2 drama fics, 1 novel fic, 1 RPF drawing. (The last one has already been linked elsewhere in the comm, but I'm still putting it here for completion's sake. :))
Held (463 words) by facethestrange Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan Characters: Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan Additional Tags: Hands, Memories, Wedding, Domestic Fluff, Tenderness, Canon Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It, Mild Sexual Content, POV Zhao Yunlan, Guardian Bingo Series: Part 11 of Guardian Bingo 2025 Summary: He takes Shen Wei's hand in his, slow and solemn, and thinks of the handshake from what feels like a lifetime ago — all the longing and confusion and desperate hope in the firm grip, back when Zhao Yunlan didn't understand anything.
Taking What's (Not) Mine (1568 words) by facethestrange Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Shen Wei/Ye Zun/Zhao Yunlan Characters: Ye Zun (Guardian), Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan Additional Tags: Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Threesome - M/M/M, Twincest, Dubiously consensual voyeurism, Mildly Dubious Consent, (as in: everyone consents but Ye Zun wouldn't exactly care if Zhao Yunlan didn't), POV Ye Zun (Guardian), Clothed Sex, Grinding, Coming In Pants, Blow Jobs, Hand Jobs, Finger Sucking, Biting, Come Eating, Possessive Sex, Possessive Ye Zun, hand-wavy post-canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies Summary: Ye Zun is welcome here, in Gege's bed, in Gege's home, no matter how Zhao Yunlan feels about it.
Show Me (1879 words) by facethestrange Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian - priest Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Shen San/Shen Wei (Guardian) Characters: Shen San (Guardian), Shen Wei (Guardian) Additional Tags: Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn with Feelings, First Time, First Time Blow Jobs, Oral Sex, Laughter During Sex, a bit of praise kink, Soft Summary: "I want to show you," Wei says, breath warm against his skin, and Shen San makes a soft, strangled sound and nods wordlessly, the fire he has tried to keep in check all day rising and blooming in his belly.
Honduran white bats, sticker by the Atomic Pixies.
This was a long week (despite being a short work week for me) and a rough one. The shooting at Evergreen High School ("minor" as it was, considering, and how awful is that?) impacted me more than I expected, having interacted with the two named students. I didn't know them well, by any stretch, but it still hit me hard. The endless discourse around Charlie Kirk's death has also been completely exhausting. The stuff from early in the week - more back and forth getting the AC fixed, a walk in a neighboring city to see an uncommon bird - seems like it was way longer ago now. We had a model show to end the week, which was tiring but a nice break. Having a long weekend was a good thing.
Goals for the week:
I did finish reading The Dead Take the A Train
I started reading Tidal Creatures
I did not finish (or even work on) the WIP intro
We did finish the model show prep, even if it was last-minute
We went to the model show on Saturday
I stopped by mom's earlier in the week to collect caterpillars, and Saturday to drop Bella off
I went to the bank
I ordered birthday gifts for Taylor, though they aren't supposed to arrive until day-of :/
We got a bit of outdoor time
I did write up my September writing goals
We paid rent, finally getting an accurate amount
I still haven't put my laundry away
I did go buy fruit flies
I didn't work on my reading page
Tracked habits:
Work - 4/7 - I took Saturday off
Household Maintenance - 7/7
Physical Activity - 2/7
Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 1/7 - over 500 words
Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 0/7
Meta Work - 3/7
Personal Writing - 5/7
Other Creative Things - 2/7
Reading - 7/7 - I finished The Dead Take the A Train, and started Tidal Creatures, I also caught up on Dracula Daily/Re: Dracula, Alex and I read more of Duma Key, and I started reading a short story called Swelter
Attention to Media - 6/7 - Sunday we watched the Ravens game (which was good for the first three and a half quarters), then watched two episodes of The Paper; Monday we watched two eps of The Paper, and then an ep of Great British Bake Off, then a documentary I don't remember; Tuesday I caught up on Re: Dracula, we watched a couple eps of Dateline, then finished the last couple eps of The Paper; Wednesday I listened to Re: Dracula and we had news coverage in the background; Thursday had some documentaries in the background; Friday watched Great British Bake Off, and then The Most Hated Man on the Internet
Looking for another job while currently employed inevitably feels like living a double life. You have to keep up with your current tasks and responsibilities at work so that nobody becomes suspicious about what you might be up to. At the same time, though, you need to make yourself available for interviews with other companies while devoting enough time and energy to preparing for those interviews so that you actually do a good job. It's a tough balancing act that few can accomplish with ease, and this employee certainly tried to pull it off. Unfortunately, it didn't exactly turn out the way they had hoped it would.
