Melissa Scott's ambitious novel, Shadow Man, is, by turns, dazzlingly original, thoughtfully executed, and deeply frustrating. Scott is easily one of LGBT-themed science fiction's greatest achievers. Her battery of accolades is impressive: she's been nominated six times for a Lambda Literary Award and won three; she won the 1999 Spectrum People's Choice Award; she was a finalist in both the 2001 and 2002 Spectrum Best Novel Award competitions; and she won the 1986 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer. Of that list, two (one of the Lammies and the Spectrum People's Choice award) were awarded for Shadow Man. While I agree that Shadow Man is a great book---head and shoulders above its contemporaries---it is not without some fairly significant faults.
Without question, the greatest strength of Shadow Man is the complex and highly original world in which it is set. In the future universe of Shadow Man, the development of faster-than-light (FTL) drive technology has allowed humanity to colonize a numerous other planets, many of which are members of the diplomatic and economic union called the Concord Worlds. However, the price of using FTL technology is reliance on a hyperlumin-A, a highly mutagenic drug whose wide use led to a dramatic increase in the number of intersexual births. In the Concord, the familiar two sexes have been replaced by a complex tapestry of five sexes---men, women, herms, fems, and mems---and nine consequent sexual preferences---straight, gay, bi, tri, di, demi, hemi, uni, and omni. (Blessedly, there is a glossary.) Rather than give up interstellar travel, most of the Concord has adjusted to the new order.
The essential conflict in Shadow Man is a sort of reimagining of the gay civil rights movement as it might be played out on a profoundly alien world. Our protagonist is Warreven, a herm (hermaphrodite) lawyer/trader/mediator living on the non-Concord world of Hara. Hara is a magnificent achievement of the imagination. Its superficial similarities to Earth mask a world which is utterly alien in so many ways. The government, social structure, religion, and economy of Hara are fantastically other-worldly, at times incomprehensibly so. Contrary to what you might expect of a science fiction novel, the technology of Hara is about the only part of it that is predictable and familiar! The immensity of Scott's imaginative talent is revealed through the many subtleties of Haran culture. Take, for example, the language. As you might imagine, familiar pronouns like "he" and "she" and forms of address like "sir" or "miss" are inadequate to characterize all five sexes in Shadow Man. Scott opts to invent a whole new system of pronouns and related terms---using unfamiliar letters---to make up the slack. While a delightful innovation, this device can be distracting. Even with the accompanying glossary to help, the complexity and strangeness of Haran culture makes for challenging reading. This becomes problematic at a few points where it seems that the essential thread of the story has become lost in the morass. I sometimes found that I was distracted from the events in the life of the main character by the mental wrangling required to try and understand the backdrop on which those events play out. I really felt that I was there with Warreven, I just had little to no idea where exactly there was.
From a queer perspective, Shadow Man is an all-around winner. No matter what your combination of sex, gender identity, and sexual preference, you will see something of yourself in Shadow Man. As one might expect from someone with Scott's long list of queer-related writing awards, she does a more than adequate job of portraying queer people, their lives, and their relationships with care and honesty. The only drawback in this regard is that, because the story is situated on a world which possesses but does not formally recognize the "odd-bodied" and non-heterosexual, there are fewer opportunities for the positive expression of queer love and desire than there might be if the novel were set, say, on a Concord world. We are asked to imagine a five sex system and to learn all of the specialized language Scott creates to describe it, only to be forced to view that system through the very distorted lens of Haran two-sex mores. This kind of layered complexity will undoubtedly appeal to some readers, as it did to me, and frustrate others. Queer readers will sympathize with the way that the odd-bodied Harans are forced to chose traditional gender roles and relationships, despite their obvious differences.
Shadow Man is definitely not a simple book. It's a gritty story set in a complicated alien world populated by complicated people. Nothing---including the resolution---is neat and tidy. Very little of it is recognizably conventional. A brilliantly imagined, sometimes difficult, but potentially very rewarding book.