Sexual salad bar sci-fi

I’ll definitely be reading Solitaire. I am curious, is it lesbian sci-fi or straight sci-fi? It won’t make a difference, but I just want to know. Thank you.

Katia N. Ruiz


I’m glad for this question: I need to practice answering it, and I have so many different answers that it’s easy to get tangled up in them.

The straightforward factual answer: Jackal has a primary emotional and sexual relationship with a woman in this book. She also has (consensual) sex with a male friend.

The deeper answer is: neither. Because the only stories I’m inclined to characterize as “lesbian” fiction or “straight” fiction are those that pointedly grapple with issues of sexuality. As an example: I just finished reading a really lovely young adult book called Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson. It’s the story of a thirteen year old girl who is raped and has to deal with the psychological damage of the attack at the same time that she’s trying to cope with her first year of high school. It’s a gorgeous book that wrestles with a lot of issues, including sexual power dynamics among heterosexual adolescent people. I can’t imagine that anyone would ever characterize this as straight fiction, but for me it’s much more “straight” fiction than my book is “lesbian” fiction.

Lots of people will call Solitaire a lesbian book because of the relationship, and some people will think that the sex with a man makes it not a “real lesbian” book after all. I suspect I am going to get a certain amount of grumpiness from several directions. I’m glad that it won’t make a difference to you: I don’t see why it would to anyone, but there you go.

I can’t even really categorize Solitaire as bi-sci-fi. Sexual identification just isn’t an issue for Jackal in any way in this book. There’s sex in it but it’s not about sex or the consequences of sexual choices. And just as I resist being labeled in my private life, I resist it in my professional life. Solitaire is character sci-fi, it’s inner-landscape sci-fi. If we must put a sex-related label on it, let’s call it sexual-salad-bar sci-fi, a category that I would be happy to pioneer.