After being contacted on Indeed by a competitor, this author decided to hear what these folks had to say and took an interview with them. They weren't actually looking seriously for other job opportunities. This position would actually be a lateral move, but it would be at a company that was closer to their location and therefore more convenient for their commute. After a successful interview, the author felt good about their chances and was told they would hear more very soon. However, nothing was set in stone.
Soon thereafter, the author was confronted by their CEO, who had connected the dots and figured out that they were looking for work elsewhere. The author was backed into a corner and was unable to deny it. That's when they learned that the fragile CEO was letting the employee go as a result. The author began to suspect foul play. After all, how did the CEO figure it out? It's not like the employee was absent or doing a poor job in their current role. When the author contacted the other company, it became clear that there was, in fact, some communication behind their back.
When we got to the dealer, the salesman would only talk to me. I was all buddy buddy with the guy, too, but he completely ignored my wife. We went along with it.
Customer: "I thought maybe you could stitch the group's name onto some caps for us?"
Me: "We can do that. What's the name of the group?"
Customer: "Moms’ Annual Getaway Adventure!"
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<p class="syndicationauthor">Posted by Sarah</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/a-tale-of-paradox-and-coincidence-invasion-from-2500-by-norman-edwards/">https://reactormag.com/a-tale-of-paradox-and-coincidence-invasion-from-2500-by-norman-edwards/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=823975">https://reactormag.com/?p=823975</a></p><post-hero class="wp-block-post-hero js-post-hero post-hero post-hero-horizontal">
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<h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1">A Tale of Paradox and Coincidence: <i>Invasion From 2500</i> by “Norman Edwards”</h2>
<div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">Can our heroes foil an invasion based on a classic time travel paradox?</div>
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Published on September 16, 2025
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<p>In this <a href="https://reactormag.com/tag/front-lines-and-frontiers/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bi-weekly series</a> reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.</p>
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<p>Today I’m looking at a rather short and straightforward book about a war with time travelers: <em>Invasion from 2500</em>, a book that was new to me. In my annual search for adventures stories that make for good summer reading, I found it in my favorite used bookstore a few weeks ago, along with <a href="https://reactormag.com/hope-amid-hopelessness-city-at-worlds-end-by-edmond-hamilton/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>City at World’s End</em></a> by Edmond Hamilton, which I covered in my last review. The book appears to be a paperback original, published in 1964 with a cover price of forty cents by an outfit named Monarch Books, a publisher I didn’t remember encountering before. And I hadn’t heard of the author of this novel, Norman Edwards, either. But the book had interesting cover art by Ralph Brillhart, showing futuristic military vehicles pouring out of a gold energy ring, which looked promising. And there was a dedication on the title page that said, “To Terry Carr and Ted White, who made this book possible.” I’d heard of those two, and if they were behind this Norman Edwards guy, he must be a decent writer.</p>
<p>Imagine my surprise when I visited the online <a href="https://sf-encyclopedia.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Encyclopedia of Science Fiction</a>, and found that the dedication was an in-joke, because Norman Edwards turns out to be a pseudonym used by Carr and White—used only once, when they wrote this book. I could not, however, find any reason why the two of them decided to use this pen name, only to quickly abandon it.</p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>About the Authors</strong></h3>
<p><strong>Terry Carr</strong> (1937-1987) was an American science fiction fan, author, and editor. He started his writing career in fan publications. The bulk of his fiction output consisted of shorter works. He was more widely known as an editor, working with Donald Wollheim at Ace Books from 1964 to 1971, where in addition to the “Ace Special” novel series, they produced an influential annual anthology series entitled “World’s Best Science Fiction.” He left Ace Books and produced his own anthology series, “The Best Science Fiction of the Year,” which ran from 1972 to 1987. He also edited the “Universe” anthology series, and produced a wide variety of other anthologies. In the 1980s, he returned to Ace, and edited a new “Ace Specials” series that published a number of influential novels, including <em>Neuromancer</em> by William Gibson. He won four Hugo Awards during his career, one for Best Fanzine, one for Best Fan Writer, and the last two for Best Editor.</p>
<p><strong>Ted White</strong> (born 1938) is an American science fiction author, editor, fan, and critic. His earliest work appeared in fanzines, and he won a Best Fan Writer Hugo Award in 1968. He wrote over a dozen science fiction novels, with a number of them being collaborations. He was an assistant editor of the <em>Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction</em> for five years in the 1960s, and then edited <em>Amazing Stories</em> and <em>Fantastic</em> magazines. He later worked at <em>Heavy Metal</em> and <em>Stargate</em> magazines. I have previously reviewed his work in this column, looking at his Captain America novel, <a href="https://reactormag.com/from-comic-book-to-novel-captain-america-the-great-gold-steal-and-libertys-torch/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>The Great Gold Steal</em></a>.</p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Time Waits for No Man</strong></h3>
<p>I have reviewed a number of books that featured time travel over the years, with characters going forward in time, back in time, and even sidewise in time (trips to alternate worlds where history turned out differently). The always-useful online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has an excellent article on the various types of <a href="https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/time_travel" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">time travel</a> stories. Most of the books I’ve looked at, however, sidestep the issue of travelers from the future affecting the time from which they departed, something addressed in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s article on <a href="https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/time_paradoxes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">time paradoxes</a>. And <em>Invasion from 2500</em> leans into the idea of a time paradox as vigorously as any time travel book I’ve ever read. It portrays the invaders as knowing how to proceed in their attack, because for them, the war is a matter of history. They see their success as inevitable. Unless of course, this loop in causality is unstable, and the people in the present can find a way to disrupt the process…</p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong><em>Invasion from 2500</em></strong></h3>
<p>Jack Eskridge, an executive from a Chicago-based defense contractor, is driving to the South Dakota ranch of Senator Bates. This is not their first meeting, as during the Korean War, the two served in the Marines together, Bates as a lieutenant and Jack as a sergeant. Suddenly, there is a hole in Jack’s windshield, and he realizes someone is shooting at him. It is the senator’s beautiful daughter, Linda, who was out plinking with a .22, and with the road to their ranch usually empty, was not being too careful where she aimed. But this awkward meeting turns fortuitous, as the two of them hit it off, and before Jack leaves, they are on their way to being engaged.</p>
<p>As Jack drives back toward Chicago, though, he encounters a strange sight. He sees a large glowing arch and nearly runs off the road in surprise. He gets out to get a better look, and sees a river of torpedo-like tanks, and men in strange suits pouring out of the arch, which appears to be a doorway to another world. Jack is fired at by a laser, goes to ground, crawls back to his car, and heads out at a high rate of speed. Jack can’t imagine where these strange invaders are coming from (he obviously hasn’t had the opportunity to read the title of the book). He stops for gas to find that the invaders are appearing in multiple locations, and the whole country is on edge. He stops to pick up a hitchhiker, a Black man named Carl Brandon (a name that Carr had employed before, and <a href="https://carlbrandon.org/about/">that might be familiar to some readers</a>). But unfortunately for them, the invaders arrive and release a gas that doesn’t need to be breathed to take effect; as soon as it touches them, they fall unconscious.</p>
<p>Jack awakens in a work camp, sees an invader without a suit for the first time, and realizes they are human. In addition to lasers, they have weapons that can kill people by overloading their nervous systems. Jack is given work papers, and assigned to a crew by an officer and soldiers who are bureaucratic to a fault. Jack meets a guy named Monroe, who is determined to escape. Monroe is zapped, but Jack makes it out of the camp.</p>
