I Wonder About The Kind Of Queer Fiction I Actually Want To Read

10 9月 2024

I wonder about the kind of queer fiction I actually want to read.

Sep 10, 2024

This article has unmarked spoilers for A Probability Experiment Turned Me Into A Clockwork Girl And I Really Don’t Know What To Make Of It All and will explore ideas found in gender bender fiction.

For a long time, I couldn't find the queer fiction I wanted to read.

Not that I know what I wanted. I went through my twenties reading a lot of the classics (your Moby Dicks and Electric Sheeps) since I couldn't find the queer fiction that would resonate with me. I knew I wasn't cis or straight, but the LGBTQ+ works I read that ranged from mediocre to okay (Wandering Son/Hourou Musuko, Bastard Out of Carolina, etc.) didn't excite me in any way.

And I think it's because they're just not interesting places to speculate about gender.

It seemed like the most interesting English-language work on queerness was on the web. I never spent time reading original and fan fiction on the web, partly because I was a literary snob, but also because I was studying around the world without consistent access to the internet. But I noticed that there was fanfare around internet fiction, and that stuck with me.

I just never looked for it. Instead, I was distracted by queer Japanese media, especially yuri, that made me think about my thoughts on gender. I thought I was cold and unfazed by romance until I read yuri.

Now, I feel like I kinda know what kind of work I'm looking for: spicy situations that invert everything I know about societal norms; blunt critiques of heteronormativity and conservative politics; and gender bender stories.

The last one is pretty fun to me. It's the most thought-provoking of the three I laid out because it has to play on irony. There's something to be said about how unremarkable it is to be a gamer guy, but becoming a gamer girl will make a lot of people notice you. Never mind that this will be irritating in real life, the fantasy of gender bender fiction makes this a very funny and interesting prospect.

What gives? For me, this paradox is what makes queer fiction interesting to read.

This is where A Probability Experiment Turned Me Into A Clockwork Girl And I Really Don’t Know What To Make Of It All by nothingspecial comes in. It was recommended to me by a friend, Contessa, who knew I was into this particular kind of exploration, and my curiosity about internet fiction never wavered.

Well, I had to read it. I do like gender bender stuff.

The problem with college, I thought to myself, is that you don't have to go, but everyone expects you to anyway.

This is how the story begins: a monologue by Stuart, a shy guy who seems to have enrolled in the wrong department at the wrong college. His self-loathing in the first chapter is so overwhelming that it spills over into his descriptions of other people around him:

I looked around the classroom. I could tell you plenty about why a number of the other freshmen were sitting in Introduction to Applied Metaphysics.* Bruce Harper? The money, or at least the prospect thereof; he made no secret about that. I didn't consider that invalid, really. Eric Lidenbrock? Natural egghead; you could tell just by looking at him that he was going to spend the rest of his life buried in one research project or another. They probably couldn't have kept him out of the program if they'd wanted to. Tammy Greenfield? Granted, a stunning blonde with a face a sculptor would kill to have crafted was a little more out-of-place in this kind of milieu, but if your gaze happened to drift low enough to take in the fact that she was in a wheelchair, her legs obviously atrophied from years of disuse, anybody who knew anything about the subject could tell you why she was here. Emma Shaughnessy? Same as Eric, she just dressed better.

* (Metaphysics, of course, being the study and analysis of higher-level patterns observed in conventional physics - the search for the reasons why the low-level mechanics of the universe behave as they do, and especially for the reasons why they sometimes don't.)

He makes it clear that he doesn't belong here, but his knowledge of metamorphic research, the main hard sf concept in this work, is astounding. He discusses several key historical details, such as the Navy destroyer and its mermaid crew, and has strong opinions about certain principles in the field before going on his lunch break.

During lunch, one of his friends, Emma, tells him and Tammy that the college is getting a probability exciter:

And that's what a probability exciter is?" Tammy said. "Okay, interesting idea, but what do you do with it?"

"Well, that's the question," Emma said with a shrug. "It's still extremely new technology - they've only just started building the things in the last couple years, and most of the initial experiments have been the probabilistic equivalent of smashing particles together to see what they break apart into. But the potential is highly interesting, especially for metamorphic research."

I finished the last bite of my burger as I thought about what she was saying. "It's a means of making things more predictable and repeatable, isn't it?"

She grinned. "Exactly! That's been the whole problem thus far - the best we've gotten for experimental methodology is variations on 'expose subjects to slightly different high-energy fields and see what happens.' But if we can actually induce events at a specific level of probability, we can start to make meaningful determinations about the potential for inducing controlled transformations. This could be a leap forward for metamorphic research like nothing we've seen before."

Tammy raised an eyebrow. "As in, if you could work out the probability of a specific change, you could make it happen reliably?"

"Potentially. It's going to take a lot of research before we could work that kind of thing out ahead of time, though. For starters, it's going to be more inducing changes at specific probabilities and seeing if the results are consistent from subject to subject."

To summarize: this could be their greatest chance to advance the metamorphic sciences because they could manipulate variables to control transformations.

They're going to use Stuart as a guinea pig. They're going to put him in the exciter and see what happens. He can't fight back. Something is going to happen to him whether he likes it or not.

And so, the inevitable event we've all been waiting for is going to happen ... in the fifth chapter.

And we don't even see his reaction until the next chapter. The writing and plotting in A Clockwork Girl is, to put it bluntly, all over the place. I've taken the time to quote passages from the first chapter because they show how clumsy the writing can be. The writing can be a slog, and the plots can go nowhere. I found myself irritated by the way the author focuses on certain details, and I wished the writing would get to the juicier stuff more.

But there's also a modicum of queer possibilities within its writing style. In "3:00: The Girl In the Mirror (pt. 1)", Stuart finally turns into a clockwork girl and checks herself out:

Part of what was troubling her was that the figure in the mirror was clearly a woman, but just as clearly not human. The hair, for starters - the color was unusual enough, but looking closer at the unusual texture...it was artificial, filaments of some other material rooted in the skin of her head. But the "skin" was also different, coarser in texture, less glossy; it too was artificial, a layer of felt in a human skin tone, stretched over an internal frame that shaped the head.

The "skin" didn't fit right around the joints, either - there were creases on the inside of the elbows and knees, and it was split around the outside. The gap revealed enameled metal, pearly-white against the skin-tone of the felt. The fit on the face was better, smoothing the moving parts that articulated eyebrows, cheeks, and lips into a convincing facsimile of human features, but the eyes were obviously artificial - pearlescent orbs with a glass coating, the irises shutters made from tiny, delicate blades of purple onyx.

But the most obvious clue that she wasn't a human was the polished brass shaft protruding from the middle of her back. This had a two-lobed, roughly heart-shaped blade on it, maybe an eighth of an inch thick, with holes in either end; an enormous winding key, slowly turning counter-clockwise to the ticking of some unseen escapement within her body as it metered out the energy from a comparably enormous mainspring, countless mechanisms chattering with activity.

The other thing that troubled this strange clockwork automaton was the part where she was me.

I stared into the mirror for what felt like an eternity, watching her, watching me: the key on my back - my key - slowly turning with the unwinding of my mainspring, driving my mechanisms, operating my new body. Hearing the chatter of things I didn't even know the names for turning, clicking, catching, releasing, extending, retracting; marking time, reacting to stimuli, processing information, making decisions, triggering responses. Feeling the perpetual motion; not a sense in itself, but a subtle interference, vibrations carried through my frame and fed back into the sensors for other stimuli - touch, hearing, balance - to form a phantom sense of the parts that I couldn't feel directly.

I watched my own expressions as my mechanical brain gradually, inexorably processed what had happened to me. I was...I was a machine; I was a girl. I was an automaton; I was a clockwork mechanism; I was a doll. I was a God-damned wind-up toy.

Most writers would linger on that moment, but I doubt they would focus on the details like this. The paragraphs show an almost excessive focus (in my opinion) on the gears that compose his body and the imperfection of the "skin". Stuart did not become a "perfect" girl, but these descriptions almost make it sound like the author chiseled her character out of marble. I can imagine the texture and sounds of this strange and unusual body.

It's not a body I want, but it's an interesting body.

Every time I pick up my phone and read the story in the gym, I wonder what it feels like to have this body. Stuart (who will be known as Susan in later chapters) struggles to understand how they should feel about this accident. She didn't ask for it, but now she has to accept that she (and their friends) have become demihumans and go back to everyday life.

