As our current feature month drifts to its close, dear listener, we have perhaps our most detailed interview yet, and with a speculative fiction author new to us, Mike Brooks. Another Britlander, no less. There’s some thought-provoking stuff below, on writing, Warhammer, queer fiction and all sorts, so join us and see what Mike has to say…
“If you’re a fan of TV shows about wayward starship crews taking on whatever job will keep them flying, you might be suffering though a dry spell right now, since shows like Firefly, Farscape, and Dark Matter are no longer running. But Mike Brooks’ Keiko novels could help fill the gap. They’re an addictive dive into a fantastic universe populated by an intriguing cast of characters, who are making their way through a future in which humanity has spread across the galaxy.”
theverge.com
Mike Brooks
Mike Brooks was born in Ipswich, Suffolk and moved to Nottingham when he was 18 to go to university. He’s stayed there ever since, and now lives with his wife, cats, snakes, and a collection of tropical fish. He is the author, amongst other works, of the Keiko novels, sci-fi adventures that follow the escapades of those crewing the spaceship of the same name: DARK RUN, DARK SKY and DARK DEEDS.
greydog: Hi, and welcome to greydogtales. Obviously we’re going to ask about LGBTQ+ writers and characters in strange fiction, but maybe first you could tell the readers a bit about yourself, to set the scene. And if you wanted to share your personal identity in the context of this feature, how would you do so?
Mike: My name’s Mike Brooks, and I’m an author who lives in Nottingham, in England. I’m the author of the Keiko series of ‘grimy space-opera’ novels, and I write freelance for Games Workshop’s Black Library. I’m disabled (partial hearing loss), and queer. While there are certainly advantages and a sense of community to be gained from more specific labels, and I’ve used ‘bisexual’ and ‘bi+’ in the past (and still will, depending on the company I’m in), I like the term ‘queer’ as a convenient catch-all. Besides, I’ve come to the conclusion that things like sexuality and gender are individual: a straight man could walk into a bar with a genderqueer bisexual and he could agree more with them on who in there was attractive than he might with another straight man!
greydog: How do you describe the bulk of your own work – horror, weird fiction, magical realism, speculative, or what? Would you find ‘horror’ an uncomfortable or inappropriate label?
Mike: I’m very much a science-fiction author in terms of my published work, although I write fantasy as well, and a fantasy novel is my next big project that I’m hoping to sell. I’m definitely not a horror writer, although one or two of my early urban fantasy short stories were a bit gruesome: but I think they lacked the essential sense of horror, in that the protagonist wasn’t powerless or near-powerless against the threat.
greydog: And what’s your preferred format and length as a writer – flash fiction, short story, novella, novel, or even book series?
Mike: I’ve done all of them except flash fiction, but I think I’m most comfortable with a book series as it really gives a story time to grow and characters to develop. That said, I’ve recently had a novella (Wanted: Dead) come out for Black Library, and it was a nice change of pace to write 30,000 words and then leave the characters where they were after a small, self-contained story.
greydog: Were there key books and films that influenced and helped you develop as a creator? Did they include LGBTQ+ works and/or characters – and if not, did this bug you?
Mike: Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy was a big influence on how I’d like to write fantasy, as were Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles in terms of having a setting where the lines were blurred between magic and superstition. Firefly was a huge influence on the Keiko series, as was the general aesthetic of Blade Runner and indeed Games Workshop’s Necromunda game (the first one, from the mid-90s, although I enthusiastically play and indeed write fiction about the new version too). But as for LGBTQ+ characters… not really.
Although that said, Willow in Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a prominent queer character, even if her presentation and description kind of flipped from “straight” to “lesbian” without any real acknowledgement of even the possibility of bisexuality. But I suppose as a child I didn’t think about it, and as a young adult it didn’t surprise me – I grew up when Section 28 was in force, and British schools weren’t allowed to provide any positive instances of homosexuality, or basically anything other than cisgender heteronormativity. I was used to these things Not Being Talked About, and I guess for a while I didn’t consider that perhaps creators could or should.
greydog: How did you discover authors who wrote about characters whose identities/positions you could relate to? By accident, word of mouth, or actively hunting their work down on your own?
