QSFer Reis Asher has a new queer sci-fi romance (M-NB) out: Conversion Dysphoria Blues.
What if cyborgs suffered body dysphoria?
In his mid-forties, former cop turned career bureaucrat Nolan Rogers is diagnosed with terminal cancer. His best friend Elly Takahara convinces him to undergo the process of body conversion, where his brain is transplanted into a robotic body. The operation is successful, but Nolan quickly finds himself adrift in a body that doesn’t eat or physically react to emotion. For the first time in years, he’s suffering from a new kind of body dysphoria, a sensation he hoped to have left behind when he transitioned to male decades ago.
During this crisis, he meets Tallis, a proud nonbinary body convert who sued his parents for the right to give up his flesh and blood body. Tallis is fire to Nolan’s water, and whereas Nolan just wants to fit in, Tallis is determined to stand out in a world where being a cyborg marks one for discrimination and worse. Despite hitting it off poorly, an undeniable attraction blossoms between the pair, and they become entwined in a complicated relationship.
Nolan can’t understand Tallis, but he wants to. Trapped in his own narrow confines of what he believes the world to be, Tallis challenges everything he thought he knew. Can Nolan learn to love who he is now, or will he find himself drawn into the ranks of the Regretters, an organization of cyborgs campaigning to outlaw body conversion altogether?
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Excerpt
Nolan Rogers sighed as he watched his body travel down the long conveyor towards cremation. It wasn’t like he was sad to be rid of the body he’d waged a war with for so long, and yet, letting go seemed like something to mourn; the end of a struggle he’d devoted his entire life to. The scars he’d worn with pride were not on this new body: it was flawless, a clean slate on which to etch the story of his life going forward.
Author Bio
Reis Asher lives in a fast-growing cat colony in rural Pennsylvania with his husband. He is the author of the nonbinary thriller Killing Games, published by NineStar Press, and the Nick Fabian series of transgender detective novels. He is transgender and bisexual, and wants to bring queer and diverse stories out into the light.