Fiction Recommendation: Margins & Murmurations Trilogy

[I like plants]

I have a fiction recommendation: The three novels Margins & Murmurations, Dignity, and Conserve & Control by Otter Lieffe. These are works of speculative fiction, that I find of particular interest for folks involved in ecological and LGBTQIA+ activism.

Ash, who is a main character in Dignity and in Margins& Murmurations, is explicitly aromantic and possibly asexual. She's a trans woman in her 60s/70s (actually, a lot of the characters in this book are older, which I appreciate as usually only young characters get to be these sorts of active protagonists in dystopian fiction, and this actually doesn't reduce how I relate to the characters, even though I am much younger), and the central relationship in these two books is her committed, long-term friendship with Pinar, a cis bisexual woman in her 50s. In Dignity, in the year (2035?2038?), Ash and Pinar are living together in an unspecified european city, where not long ago many queer people had made their home, but under increasing pressure from the State, which is pushing people with different marginalisations further into the margins and pushing anti-queer, anti-femme sentiment in a time of continued collapse. Ash and Pinar, who are somewhat famous for their role in the fictional Femme Riots of 2017, are running a herbal clinic and struggling to find ways to continue to live and resist for themselves and their community.

In Margins & Murmurations, Ash & Pinar are living in the forest and have chosen to live a few km apart, and regularly walk to visit each other. Pinar tells a new potential lover something like 'Ash and I have a life together, we're not involved romantically. Ash doesn't do that in general.'

 

Themes in three books include: transfeminism, queer ecology, sex work from sex worker's perspective, activist struggles from the perspective of marginalised people, activist culture and movements, herbalism, BDSM, green and rainbow capitalism and the ability of the state to appropiate activist causes to stay in power, extractivism, conservation as a form of colonialism, mutual aid.

 

There are sex scenes involving other characters, always queer and often involving BDSM. As someone who mostly just doesn't have feelings while reading pure smut, I found these scenes interesting.

[I like plants]

Link to goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34791281-margins-and-murmurations

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55367084-dignity

Date: Margins & Murmurations published January 2017, Dignity January 2020

Source: Author Otter Lieffe

Category: Books