Mike: I’ve never really gone looking for queer fiction. I almost exclusively gravitate towards speculative fiction, and I vastly prefer that which includes characters who have various sexualities and genders, but the two groups don’t really cross – ‘queer fiction’ is about being queer, and speculative fiction is about the speculative nature of the world it takes place in, which generally involves something that threatens the entire world. I almost exclusively read novels, and you don’t tend to get stories about two dragon riders quietly exploring their sexuality while the world fails to be threatened by a resurrected god, or what have you. As a result, it’s tended to be either by accident or, on some occasions (and more often recently), word of mouth – K Arsenault Rivera’s The Tiger’s Daughter is a wonderful book, and a rare example of fantasy which is also very definitely queer fiction, because it’s an f/f romance told in flashback against the backdrop of a threatened demonic invasion.
greydog: Being realistic, there are times when many of us compromise, and times when we lose our cool. Have you ever dialled down the queer aspects of a piece to try and draw in a wider audience? Or dialled it up on purpose, to hammer a point home?
Mike: I played it very straight (literally) with my first published novel, Dark Run, mainly because at that time I wasn’t sure how my publishers would react to queer characters… and also because the novel is a fast-paced thriller, and the characters were more concentrating on staying alive than on the finer points of sex and romance. My idea was that once I’d found my footing a bit, and got a better handle on who I was working with, I’d start including more LGBTQ+ elements, which I did.
In contrast, my Black Library novella Wanted: Dead features their first-ever openly acknowledged lesbian relationship (to my knowledge), and that was an entirely deliberate choice on my part. The main characters come from a House which (for reasons of largely-unexplained genetics, that I didn’t come up with) is about 98% female, and as it’s a Necromunda story it’s about gangs and gang conflict in an enormous city rather than actual war on a battlefield, like most Black Library fiction. I wanted to give some sense of the personal lives of the characters, to show what it was they were fighting for, and I could see absolutely no reason why characters from a House that is 98% female, and which generally despises men, would do anything other than hook up with another woman if they had any sort of sexual interest at all in that direction. So Jarene, the main character, not only has to consider the welfare of her fellow gang members during the story, but also deal with the fact that one of them is also her girlfriend (and a bit reckless), which provides an extra twist of fear and alarm for her any time something dangerous happens.
greydog: Have you ever had negative reader reactions because of those factors, to your knowledge?
Mike: Only from older relatives who’ve decided to read my stuff. At least, that I know of: there’s a fairly small (I hope) but vocal part of Games Workshop’s fandom who seem to object to representation of anyone who isn’t straight white men, so I imagine any of them who’ve read Wanted: Dead are going to have an aneurism, but none of them have contacted me about it and I haven’t gone looking for reviews of it.
greydog: What’s the most heartening response you’ve ever had to portraying/including LGBTQ+ characters?
Mike: I try not to read my GoodReads reviews, but there was one person who expressed delight that I’d included a couple of gender-neutral characters with gender-neutral pronouns in Dark Deeds (the third Keiko book), because it meant they’d got to see someone like them in science-fiction. To be honest, if even one person has seen a character I’ve written and gone “Oh my God, that’s me, I’ve never seen myself in this genre before”, that’s good enough for me.
greydog: We were at a panel during the 2018 UK Fantasycon, which included discussion of asexuality in fiction as part of the diversity spectrum. Have you ever covered characters who specifically identified as asexual?
Mike: Tamara Rourke in the Keiko series is asexual. She doesn’t actually use that term – I’ve tried to avoid using 21st Century terminology about such things, since it’s set about five hundred years in the future and, while the galaxy is far from perfect, I wanted to give an impression than anything anyone does in that respect is so unremarkable to them that nothing needs its own term – but she specifically states that she’s tried sex once or twice out of curiosity and really didn’t see the appeal of it on its own merits. It’s not that she never would, but she doesn’t have any desire to do it for herself, and that is I believe pretty much the definition.
greydog: Which piece of your own work are you most proud of, and why?
Mike: That’s almost impossible to answer! Dark Run was the novel that got me published, on both sides of the Atlantic and in two, soon to be three languages, so that’s a huge reason to be proud. Dark Sky got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, but then so did Dark Deeds, which I think had the plot I was most proud of from the three of them, and also where I introduced a couple of genderqueer characters as well as making a couple of characters’ non-hetero sexualities more overt. But then I’m proud of Wanted: Dead because it features the first openly-acknowledged queer main character in all of Games Workshop’s fiction. And I’m already proud of the stuff that I’m currently working on. Essentially I’m just proud that I’ve got stuff published, for money, and that people read them and seem (in the main) to enjoy them!