<p>The next chapter has a different feel from the preceding narrative (I suspect the chapter was written by a different co-author than previous chapters). Jack finds a house, asks for a meal and shelter, and his request is accepted. But when he sits down for dinner with the man and his family, it is an awkward affair. It turns out the man is a hard-core, communist-hating conservative, who looks at the invasion as an opportunity to remake the country into something more to his liking, and is enthusiastically collaborating with the invaders. He looks forward to them replacing our current government with something more efficient, and helping us rid the world of foreign adversaries like the Russians and Chinese. Jack is uneasy, and sleeps with his knife under his pillow—which comes in handy when his host sneaks into the room to kill him. But it is Jack that does the killing, something the newly widowed wife reacts to without much sorrow, making me wonder if she had been the victim of some sort of abuse. The chapter stands out from the rest of the book because of its rather pointed social commentary.</p>
<p>Jack makes his way to Chicago via Duluth, using a water route to avoid roadblocks. When he arrives, he finds much of Chicago is in rubble, and the Loop roadway in ruins. He tries to phone a friend, but the phones are bugged, and he is nearly captured. He finds out where the invaders have their local headquarters, and heads there (although what he thinks he might accomplish is beyond me). But (in one of those coincidences most writing guides warn authors to avoid), Jack arrives just in time to see Senator Bates and his beloved Linda arrive as prisoners. And then Jack is captured by a group of insurgents (in another improbable coincidence, led by an old friend), who are there to rescue the senator, but they only succeed in rescuing Linda. Thus, Jack and Linda find themselves becoming members of the Underground.</p>
<p>This resistance organization has been reduced to lurking in tunnels under the surface of Chicago. And their efforts are further complicated by the Jackals street gang, which fights both the invaders and the resistance. Jack and another man sneak into the invader headquarters, only to find its occupants expecting them. They are taken to the invader leader, who explains that The Conquest is preordained to happen in a certain way, as chronicled in <em>The Book of Days</em>, which guides the invaders’ every action. As his villainous monologue continues, he reveals that the invaders know what will happen because they are from the future. And then, because their book says so, the invaders release Jack and his friend to tell others that their defeat is inevitable. The invasion is based on a classic time travel paradox.</p>
<p>Jack is not willing to accept the inevitable, so he overpowers their escort, Ellick Twenty-three (I am so glad numbers for names went out of style decades ago), and they steal one of the enemy torpedo tanks. They encounter an invader officer, and try to bluff their way past him, but coincidentally (again with the coincidences), he is the same officer who checked Jack in at the work camp, Lieutenant Gann-Fourteen. He recaptures them, and has them drive him back to Chicago. Fortunately, when they arrive, the Jackals attack, which gives Jack a chance to escape back to the Underground. Jack sees another man being possessive toward his beloved Linda. He tries to tell the others about the invaders being from the future, but no one believes him. When they decide to crash a kamikaze plane into invader headquarters, the despondent Jack (who became despondent very quickly, but I guess the plot required it), volunteers to fly the plane. But then the invaders attack again, destroy the plane, capture Linda, and take her back to their headquarters. Jack, who finds out that she loves him after all, sets out to rescue her.</p>
<p>Jack sneaks into the enemy headquarters, to find Linda (coincidentally) in the hands of the seemingly ubiquitous Lieutenant Gann-Fourteen. Jack is captured yet again. But there is a servant in the quarters (coincidentally, it’s Carl Brandon, the Black man captured with Jack way back in the beginning of the book), who loosens Jack’s bonds. Jack escapes with Linda and a copy of <em>The Book of Days</em>. Now that the Underground has the full story of the invasion, they cook up a wild plan. They decide the time loop is not stable (could they have been inspired by Chicago’s now-ruined Loop?), and think that destroying the time gate might disrupt the loop and restore time to its original condition. Jack volunteers to bomb the portal (where he first spotted the invaders in South Dakota), and Linda goes with him, refusing to be separated from him again. Will it be possible to destroy the paradox along with the portal? Only time will tell…</p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Final Thoughts</strong></h3>
<p>I can’t say that I would recommend <em>Invasion from 2500</em> to another reader without reservations. The book is indeed a briskly paced adventure story, full of action, battles, reversals of fortune, and misunderstood lovers, but the writing style is uneven, and it relies far too heavily on the type of coincidence an author should only use sparingly, if at all. It makes me wonder if the authors—who, from the exuberance of the narrative, seem to have had fun writing the book—also realized its weaknesses, and decided to use a pen name. The book certainly doesn’t reflect the quality of the work those authors produced later in their careers. But it was a fun read, and as a thin volume, had the advantage of being short enough to end before I grew tired of it.</p>
<p>And now I turn the floor over to you: If you have read <em>Invasion from 2500</em>, or know anything about the history of its creation, I would enjoy hearing from you.[end-mark]</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/a-tale-of-paradox-and-coincidence-invasion-from-2500-by-norman-edwards/">A Tale of Paradox and Coincidence: <i>Invasion From 2500</i> by “Norman Edwards”</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/a-tale-of-paradox-and-coincidence-invasion-from-2500-by-norman-edwards/">https://reactormag.com/a-tale-of-paradox-and-coincidence-invasion-from-2500-by-norman-edwards/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=823975">https://reactormag.com/?p=823975</a></p>
A labor man broke his leg on the job by slipping between some dangerous high-rise scaffolding, but instead of leaving him to fend for himself with the medical bills and the leave, his manager stepped up and defended him. Knowing that it would cost the managerial team their safety bonuses, this upstanding subcontractor diligently recorded all of the events of his employee's injury and refused to let corporate brush his physical ailments to the wayside.
The right thing to do isn't always the easiest, but when it comes to meticulous compliance, this contractor is the defendant you want in your corner defending your case, because he was prepared to go the extra mile in good conscience.
Customer: "This one’s damaged. Can I get a discount?"
Me: "No worries, ma’am. We’ve got plenty of new ones in the back that aren’t damaged."
She doesn’t look thrilled, but I think that’s the end of it.
There are certain situations where you just don't want to draw unnecessary attention to yourself. Things like avoiding making direct eye contact with the teacher in class to avoid answering questions, or that exceptionally long paragraph that's coming up.
In situations like this, it's best to go as unnoticed as possible. Flying under the radar becomes a method of self-preservation, even when you're not doing anything wrong; it's just that getting your teacher's attention at the wrong time would be mighty stressful and inconvenient.
As you grow up, the powers that be are no longer petty authority figures but mighty swollen bureaucracies and their agents of misfortune. Again, it's not that you're doing anything wrong, at least not intentionally, but drawing their gaze is like the eye of Sauron fixating on the Ring when Frodo slips it on his finger, and once the gaze is upon you, there is no going back.
Before you know it, you're going to be drowning in unnecessary administration and all the paperwork that comes with it, with fines for each small violation as a reward.
When it comes to building management, the local authorities' building inspector and the fire marshal are two of those things that you'd rather not have come poking around. With their technical policy manuals in hand, there is not a building in the world that these professionals could walk through where they couldn't pull up some violation that would need rectifying.
Don't get me wrong, this is all for good reason, good technical standards are written in the dark red ink of hard lessons. But when you're on the receiving end of an impossible list of required alterations, it doesn't feel this way. And I'm sure that's exactly how this landlord was feeling after they willingly brought themselves to the attention of the local fire marshal, putting an end to their quarrel with their tenant.
We kept getting fed the same bullshit, and it’s being laundered in the same kind of stories. [The New York Times] sucks, man. It doesn’t suck because it posted something dumb that betrays the paper’s poor commitment to video gaming’s wider place in our culture and artistic landscape. It sucks because it’s doing to games, and AI, what it seems to be doing to every other important beat of the 2020s: taking the worst people at face value.
Mum: "Could I have a small pizza from the kids’ menu, please?"
Waiter: *Shaking his head.* "I’m sorry, ma’am, but the kids’ menu is only for children."
Title: Wasted Energy Fandom: Miss Marple/Sherlock Holmes Pairing/Characters: Jane Marple & Mrs Hudson Content Notes: No warning needed Prompt: September 17th: energy
Title: Wirework Fandom: FAKE Author: badly_knitted Characters: Dee, Ryo. Rating: PG Setting: Set in my AU where Dee and Ryo are stuntmen. Summary: Dee and Ryo are all harnessed up for a dangerous stunt on a mountainside. Written For: Challenge 453: Amnesty 75 at fan_flashworks, using Challenge 21: Wire. Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh. A/N: Triple drabble.
Gtsto was the offspring of Atli-lyen-tlas, gtsto, ruthlessly abandoned, gtsto, hitherto gtste… who most valorously hid from gtst enemies until Chanur had come to port. Then, seeing my magnificence and, surely to afford me comfort, gtstisi became gtsto…
So Atli-lyen-tlas’ daughter had hid from assassins, and, attracted to Tlisi-tlas-tin had become… call it male. It didn’t bear offspring in this hormonal condition. If she presented what gtst had said to the universities at Anuurn or Maing Tol, she could justify a second certificate in foreign studies.1
This passage, where a spaceship captain discovers that an alien passenger has changed gender (and switched pronouns), might not be surprising in the modern sci-fi sphere, where books featuring trans and nonbinary characters are published far more regularly. But this book—Chanur’s Legacy—by C.J. Cherryh, came out in 1992, marking the end of Cherryh’s beloved Chanur saga, which began in 1981. Cherryh was writing about trans themes and identities in the era dominated by the social and religious conservatism of the Reagan administration and organizations like Focus on the Family; they are deeply interesting, and worthy of greater attention and recognition.
With a background in archaeology and classics, Cherryh is known for building complex alien societies anchored in cultures, social mores, and neurobiology foreign to humans. This leads to intricate conflicts as species’ differing customs and behaviors come into contact with each other. Often, these conflicts involve conceptions of gender.
Take the hani, the main species of the Chanur series. The hani are inspired by lions, by which we mean the males laze about while the females do everything. The males nominally rule big, sprawling estates as clan lords, but in reality, they are considered too short-tempered and irrational to be trusted with important decisions, so the females run the estates and, once the hani discover space travel, crew the spaceships. The lords’ only job is fighting off male challengers and “lying about on cushions with a dozen wives to see to the nastiness2.”
Anyone who can do arithmetic can spot that this isn’t as good a deal for the males as it seems. Adolescent male hani “had to go out into the outback to live, learn to hunt and to fight each other and if boys lived long enough they could come back and try to drive some older man out into the outback to die3.” And when an aging clan lord is defeated, his reward is either death or a pitiful exile. To a hani, “Males were what they were, three quarters doomed and the survivors, if briefly, estate lords, pampered and coddled4.”
No wonder not every male rushes to embrace this role.
When Pyanfar, a hani ship captain and the protagonist of the Chanur series, finds her deposed mate Khym injured and hiding at the fringes of another male’s territory, “surviving, out of his time and his reason for living5,” she offers him a berth on her ship, telling him, “It’s different out there… Right and wrong aren’t the same. Attitudes aren’t the same… Might start a fashion6.”
Easier said than done. While Khym is not a stereotypical bad-tempered male—“as males went, he was a rock of stability and self-control7”—he’s learned to be lazy and fails to pull his considerable weight. When warned to control his temper, he complains, “We’re set up to fight. Millions of years—it’s not an intellectual thing. Our circulatory system, our glands8 […]”. Pyanfar tells Khym he’s “spoiled by a mother that coddled your tempers instead of boxing your ears the way she did your sister’s. He’s just a son, huh? Can’t be expected to come up to his sister’s standard9.”
Khym struggles because he isn’t just changing jobs—he’s switching gender roles. From a hani perspective, Pyanfar must feminize him so he can join her crew. But he learns. Pyanfar is astonished when he accepts drudge work, “by the gods, the ex-lord of Mahn on galley duty, no complaints10.” A turning point comes when Pyanfar loses her temper and nearly attacks an important hani and finds “Khym’s arm between her and the Ehrran: Khym, whose mind had gone on working when hers quit11.” At the end of that voyage, she awards him an earring—a badge of honor that hani spacers earn for their travels, only ever awarded to females. Khym has learned how to be female.
