announcing THE ASCENDANCY TRILOGY

or, what if cyberpunk was gay and it fucked

If you, dear reader, happened to be at any of my book tour events for The Stars Too Fondly, my debut sci-fi romance that came out exactly six months ago today, you may have heard me talk about how the idea for it came to me literally in a dream. Yes, I had a dream about an abandoned spaceship and the hologram of its missing captain, I outlined the entire novel in one feverish weekend, and the rest is history.

I’m not too proud to admit that this experience — an entire Star Trek-inspired sapphic rom-com basically springing fully formed from my mind like Athena from the head of Zeus — gave me some unrealistic expectations about how writing my second book would go. And reader, it has gone about as different as a second book can go.

I’m an outliner. I’m a Capricorn rising. And so, when this story refused to outline itself for years, I didn’t have a clue what to do with it, and I had to learn, essentially, how to write a novel all over again. And reader? It’s been the most exciting learning experience of my life.

Instead of an outline, the first thing that came to me was the world. A cyberpunk space opera set on the moons of Jupiter. A seemingly unbreakable surveillance state called the Ascendancy¹ that rules its citizens through the computer chips implanted in their brains. A neo-Luddite chipless underground. A transhumanist death cult that threatens both factions with a new, unimaginable future.

Next came the characters: A butch space Robin Hood with a terminal case of Eldest Sister Syndrome. A femme fatale with religious trauma and a sword made of meteors. Omnipotent philosopher-king Mommi and militant cult leader Daddy. Glitter-crusted trans girlie starship mechanics and baby brothers you can’t stop from falling down the radicalization pipeline. Anarchists reinventing the radio a thousand years in the future and lesbians with mommy issues so severe that they have to burn down an empire about it.

And finally, blessedly, after many many false starts and scrapped outlines, the story. The Ascendancy Trilogy is a story about technology and tyranny, about family and fanaticism, about the lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers arc between two incredibly fucked-up women named Neev and Ida. It’s about bringing the Romantic (in the Frankenstein sense) and the Erotic (in the Audre Lorde sense) back to science fiction. And it’s about — don’t worry, my beloved TSTF readers — spaceships and gay sex and hope at the seeming end of the universe.

There’s this thing that happens — surely you can relate — when you write a science fiction novel about a lesbian and her hologram girlfriend for the girls gays and theys: A lot of people tell you that it’s the first science fiction novel that they’ve ever read, that they’ve ever enjoyed.

I hope that Ascendancy is the next one, beloved reader. Science fiction, in my opinion, was born to fuck.²

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That’s all I can say about this project for now, but you can have some hints in the form of Ascendancy’s bibliography thus far:

• “Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde³

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

• “Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos” by CJ the X

• Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution by Kirkpatrick Sale

• Northwest of Earth by C.L. Moore⁴

• “Project Blueprint and the Horror of Eternal Life” by Lily Alexandre

• “AI Is a False God” by Navneet Alang

• The Republic by Plato (derogatory)⁵

• “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General” by Karl Marx

• Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

• “Neither Elon Musk nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars” by Albert Burneko

• The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta

• “The Land Ethic” by Aldo Leopold

• “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke

• Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

• “The Future Is a Dead Mall” by Folding Ideas

Happy reading/watching!!

1. “Wait,” I hear you saying, “Jupiter? Ascendancy?” And then you eye me suspiciously. Yes, I needed a name for my Evil Space Government that wasn’t just, like, “The Domination,” and it delighted me to name it in homage to a modern classic of queer camp science fiction. The name is also thematically descriptive. In case you were worried

2. Next essay: Weaving Audre Lorde and Mary Shelley and C.L. Moore — stay with me now — into an animating argument that Sci-Fi Should Be Sexy

3. Required reading for everyone on Earth, btw

4. One of the only women publishing science fiction in the Pulp Era! Tagged, AO3-style, for Period-Typical Orientalism, but still highly recommended. Dathomira’s Goodreads review of Northwest of Earth put me onto her and makes the case better than I ever could

5. With thanks to Plato for being such a bad philosopher that his ideas largely inspired my entire Evil Space Government