The foremost concern, that an explicit queer sex scene will automatically make certain readers not buy your book, has an unfortunately strong basis. Discussion of one of the examples I use frequently, Richard K. Morgan’s The Steel Remains, is a case in point: many reviewers and commentators, as well as commenters here, expressed the sentiment that they would not ever pick up the book because they didn’t want to see the gay sex in it.
…
I hate this argument to not read a book, unless the reader chooses to never read a book with sexual content at all ever. I think it’s generous to say that 90% of speculative fiction is about straight characters, many of whom have sex with other straight characters in varying degrees of explicitness.

And you know what? Queer people read those books, and most aren’t particularly excited by those straight sex scenes—but if they’re in a good book, what’s the problem? It’s part of the characters and their relationships. The point of sex in speculative fiction is not solely to be an erotic experience for the reader. If the entire turning point of a reader picking up a book is how titillating they personally find the sex in it, I suspect they should be reading erotica, not speculative fiction. If a queer person reads straight sex in a good book, why won’t a straight person read queer sex in a good book?

The excuse that a book isn’t worth reading solely because it contains queer sex is homophobic. Cushion it however one may, it is. The fear and disgust that motivates a reader to avoid a book about a queer character has a definitive root, and it isn’t prudishness.

“God, that’s a merciless question”. (via midnightradio)

Ich bin schon länger ein Fan von Miéville. Er schafft es in seinen Werken nicht nur gut geschriebene, spannende Fantastische Geschichten zu schreiben, sondern auch politische Ideen intelligent zu verhandeln. Sein Buch Der Eiserne Rat ist hier meiner Ansicht nach herausragend. In ihm erzählt Miéville von einer fahrenden Stadt, ein wandelndes sozialistisches Experiment auf Schienen, die vor dem Zug auf- und hinter ihm abgebaut werden, und einer versuchten Revolution und deren scheitern. Außerdem ist einer der Hauptcharaktere Schwul, was ganz selbstverständlich und ohne die oft gängigen identitären Zuschreibungen in die Erzählung eingebracht wird, eine wahre Rarität in diesem Genre

Der für mich spannende Teil des Interviews dreht sich ein wenig um dieses Thema, bei einer Frage zu Dan Simmon’s Terror. Ich schätze Simmons als Science Fiction Autor sehr, Hyperion und Ilium sind Meilensteine des Genres, doch habe ich bei ihm schon immer einen faden Beigeschmack wenn das Thema Homosexualität in seinen Werken auftaucht.  Dieser Beigeschmack hat sich in “Terror” zu einer handfesten Übelkeit entwickelt, so sehr dass ich das eigentlich sehr spannende Buch nicht mehr zuende lesen wollte.

Außerdem argumentiert Miéville hier sehr schlüssig, wieso und wann auch literarische Fiktion politisch kritisiert werden kann.

Aus dem Interview:

VanderMeer: Did you like The Terror?

Miéville: No. I kept wanting to find out what the giant polar bear was. When I discovered it was, indeed, a giant polar bear, I was deflated. I found it fairly page-turny, but I found it much too long, too bogged down with its historical research for its narrative, its disclosures and teratological money-shots too contingent to its narrative, and its embedded politics–particularly vis-à-vis homosexuality–offensive.

VanderMeer: You don’t believe those embedded politics were part of the historical research?

Miéville: No, because I’m not talking about the politics of the characters, but about the politics of the text, as I read it.

VanderMeer: At least he was honest. In that sense.

Miéville: Specifically, the obsessive locus of the evil character’s evil in the fact that he was an engager in anal sex. I know lots of people point to the fact that there’s a “sympathetic” gay character too (who reads, incidentally, to me, very like someone invented because an editor said “we really need a counterbalance to the evil gay”) but that character is explicitly defined as a goody because he doesn’t have sex on the ship. That’s nothing to do with historical research or attitudes (and parenthetically the idea that in a crew that size two men only would be fucking is ludicrous) but to do with the text’s pathological Terror of anal penetration which is (spoiler!–hello The Sparrow) the usual way culture gets to have a deep-seated pathologising of gay sexuality alongside putatively liberal attitudes to desexualised gay men.

VanderMeer: You’ve just ruined the innocence of perhaps 85% of Weird Tales readers.

Miéville: Hurrah! My work here is done.

VanderMeer: Please take a bow. I really liked the book, but I didn’t catch the subtext you’re talking about, in part, probably, because I was turning pages too quickly.

Miéville: I’m very aware, by the way, that loads of readers of this may think I’m being a humourless or po-faced dick about it. This is how it reads to me, and I have a big problem with it. And I think arguments about “what the writer really means” or thinks are very point-missing, because this stuff isn’t reducible to “intent.”
(Hervorhebungen von mir)

Sein neuestes Buch The City & The City ist letztes Jahr erschienen. Hier ein Buch-Trailer von youtube: