Lesbian Mars: The Martian Wild in Liz Williams’ <i>Banner of Souls</i> and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “Bradbury Weather”

The article examines the construction of the planet Mars in two early twenty-first-century science fiction texts: Liz Williams’ Banner of Souls (2004) and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “Bradbury Weather” (2005). Standing out in the largely male-authored canon of Mars science fiction, these texts seem to challenge dominant understandings of the planet as associated with, linked to, and ultimately for men through the depiction of Mars as woman-only world. The separatist utopia is a common theme in feminist science fiction, here transferred to a Martian setting. Harsh, hostile, and desolate, Mars has, in the entwined discourses of scientific observation and science fiction, long been constructed as a form of wilderness to be subdued and domesticated through technoscientific exploration and human colonization. Drawing on queer-theoretical conceptualizations of temporality and wilderness, I examine the texts through a thematic reading of the Martian wild as a spatiotemporal location. I argue that the texts construct Mars as a lesbian space, challenging dominant heteronormative, patriarchal, and colonial understandings of the planet as the future home of humanity. Furthermore, the Martian setting here shifts the woman-only world from utopia to atopia, reworking its typical linkages between gender, place, nature, and planet.