Tag: booksmakeme

please share the list of non-titty-based robot stories :D

Off the top of her head, before going to work this morning:

Specifically robots:

  • Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross
  • Saturn’s Children, also Stross (which does have lots of Teh Sex but is nicely trope-subversive – it’s a reimagining of Heinlein’s Friday)

Sort-of robots:

  • Ancillary Justice/Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (beware, the third one isn’t out yet)

General non-titty-based sci-fi:

  • Women Destroy Science Fiction! a compilation published by Lightspeed Magazine.  I’m pretty sure some of these stories do actually contain robots. (there is also Queers Destroy Science Fiction but she hasn’t finished that so can’t recommend it yet)
  • Conservation of Shadows, Yoon Ha Lee
  • Glitter and Mayhem, a compilation published by Apex
  • Heiresses of Russ: technically categorized as “lesbian speculative fiction”.  As such, some does contain Teh Sex, but at least it’s with lesbians.  It’s an annual collection, some years are better than others.
  • Litany of Earth, Ruthanna Emrys: post-colonialist Lovecraftian.
  • ursulavernon has lots of good stories, although they tend to be more fantasy-oriented than sci-fi.
  • Tea with a Black Dragon, R. A. Macavoy (also her other stuff)
  • She also suggests trawling the Tiptree Award winners.

Further additions as books occur to her.

i read your tags on one of the marriage equality posts, and if it’s not too rude, i was wondering why you can’t get married?

In brief, because I’m the third member of a triad. 

My girlfriends were legally married – and conceived the Kid – before I entered the scene.  In practice, I am a full partner in the adult relationship(s) and equal parent to the kid, whom all of us refer to as my son (as well as each of theirs).  In legality, I am a freeloading housemate whose only legal relationship to the family is that they get to claim me on their taxes because they supply more than 50% of my support (since I am not currently employed), and a medical consent paper that gives me the right to make decisions for “their” child.

I am on state health insurance (nearly-free, but bare-bones) because they are not allowed to add me to either of their plans.  If we were to break up, I would be ENTIRELY dependent on their goodwill to be able to continue to see my child.  If they were to die, I would be dependent on their parents’ goodwill to get custody of him. (There’s some possibility that I’d get it anyway if it came to a fight, since I’ve lived with him nearly his whole life and could call all kinds of witnesses to the fact that he considers me a mother, but it’s not anything like guaranteed.)   All legal rights I have as a member of the family – to hospital visits, executorship of wills, life insurance payouts, custody of my own damn kid – are the ones they have remembered explicitly to give me, and frankly we don’t have the money at the moment to hire a lawyer to tell us what we might have forgotten.  (Not to mention that I can’t put my savings toward our family debt, because it’s my only guaranteed safety net in the event of an emergency.)

So, yeah.  Intellectually, I’m over the moon about the SCOTUS decision – and even on a personal level, it’s really reassuring to know that there won’t be any kind of legal question about my partners’ marriage once the Girl changes her gender designation legally.  But it’s kind of painful to see (over and over and over) that post about the list of rights guaranteed by marriage that are now available to “everyone” and know I don’t get them yet.  And, like I said, I don’t expect to live to see it.

(ETA, since someone asked:  this is totally rebloggable if you want.)