Meanwhile on the homeworld, Pyanfar has started a dustup over gender roles. Mentioning men at all is rocking the boat—“Ten, fifteen years ago, you didn’t by the gods use the male pronoun in a message between clans. It still felt queasy and indecent12”—and Pyanfar is asking them to rethink their fundamental understanding of society. Are males just built that way? Or is it, as Pyanfar claims, “custom, not hardwiring13?” It’s an argument that humans have been having for decades, with the same key point of contention—once someone has been assigned a sex at birth, are they shackled to that role forever?
Khym adapts to a female role out of necessity. In Chanur’s Legacy, though, we meet a male hani who adopts a female role by choice. The adolescent Hallan has decided to “fight biology and go to space14.” Hallan is a miserable fit for the traditional male gender role. He’s shy, curious, bookish, and terrible at fighting. He surreptitiously reads romance novels. “Whether you read him as trans or queer, the feeling of being an other is palpable. He cannot survive the violent life dictated to male hani, his only role to sacrifice his body in a system he does not believe in, but is forbidden to travel the stars and seek something else for himself on account of his gender,” says Dorian Dawes, author of A Dream of Saints.
Hallan isn’t just escaping from a bad lot in life—he actively wants to be female. He “insisted he was one of the girls, that he was cool-headed, he wanted to play the game on their terms15.” And he wants not only the female role, but female biology. He has “[i]llusions he was a girl16.” He dreads that in the future “when he got all his size and hormones kicked in for good and earnest, he wasn’t going to be worth anything but one thing until he was as old as Khym Mahn and hormones had stopped making him crazy… worst of all, to think that, over the next few years, he might progressively lose his self-control and his reason17.” Fearing your hormones turning you into someone you don’t want to be—it’s a feeling all too familiar to trans people.
Yet everywhere he goes, people see only his birth sex, and misunderstand him because of it. When he impulsively hits someone and lands in jail, everyone assumes he’s another crazy male hani, but “[t]ruth was, he’d been scared, not mad21.” He’s desperate to prove himself, but his rookie mistakes get blown out of proportion. An alien passenger flips out at the sight of him, protesting that “our presence has been assaulted by strange persons of male and violent gender22.” Dorian Dawes sees a strong connection to the trans experience: “This idea that you are bound to your biological sex, and everyone perceives your male hormones as a threat to female spaces feels all too familiar in 2025, and Cherryh uses this metaphor with devastating precision.”
Among the hani, gender is rigid. Among their neighbors the stsho, gender is fluid. The stsho are “trisexual hermaphrodites, one of each triad bearing young: but that same individual may exist within another triad as a non-bearer. Stsho refuse to explain23.” When stressed, stsho go through a transition called Phasing and come out an entirely different person, sometimes with a new gender that, thanks to hormonal changes, is capable of reproducing in its new role. “Stsho change sex, change person, change everything24.” After phasing, they are treated as a completely new entity, and “it was not at all polite to recognize the refurbished person25”—that is, to deadname them.
The stsho use their own pronouns: gtst for the neuter gender, which engages with outsiders; gtste for (more or less) female; gtsto for (more or less) male; and gtstisi for those currently Phasing. Finally, elder stsho take on a completely genderless role—different than neuter—with the pronoun gtsta. For the stsho, gender is a temporary role that changes many times over their long lives, due to stress, politics, desire to find a mate, or for countless other reasons.
Interactions with the stsho can be complicated, unsurprisingly. The opening vignette comes from Chanur’s Legacy, where hani captain Hilfy accepts a contract to deliver a vase from a stsho governor to a stsho ambassador. The vase turns out to be a formal marriage proposal, which indicates “[t]he nature of the alliance. No’shto-shti-stlen’s position within it, which of the three… an emblem of proposed gender26.” Since only one gender serves in politics, many parties have a strong vested interest in the exact nature of the offer, and Hilfy finds herself embroiled in intrigue.
