“Science fiction is bathed in queerness”: A conversation with Susan Jane Bigelow

“Science fiction is bathed in queerness”: A conversation with Susan Jane Bigelow

By Alex Dueben

“Being trans is such a weird experience,” writer Susan Jane Bigelow said in a recent conversation. I suggested that’s why she writes fantasy and science fiction, and she said yes, but “Also just because it’s cool. In the end, we write about what’s fun and interesting to us.”

Bigelow is a writer of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories including her recent books Flight of the Scarlets (2023) and Siphany and the Whale (2024), but the librarian is known to many in Connecticut for writing about local politics, which she stepped away from a few years ago. 

“I feel like I’ve always written fiction,” Bigelow said. “It’s something that’s always been part of me. I was this really lonely little weird kid, so I spent a lot of time by myself just making up stories,” she said of her childhood in Newington. “In 2004, after Bush won a second term, I was extremely agitated. I did the National Novel Writing Month, and I wrote a book about fascism.” That book was Broken, the first book in her four volume Extrahuman Union series, which combined science fiction and superheroes.

“The books got progressively more and more queer as I kept writing them,” Bigelow said of the series. “I transitioned around in 2010-2011, and the further that I got into that, the more queer everything got. I think I’d always wanted to do that, but I gave myself permission to write queer stuff.”

Bigelow’s two recent novels are very different from each other. Siphany is a space opera about a character trying to be left alone, while Scarlets is magical girl fantasy story about a trans teenager in a boring town. The books also had very different processes. “For Scarlets, I thought, she can turn herself into a girl with a magic wand. Where can I go with this? And I started incorporating all these other things that I’ve thought about,” she said. “Siphany and the Whale started as an experiment to see if I could build a world. I wanted to create a protagonist who was autistic-coded, neurodivergent in some way.”

“I came up with the idea of somebody who has a really comfortable spaceship. She’s all alone and loves it. Then you throw a psychotic robot in, and the story flowed from there. Take a character who’s perfectly happy and content, and then you throw some chaos in,” Bigelow said. “It’s mean as hell, but it’s great for stories.”

“Siphany and the Whale came from an earlier version of myself, but over the decade that it took to get it published, I kept going back to it and changing it over time. Whereas Scarlet was something that I thought, I’m going to make something completely new and completely different from the other stuff that I’ve written. And I’m going to explicitly make it a trans story.”

Bigelow said that she has plans for more of Scarlet and Siphany “and just more in general.” The two recent books are her best work to my mind, and she agreed. “I feel like I’m getting better,” she said. “I wish I had more time. I find myself busier than I thought I would be. I work with the Enfield Historical Society now. Everything that’s going on in the world takes up space in my brain,” she said. 

“I’ve been playing around with genre a little bit and trying new things. I’ve got nine-tenths of a romance novel done. I’ve been reading nothing but sapphic romances for the past year and a half, and it feels a little embarrassing to admit, but I have so many ideas for romance novels.”

Over the course of our conversation, Bigelow kept coming back to the frustration over publicity, working with small presses that went under, and trying to build a career as a writer despite her many books and being published in an impressive list of magazines and anthologies including Lightspeed and Strange Horizons. “It was very hard for a while to feel like I totally failed at it,” she said.

“It took me a long time to understand that it’s not me. It’s just how the publishing world is. I have two choices. I can either wallow in it forever, which is a good option,” Bigelow said with a laugh. “Or I can stay the hell with it and just keep writing what I want to write.”