other ships decide to create for themselves. Gender and orientation are evolving and inter-linked to the society they exist within—I can’t wait to explore what sort of gender a ship might desire (or even feel trapped in) in the society implied by the tables and example ships of An Infinity of Ships.

I am still nervous about handing all of this over to players who may not have the knowledge or lived experience to treat these ideas with respect. In the end, I can’t control that. Instead, I see it as my task to communicate what I have here: that to say that a ship has a gender and orientation is to say that the ship exists within a society somewhat like our’s, and the ship’s intelligence is struggling to find its own place and identity within that society. This is a subject that any good story of artificial intelligence explores. I am excited to make this exploration gay as hell—and to give it hyperspace engines.