A belated december meme post: fenellaevangella asked: could you talk a bit about Their Majesties' Bucketeers? I reread it not too long ago and I'd love to hear about what kind of fic you wish there was, or some meta if you've got it in you.

So for those of you who don't know about the thing of beauty and joy forever that is Their Majesties' Bucketeers, it is a short sf novel that is also a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that is set on a desert planet occupied by trilateral furry crab people with three genders.

But other than that it's exactly like Sherlock Holmes. It's set in that planet's equivalent of the high Victorian era, down to steam cars, a raging controversy over the new theory of natural selection, and a society built on racist imperialism. (In fact lamviin-Holmes's mother was the equivalent of east Indian, and his surfather was also foreign, though was his father was upper-class English equivalent and he seems to be successfully coasting on that, one of many things I wish canon had explored more except not really because I don't trust the writer to not suck at politics, so I guess we need fic.)

Anyway you can read more about it in this old entry about pro Holmes fic or my yuletide letter the year I asked for nothing but increasingly bizarre Holmes pastiches--everything in those still applies. And I still want more of the WIP about Srafen and rher inexplicable romantic life that I got as a treat that year, you're not off the hook.

I will also probably talk about the Srafen plot in this more in my entry on Lovelace and Babbage because they're probably my two favorite versions of steampunk ever.

But anyway. fenellaevangella knows all that already so now I am going to talk about a specific worldbuilding/speculative biology thing that Bucketeers does, and so do several other sffy things from that period, that I wish somebody would take a closer and more rigorous look at: ( a culture where it's taken for granted that you don't know what your adult gender will be until puberty. )

So I guess that's one answer to your question: I'd like more stories that explore the really different ways gendering might happen in a world where gender is never assigned at birth.

Not necessarily Bucketeers, really any version of that world you'd like to build, although I would still like fic that explored that with any of the canon characters, especially Vyssu or Srafen.

(I'd also like stories that do it more like Kazul's people, where gender isn't assigned at all but you are expected to pick one sooner or later. I suspect in a human society like that we'd still be fucked up about gender, because unfortunately, as you know, people, but in ways that were expressed quite differently. Some of the non-Α/Β/Ω D/s AUs used to touch on that, but again usually in ways that pretty closely reproduced contemporary gender issues and rarely in any depth.)