In truth, nonbinary characters and relationships already abound in science fiction and fantasy.
Even really graphic ones. It’s just that authors who wrote this stuff were largely relegated to more literary fare in the late 60s-early 70s ‘New Wave’ or 2000s-era small-press erotic romance publishers. If they wanted to publish with Tor, Daw, Del-Rey, Ace, or the other big SFF publishers, they could write coy fade-to-black scenes or scenes masked in ‘literary’ language. A few brave and explicit authors became well-known in mainstream SFF, like Samuel R. Delany. (Delaney’s fame came not so much from his gay sex scenes, but his biting and deeply-explored philosophies about human culture.)
Several momentous publishing industry shifts happened in the last few years, potentially changing the game for nonbinary SFF.
Many literary agents were long reluctant to pitch explicit ‘big gay SFF’ to mainstream publishers (even though the field was rife with explicit heterosexual writing). I’ve heard anecdotes against gay characters and steamy scenes from other authors, and have personal experience of this from *multiple* agents from 1999 to 2017.
Like it or not, 50 Shades of Grey brought erotic writing into the mainstream. Popular paranormal romance authors introduced gay and bisexual main characters. C.S. Pacat’s Captive Prince and its sequels brought Male/Male romance stories out of fanfiction and the narrower bandwidth occupied by gay romance e-publishers.
Some erotic romance small presses died off, for reasons from Amazon’s dominance of the self-pub market, to business incompetence, to changing battlegrounds in the larger American Culture War. Romance, while still a driving powerhouse of genre fiction, seems to be less popular among literary agents, leading to angsty existential discussions among romance writers’ groups. Big publishing houses are still happy to take on a proven romance author, or one they hope will be a breakout hit. Most of the growth in the romance field is projected to happen within self-publishing, often by authors leaving mainstream publishers and striking off on their own.
Mainstream science fiction and fantasy publishers have been watching this, and know their industry could be next. Some of them are gambling they can get ahead of the curve. The battleground of the Hugo Awards pitted mostly white heterosexual conservative authors against everybody else. One result is that big publishers have aggressively started seeking diverse new books and authors.
In 2020, should we all still exist and be legally able to read smutty gay novels, author K.M. Szpara, agent Jennifer Udden, and Tor.com editor Carl Engle-Laird will bring us DOCILE.
This steamy SFF is being described thus on Goodreads and its PM blurb:
A young man sells his life to a handsome trillionaire to save his family from debtor’s prison, and gets caught up in a world of money, power, sex and deceit, pitched as a queer Handmaid’s Tale meets Gossip Girl.
I can’t wait to see it, and I salute Szpara, Udden, and Engle-Laird for taking a chance. I’m hoping this gamble pays off for Tor, and for the rest of us.
Added 2-23-2020: Alas, I’m not happy with the outcome. You can read my reasons why here.