LGBTQ+ AND THE FIELD
greydog: The most common phrase you hear when people object to active movements which encourage diversity in fiction is “I don’t care about the sexuality, gender, colour, etc. of the writer. I only care about good stories”. How would you respond to that?
Mike: It’s a fine phrase in and of itself. The problem is that it’s usually uttered by people who almost only read straight white male authors, and use the line as a defence for why they don’t read stories by anyone else. It’s also generally followed with something about how ‘women can’t write good battles’, or not wanting to read about stories that are just about queer politics or racial politics, and so it turns out that they do care about the sexuality, gender or colour of the writer, because they think it has a direct correlation to whether a story is good.
greydog: For fantasy/speculative readers especially, world-building allows for any take you want on individuals and societies. Nowadays that includes gender identities and sexual identities more than it used to. Do you have any examples of books you’ve read where you felt that LGBTQ+ characters were handled well?
Mike: Again, The Tiger’s Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera was a great example of having two lesbian main characters, and even having the story being about that (it’s a fantastical romance, essentially?), without that being the sole focus (there are also demons). Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie was a really interesting look at a society where everyone uses ‘she/her’ pronouns and so things like sexuality and gender identity essentially disappear.
greydog: Are many readers basically scared of directly queer fiction (which would be ironic in the horrorand speculative fields especially)? Or do you thing that they just don’t come across enough good examples to get into it?
Mike: Why would readers as a group be scared of directly queer fiction? A fair percentage of them are queer themselves. Unless you’re presenting ‘readers’ as a heteronormative group, and ‘queer readers’ as a distinct group who aren’t simply ‘readers’, which isn’t exactly helpful for this narrative.
Even with that said, I think we need to be very careful what we term as ‘good’ examples of queer fiction. It is certainly possible for a non-queer person to write bad queer fiction in that they’re not good at representing queer people. It’s also certainly possible for a queer person to write an excellent presentation of queer characters that comes straight from their own lived experience, but be crap at writing a story, or dialogue, or what have you. The issue is that queer writers (or writers of colour, or women for that matter) will be held to higher standards than straight, white, male authors. There’s plenty of absolute trash (subjective opinions only, of course) that’s been written by straight people featuring straight characters doing straight things, and published, yet no one’s talking about readers being scared of ‘directly straight fiction’ because they happen to have encountered an Alan Titchmarsh sex scene.
greydog: True. The heteronormative point is a good one. Anyway, ‘straight’ is a silly term in many ways, but we’ll use it for shorthand. A number of straight creators utilise LGBTQ+ characters in their work. Do you see any inherent problems with this, or is it a good way of getting audiences to broaden their minds and reading scope. Are there any common misconceptions which get transmitted by straight creators?
Mike: No problems at all, so long as the voices of straight creators writing queer characters aren’t promoted over those of queer creators writing queer characters. Just like men writing women shouldn’t be promoted over women writing women, or white people writing characters of colour shouldn’t be promoted over creators of colour writing characters of colour. And all these creators, when writing characters from a different demographic (particularly if that’s a demographic with less privilege than their own) should be doing research and getting feedback to ensure that they’re not perpetuating damaging stereotypes or inaccuracies.
There are all sorts of common misconceptions which can and have been transmitted by straight creators, too many to list, but it would be unfair to say that all straight creators do them, or indeed that the misconceptions are universally misconceptions: it’s perhaps better to say that things which might be true about certain queer individuals are taken as true for most or all, and presented as their primary characteristics.
greydog: Are such niche fields as gay and lesbian dark erotica, and the more explicit side of paranormal romance, useful for advancing the presence of LGBTQ+ writers and characters, or detrimental to a balanced portrayal?
Mike: It’s detrimental if that’s the only avenue in which LGBTQ+ writers are allowed to write, or in which those characters are allowed to be seen. If those writers and characters are represented fairly and equally across all other forms of fiction then it would be unbalanced for them not to be present in dark erotica. If they’re not present fairly and equally across all other forms of fiction (and let’s be honest, we’re not), then questioning whether their presence in dark erotica is detrimental to a balanced portrayal, as opposed to attempting to increase their visibility elsewhere, is merely an attempt to further suppress their presence.
greydog: Do you think LGBTQ+ fiction is more acceptable to the broad public when it comes from ‘nice middle- class white people’ than when it comes from additionally marginalised groups such as queer black writers?