And weirdly enough, the world around them is chill about them. They can attend classes at the university or go out to eat without causing any trouble. Their family and friends aren't too upset either after the initial surprise -- things just kinda go on as seen in an exchange in "5.00. Facing the Music (Pt. 2)":

"So she knows you're a guy, so what?" Emma watched from the bed while her body hefted a box of textbooks onto the rickety handcart we'd brought from the maintenance room. Her roommate sat on the other end of the bed, still in a daze.*

* (She'd taken it better than I expected; no screaming, just silence and a thousand-yard stare. She'd be alright in a few hours, I thought. Probably. It's not every day you see your roommate with her head off.)

"So...how!?" I sputtered. "Was I wearing a sign?" I pondered how to fold a stack of dresses without wrinkling them, gave up, and settled for carrying them by the hanger, my arms held high enough that they cleared the floor. It wasn't like I had muscles to strain.

"Honestly, kind of," Tammy said, wrapping up the last of the cables for Emma's personal electronics. "You do realize that your body language is like 90% the same?"

Everyone knows Susan, the guy who turned into a clockwork girl. Her behaviors haven't changed, but she is too conscious that they may have transgressed gender norms and affect how people perceive them. They have a hard time feeling okay with people accepting them.

This makes the story rather unusual when you think about conflict in serialized stories. There's no external conflict that threatens the protagonist or their friends. It's all internal: if there's a conflict that motivates the story, it's that Susan doesn't feel comfortable with her body and society being so accepting. She's so used to self-loathing that she's shocked and confused that people might like her, maybe even more than when she was just a guy.

Without an external conflict guiding the structure, the story meanders as long as Susan is caught up in her thoughts. It's more than happy to infodump setting details or have the characters go off on philosophical lectures about identity (8:40. Maidens and Madeleines (Pt. 1))

"No, but I'm not a different kind of..." I paused, considering it. Was I not? Being a man sort of was a difference in kind from being a little boy, in so many ways; was it that much smaller than the gulf between a man and a woman? But then, a boy was the larval form of a man; it was natural to go from one to the other, even if it took time. Surely that was different than-

Emma laughed. "But you could be. 'You' isn't a fixed, immutable thing; changes in what makes up 'you' are part of life. You're a different person now than you were a month ago, and you were different then than five, ten, fifteen years before that. So it's not like your 'self-definition' is something you have to consciously adhere to; it's a reflection of your own natural properties. And it's okay if those change - whether you choose it or not."

This can admittedly be quite silly, but I appreciate how the pacing captures the ebb and flow of Susan's contradictory thoughts about her body and place in society. I found it fascinating how much the story respects her feelings to its own detriment; the story is happy to halt its plot in order to let Susan unpack their thoughts.

Self-discovery is a messy business, and the story is fine with going around in circles because that is how Susan thinks.

The approach allows for some very valuable digressions for me. While the story repeats itself and that can be irritating, I found the repetition quite effective at the very end. In "9.00: A Boy Named Sue (pt. 3)":

It's what you wear to pretend to be something you're not. That's what I'd said to Emma - but how much of me was a costume? How many layers had I wrapped myself in, trying to be what people expected, pursuing goals that weren't mine, looking for direction from someone else because I had no compass of my own...? I suddenly couldn't stop thinking about it. And now I was pretending to be someone else entirely, dressed up as yet another character...was there even a real me in there, under all the make-believe, or was it just hollow inside? If there was nothing underneath, did it even matter how the outermost wrapping was shaped-

I've seen passages like this before. They can be mind-numbing at times, but I found myself in sync with Susan's character. She thought this shit over and over again because their sense of wearing a "costume" was so important to her that I started thinking about my "costume" too.

To what extent is gender an act of masking? Is authenticity possible, even in a society as accepting as this one? How is it possible to love oneself when the gender binary exists? The repetition had taken a toll on me because these were questions I had pushed away in order to get on with my day, but I had to confront them as I read it.

The more I digest this story alongside Susan, the more creative I feel I can be in expressing my thoughts about gender in interesting ways. I feel like I'm growing with Susan and beginning to internalize her struggles, even if I'm just reading the same thoughts about self-love repackaged for a different chapter.

But there is one chapter that made me feel this the most.

In "8:40. Maidens & Madeleines (pt. 2)", an old man comes out of nowhere to rant to Susan and Emma about his best friend. It doesn't seem relevant to the story or the characters until he brings up the fact that his best friend turned into a mermaid while serving in the Navy, the same incident that sparked intellectual curiosity about transformations:

"How did...how'd you deal with it?" I asked. I sipped my tea and frowned; it'd gotten cold, and I'd been too wrapped up to notice. "How did she deal with it...?"

He shrugged. "Well, for a coupla weeks we just talked. Hadn't seen each other since we shipped out, and it was good to talk to Charlie again and it was good for Charlie to talk to anybody - so I'd just go over to visit every day. It was the damnedest thing - she'd been that way for months, and she'd get around and take care of herself just fine, and never acknowledge that she was a mermaid instead of havin' her legs blown off or something. But I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say nothin'."

"Then one day - I forget what set her off, if it was anything - she just broke down crying. Just sobbin' like her own mother'd died. Didn't know what to do then, either, but I figured she'd take it bad if I comforted her like ya would with a girl - so I gave her a slap on the back, put a hand on her shoulder, and we sat there for an hour, with her bawlin' her eyes out. At the end of it, when she finally calmed down, she asks me, George, d'you think I'm a pansy?" He chuckled. "I told her I figured, any fella that went through this and didn't cry over it hadda be crazy."

Eventually, his best friend went to an all-girls school and learned to accept herself for who she was. As his story draws to a close, a very interesting scene happens:

While we sat there, digesting everything he'd told us, the barista, a dusky-skinned young woman in her mid-twenties, made her way over to the table. "Granddad, are you bothering my customers again?" she asked, with a wry smirk.

The old man chuckled and slowly, creakily, rose to his feet. "Just talkin' with an old friend, sweetie," he said, turning to me with a knowing smile. "Well, you ever wanna talk about it, ya know where t' find me." He doffed his cap, nodded adieu, and made his way out of the shop.

"Sorry," his granddaughter said, bemused. "He gets like that sometimes. Hope he wasn't a bother."

I shook my head in a daze; Emma waved it off. "No, no, not a problem."

She smiled and nodded, turning to go back to the bar. I blinked, shook my head, and took another look. She had her hair up; at the base of her skull, behind her ears, I could just make out closed-up gill slits.

This broke my brain when I read it. I couldn't believe the author had snuck in this fascinating detail. Just like Susan, I was left with questions and my imagination to think about what we had just read.

I wanted to know more about this grandfather, this mermaid, their granddaughter, and so much more. But the author has wisely left that desire unanswered -- we have to supply ourselves with our own interpretations if we are ever to be satisfied. I'm sure it's possible to do just that, but I'm still unsure what to make of that.

And I think that's a beautiful thing because I felt a little bit like Susan the day I read that passage.

I don't expect people to read this article and think this is a story worth putting their time into. The hard SF elements are not easy to read, nor do they feel grounded in actual science. It has no breathing room for its characters and plots, so that important events and interactions always feel spontaneous. I can't say that I enjoyed the banter between the characters that much, and the ending is too abrupt to feel conclusive.

If anything, I should dislike the work. But I don't. Clockwork Girl is a clumsy work that goes in many fascinating directions, and I still think about it from time to time. It's perhaps the closest thing I've found that makes me go, "Woah, this is the queer fantasy work I've always wanted to read."

I can see myself not finding any value in reading this work before, but I read it at the very moment I began to think about the kind of gender fantasies this work stimulated. I wondered what it was like to have a body that wasn't obviously human, how it felt to be alienated even though one was accepted into society, and so on. This story allowed me to speculate on a body so different from mine that I found more appreciation for what I have and idealize right now.

I don't like to make grand statements about the value of fiction or whatever because they might come back to bite me in the ass in the near future. But at the very least, I think there's something fun about that kind of speculation, about being able to think outside the gender box and just go on a journey that's so foreign to you but in the end feel like you've connected with its themes.

And that's the kind of queer fiction that fascinates me right now. It allows me to break out of this mundane heteronormativity for something more exciting, something more queer. While it's important for stories to explore how queer people are marginalized, I want something different right now: I want the sense of wonder that's inherent in science fiction to appear more in queer fiction ... I want new and unusual queer possibilities that haven't yet been imagined ... I want to speculate, dream, and explore our beautiful paradoxes.

I wonder about the kind of queer fiction I actually want to write. I'm still not sure what it's like, but I think it should be something like Clockwork Girl: messy, insightful, and inspiring. If someone came across my writing and found themselves imagining a new form of reality, as I did with this work, I think I would be very elated.