Finally, we have the kif. The kif “hit the ground at birth competitive, aggressive, and (some scholars surmised) having first to escape their nest before they were eaten27.” “What their genders are is a matter of guesswork28” and “he” is used by outsiders only by convention. Instead, their culture is organized around a principle called sfik, which translates to something like “face.” For a kif, life revolves around gaining sfik or causing others to lose sfik. They have no other model for social interaction.
Usually.
Skkukuk is a castoff from a former kif master who considers him worthless. Given to Pyanfar as a gift, he initially “looked sinister in one instant, beaten and pathetic in the next29,” devoid of sfik and clearly not flourishing within the kif social order. As author Tuxedo Catfish put it on Bluesky, Skkukuk is “somehow trans despite belonging to a species whose closest analogue to gender is ‘how much boss are you’.”
Pyanfar considers him a dangerous, annoying liability, but when she finally begins allowing him responsibilities on the ship, he is eager to please, proving resourceful and trustworthy. It is Tully, the human crewmember, who figures him out: “He want be hani… He kif, he same time got no friend with kif, he be little kif. They kill him, yes… He don’t be hani, he die30.” Unable to live with his birth-assigned social identity, he adopts a new one.
Skkukuk reappears years later under the name Vikktakkht. He commands a fleet now, but still demonstrates un-kif-like attitudes. He foregoes the opportunity to turn on Pyanfar to increase his own sfik, saying, “if I aspired to be mekt-hakkikt the peace would end31,” even though kif supposedly can’t understand the concept of peace. He blindsides Hilfy by dealing fairly with her when she’s in a precarious situation. He takes to Hallan, visiting him in jail, doing favors for him, and offering him an honored spot at a negotiation table. Hilfy is baffled: “Why had Vikktakkht wanted him? Why had Vikktakkht insisted to speak to him, except to get a less wary answer?32” Vikktakkht’s answer is “I find him amusing33”—perhaps the closest he can get to expressing his feelings with the language he understands—but the real answer is something the kif are supposed to be biologically incapable of: friendship. Another alien says of the kif, “Nobody friend. Don’t got word, ‘friend.’ Just ‘advantage34’”but Vikktakkht apparently does. He saw the struggling misfit who no one trusted, sympathized with him, and took him under his wing.
The trans connection here is more subtle than it is for the stsho, but the parallels are there: Being born into a supposedly immutable biological and social role that doesn’t suit you at all, suffering for failing to fulfill that role, blossoming when you find an identity that fits you, and—of course—finding community with others in the same position. Tuxedo Catfish explains, “he’s constantly mistreated in ways that don’t really register as mistreatment to him, and once people start feeling guilty about it you can almost see the wheels turning in his brain as he realizes both that this is better than the life he lived before and also that he can take advantage of it.”
Alien gender revolutions, aliens who regularly switch genders, aliens who take on social roles from other alien species—the Chanur series is full of trans themes and concepts, and many trans readers have seen themselves reflected in characters like Hallan. Today’s science fiction continues to build on the decades-long heritage of authors who used sci-fi as a space to explore ideas about society long before they were mainstream in the real world—playing a key part in that heritage is C.J. Cherryh, who took a hard look at how our society views gender and saw other possibilities.[end-mark]
Chanur’s Endgame, p. 574. (All quotations from Chanur’s Homecoming and Chanur’s Legacy come from the omnibus edition Chanur’s Endgame.) ︎
Title: That Sinking Feeling Author: badly_knitted Characters: Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond. Rating: G Written For: Challenge 958:‘Morass’ at dw100. Spoilers: Nada. Summary: The Doctor seems to have made a slight miscalculation… Disclaimer: I don’t own Doctor Who, or the characters.
Title: Home Is Where... Author: badly_knitted Characters: Ianto. Rating: PG Written For: Challenge 883: Home at torchwood100. Spoilers: Nada. Set in my Through Time and Space ‘Verse. Summary: Home doesn’t have to be a place. Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. A/N: Double drabble.
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