Mike: Yes.
greydog: Getting work noticed at all is one of the hardest things for a writer to achieve. Do you think there are more barriers for LGBTQ+ writers in general?
Mike: That’s a huge question, and probably not one that can be easily answered. There are certainly some publishers or websites who refuse to accept LGBTQ+ positive works, but they’d tend to be fairly small. The big names will publish pretty much anything if it’ll get them money, queer fiction included (I’m with an imprint of Simon & Schuster in the US; another imprint of theirs publishes books by people like Rush Limbaugh, or glowing biopics of Trump, and they were going to be publishing Milo’s book until he talked about having sex with teenage boys – it’s fair to say S&S don’t have a single guiding compass, whatever the individual opinions of individual editors might be).
But you have look beyond that, at other factors. It’s documented that bisexual people are more likely to experience mental ill health than either gay or straight people. Trans people pre-transition (those who would like to transition, that is) have a much higher rate of suicidal ideation than either cis people, or trans people post-transition. The myth of the tragic artist aside, these things are likely to have an impact on someone’s ability to create, and that’s just two factors which are related to queer identities but have nothing whatsoever to do with reception within the field, just on the potential ability to get something out there in the first place. But you can’t ignore intersectionality: a middle-class gay white man may still have less barriers to overcome than a working class straight black woman.
greydog: We’d wonder if perhaps it’s not always the basic creativity which is so much of a challenge for many writers with mental and/or physical health issues, more the constant networking, and representation on social media and formal platforms, which seems to be demanded nowadays. Those activities are draining enough in their own right. We did read the 2017 Mereish report, which suggested that in the case of bisexuals and mental health, many problems might be caused primarily by a lack of ‘community’, as opposed to the presence of active lesbian and gay communities in many areas. From the industry side, how should the big publishers and larger independents be fostering LGBTQ+ fiction and portrayals? Or is it purely up to readers to express a demand?
Mike: It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario. With the best will in the world, I understand that publishing is based on numbers, and risks have to be calculated. Going large on a market for which there isn’t a definite demand is courting failure. But by the same token, readers can’t buy things that don’t exist to express a demand (and publishers can only take so much account of what people say they want, they have to be led with what people actually buy).
However, I think there should be a standard question for large publishers and independents to be asking about any and all fiction, which is “where are the queer people?”. And if there aren’t any, or there’s only a token, badly-represented presence, and there’s no reason for this (there may be a justifiable reason for it, in that there might be a justifiable reason why there aren’t any women, or aren’t any people of colour, but it needs to be a good reason rather than just “Well, I didn’t think of that/didn’t want to include any”) then the story gets declined, or bounced back until it’s brought up to standard.
greydog: There are a number of presses dedicated to LGBTQ+ fiction. Do you view these as a good thing, or do you think they risk perpetuating exclusion from mainstream presses?
Mike: I think they can only be a good thing. They can provide an environment where queer authors can be certain of not being rejected because of their queer identity, which can allow them to build confidence to then try to approach more mainstream publishing. And it might be that a story really wouldn’t have the mass-market appeal for a big publisher to pick it up, but it might be viable for a smaller press with a small but invested audience, and that’s good for everyone involved. And rest assured, if a big publisher sees the potential for money, then they’ll jump – you need only look at the fact that Fifty Shades Of Grey and The Martian were picked up from being self-published, so already out there and available, but still bumped up into global successes.
greydog: Is there anything else you’d like to say about the topic that we haven’t managed to cover?
Mike: I’d like to see less conversation about “should LGBTQ+ authors be [doing thing]”, when no one’s asking if straight authors should be doing it. It feeds into the idea that queer authors must always be shining beacons of positive representation for the entire demographic, while straight authors can do as they please and it only reflects on them personally, if it even does that.
greydog: Yes, that’s a difficult area – and we’ve heard the same comments from author friends who are black, who get asked things you wouldn’t ask a white writer. The pressure to be a role model, to get everything right, and all those related factors. So, finally, what have you planned in the way of work for 2019?
Mike: I’m currently editing my own fantasy novel, which directly addresses issues around patriarchy and sexuality through culture clash, and has a culture with five different genders. I also have my debut novel for Games Workshop’s Black Library coming out, which I believe is scheduled for late in the year.
greydog: We’ll look forward to seeing the novel, and many thanks for taking part. It’s been fascinating.
You can find Mike Brooks’ books on Amazon, and here’s a direct link to the first in the Keiko series mentioned above:
