Queer Sci-Fi Is Helping Us Survive This Political Hellscape

Sincetheelection, I’ve read at least a dozen sci-fi and speculative fiction novels. I’m constantly devouring paperbacks, e-books and audiobooks. Basically, I’m taking queer sci-fi in through every orifice. O ur current political reality is bleak, so I’m desperately seeking an alternate timeline, a portal to another world or even the thinnest promise of a better future.

I need hope. I need escape. I need to be able to think past the headlines.

It’s easy to dismiss genre fiction as a guilty habit, something you consume that doesn’t have much moral or intellectual fiber. But that’s not how authors or fans see it — and that’s not what experts think, either.

“What sci-fi gives me is faith beyond hope or fear,” says TQ Sims, author of The Lover’s Universe trilogy, a queer space drama that’s equal parts smart and sexy. “It’s evidence, and a reminder, that we have always been here and we always will be.”

A lot of us need that reminder, as our rights are being erased by Trump and his minions.

It’s starting to seem like some new normal that the existence of trans people is hotly debated, but that type of erasure does not exist in a lot of queer sci-fi. “In queer sci-fi, it’s just incidental — this person is trans or nonbinary, and there’s no discussion about why. It’s just woven in, and it’s no big deal,” says Dulcinea Pitagora, a therapist in New York City who works with individuals with marginalized sexual and gender identities. Processing normalized diversity in this way can serve both as a balm for the present and a model for the future, Pitagora tells me.

And there’s something to be said for the escape sci-fi offers. “It’s good for brain health to force yourself to look at something that’s different than the barrage of bad news, even if it’s totally impossible,” Pitagora says.

They think about reading sci-fi in two ways: As a coping mechanism and as a distraction. 

“Even if you’re just only trying to escape, reading sci-fi is probably doing some mind expansion, anyway,” Pitagora adds.

The idea that escaping into books is bad or anti-productive is kind of bullshit, Sims says: You can’t read without using your imagination, and using your imagination is both productive and also, well, kind of revolutionary.

“The current regime is structured to overwhelm us with political chaos, and it can be almost impossible to imagine our way out of it,” Sims says. “When we do, that’s an act of resistance. The best sci-fi has the ability to take us elsewhere while fostering new concepts for current struggles.” There is an alternative to the bleak future the political headlines are painting, but as Pitagora notes, we need to look away from the barrage of bad news in order to see anything new.

Imagining new things — especially new futures for queer people — is also a form of community care. Maybe you read alone, but that reading makes it more likely for you to take the ideas off the page and into the world. “When you read stories with queer characters, you create space for queer people with your attention and you affirm the power of queer life,” says Sims.

And people are paying attention. The impact of queer sci-fi doesn’t stop at the page. Fans transform speculative worlds and make them their own — through fabulous artwork, erotic fanfic, chatty subreddits, and queer sci-fi podcasts. Active Tumblr pages about Becky Chambers’ ”Wayfarers” crew and N.K. Jemisin’s Earth-shattering magic wielders show that queer fandoms aren’t just consuming these stories — they’re gathering around them and evolving them in conversation with each other. And, as Sims suggests, imagining our way out of oppression is its own form of resistance — and a first step towards making it real.

Our queer future doesn’t have to be imagined as perfect or without conflict, says Sims. “I don’t want to erase the struggles queer people face. I want to show them surviving and thriving in those worlds,” they say. 

Reading about happy gay aliens defeating their multidimensional overlordmay seem divorced from reality — but is it, though? Following fantastical characters as they disrupt imaginary power structures can feel more like a thinly veiled road map.

Because not all futures imagined by queer sci-fi authors are ideal, they can also help us think about possible dystopias before they arise. “Sci-fi can serve as a cautionary tale,” says Pitagora. “Reading sci-fi gives us a different way into the brain to explain narratives that are otherwise too easily rationalized away, either due to indoctrination or denial,” they say. In other words, sci-fi can help us see into our own blind spots and help us build strategies for dealing with them.

“In my current work, the main characters leave an organization that has set up a structure to protect the world, but also completely exploits them,” says Sims. Opting out of systems that exploit us may seem impossible until you read it into reality. And how is it that sci-fi characters are able to dismantle power structures? Interdependence, says Sims. That holds true from the work of Butler to John Scalzi.

“We’re rapidly approaching the time where we must implement systems of mutual aid,” Sims adds. “We should start doing that now to be prepared for the time when we need it.” That is something we might also be able to learn from queer sci-fi, because the powers that be are certainly not going to teach us how to band together. 

“We are not taught in our culture to focus on interdependence,” says Sims. “We’re taught to be independent and to hustle and to rely on yourself and just go to work and do your job, and I’m trying to imagine something different.”

While my near future is being debated and devastated by politicians, queer sci-fi gives me a portal into a future in which liberation is possible and hot gay sex is ubiquitous. You could call me escapist—and you’d be half right, but as Pitagora and Sims explain, science fiction and speculative fiction give us more than fodder for fantasy. Sci-fi gives us permission to be creative about how we imagine the future and invites us to think outside of current paradigms. Those invitations feel priceless right now, and also a beautiful future is a party we can only attend together.