Lyda Morehouse has spent a lifetime writing her way into her own understanding of the trans spectrum and her own place on it.

From an early age, Lyda knew she might have been born Jason, relished playing D&D characters where 'he' was the pronoun, and clung to stories of pirates, soldiers, and others who had a certain secret. At the same time, she also spent the 70s and 80s admiring nonconforming women. So many other things along the way seemed different from her cis friends, but none of them felt quite… enough, especially given all the things she loved (and continues to love) about being a woman. Regardless of her own personal journey, Lyda firmly believes trans women are women and trans men are men (and nonbinary people exist!)

She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her wife of over thirty years. Their son, Mason, has been successfully launched into the world and is now a delightful young person who visits his moms during college breaks.

Lyda's debut novel, Archangel Protocol, won the Shamus Award for private eye fiction, and was a finalist for the Locus Award. Her fourth novel, Apocalypse Array, won the Special Citation in the Philip K Dick Award. They are books 1 and 4 respectively in the AngeLINK series.

Welcome to Boy.net takes place in the same word as AngeLINK, but well into the future.

Welcome to Boy.Net by Lyda Morehouse

Lucia Del Toro and Independence 'Hawk' Hawking are a pair of happy-go-lucky lesbian bounty hunters, united in their passion for adventure and each other. Hawk grew up on a hippy science commune on the Earth's Moon and has always been rootless and carefree. Del Toro, however, has a more complicated past, which is about to come back to haunt her.

Politics in the Solar System are always fraught. A key player is the UN's crack regiment of space marines, the ENForcers. They are as hardcore and testosterone-fuelled as military units come, and proudly all-male. Being cyborgs they are all connected through a bioware network known as boy.net. Lucia's link to that network is one of many things that Del Toro thought she'd put behind her when she got out of the military and changed her life. But, with the security of the Solar System at stake, she will soon have a choice to make.

CURATOR'S NOTE

Cyborg Lucia Del Toro used to be part of the all male ENForcers — and she's still connected to her former unit through the bioware network boy.net. Stunning cyberpunk from a brilliantly imagined trans perspective. – Catherine Lundoff

 

REVIEWS

  • "Welcome to Boy.Net gives the reader a gripping blend of space adventure, a universe with the glitz and grime of a city's nightlife, and heartbreakingly human characters you will root for. […] The Rule of Cool" in fiction writing is when if something's cool, it's in. Welcome to Boy.Net follows the Rule of Cool, then flips everything over to show you the underside, the complications, and the price. You see the place built with the Rule of Cool two decades later, as the employees try their best to keep the air from leaking out and the cold from leaking in. Lyda's books start with cool, and then ask, who's in charge of the repairs on this?"

    – Naomi Kritzer

  • "Welcome to Boy.net is space opera with heart! It's a rollicking tale full of love and peril, set in a future solar system as vibrant and diverse as the real world."

    – David D. Levine

  • "What Morehouse is doing here is the sort of concretized metaphor that science fiction is so good at: an element of world-building that is both an analogy for something the reader is familiar with and is also a concrete piece of world background that follows believable rules and can be manipulated by the characters. Boy.Net is trying to reconnect to Lucia against her will. If it succeeds, it will treat the body modifications she's made as damage and try to reverse all of them, attempting to convert her back to the model of an ENForcer. But it is also a sharp metaphor for how gender roles are enforced in our world: a child assigned male is connected to a pervasive network of gender expectations and is programmed, shaped, and monitored to match the social role of a boy. Even if they reject those expectations, the gender role keeps trying to reconnect and convert them back."

    – Russ Allbery
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

[Jonathan Galelei has just offered Hawk and Lucia a very lucrative contract.]

"Tell me more about how you know him."

"The Galileis were our closest neighbors. I practically grew up with his sister. We played together."

"Like creche mates."

Hawk looked a little taken aback by the comparison, but said, "I guess? But, I had other friends. Like, I saw the Galileis only every so often. I wouldn't take a bullet for him. But, I suppose that's the closest thing you would have had. I just—I'm less sure about all this than you would be if it was one of your 'mates. Like, I don't know this guy anymore. I don't trust him any further than I would throw him."

Lucia didn't feel the need to point out that wasn't at all dissimilar to how she'd felt about her creche mates at times. Civilians tended to imagine everything about Lucia's childhood as some kind of nightmare, but there had been a lot of good times among the four other people she'd been assigned as 'brothers.' She often wondered where they'd ended up, how much they hated her… or envied her. Simon would definitely have been in the latter camp; he knew he was gay at seven years old. Homosexuality was considered a Glitch and undesirable. Being a lesbian, Lucia was a double 'fuck you' to the Force, and she was weirdly proud of that fact. Marcus, though? There's a brother she was just as glad she'd never see again.

"My experience wasn't my choice," Lucia said by way of agreement. "But, trust me this is what the Force counted on. You were raised with Jonathan. Bonds form, like it or not."

"Bonds, huh?" Hawk gave a little half smile. "And raised together is a bit strong. Cohorts are bigger than I think you're imagining. There were hundreds of families in this group. I had a lot closer friends. The sister was cute, though. I kissed her once."

"Heh, of course you did." Lucia gave her a little wink of approval. This little tease elicited an unexpected blush.

"Hawk? Are you okay?"

Hawk pulled a napkin from the little bin. Lucia was surprised to discover it wasn't a holo, but Hawk's behavior was even more startling. She started nervously folding it. "Jonathan seems to enjoy marriage. He's been married more times than God."

Lucia frowned, trying to decide if she should know the god in question or what any of this had to do with a teenage kiss.

The napkin became a compact origami. "He just got me thinking, is all."

About gods? No, it had to be the marriage thing. Oh! "Is this a proposal? It's just that I thought you'd be more showy and less shy."

This seemed to break through some tension because Hawk laughed. "Right? I would have thought so, too?" She glanced up from the wad of napkins with a very intense look in her eye. "You and me, we've been kicking around together a long time. Have you thought about it at all? I mean, with me?"

Lucia had to hold back an immediate, 'no, never.'

Because, even if that was true, it wasn't the right thing to say. She knew that. Her upbringing hadn't been the best at fostering empathy, but even Lucia knew enough to know that a swift, decisive answer like that would be crushing. And, she wouldn't mean it the way it would come out.

It wasn't as though Lucia found the idea of spending the rest of her life with Hawk repulsive. No, in fact, it was the exact opposite. She'd never wanted to presume, and so she hadn't thought about it, not even once. She'd shoved that possibility to the back of her mind. Especially since what always stood between them was The Scourge. Hawk would choose to ask, today of all days, when the shadow of that event loomed larger than it had in years.

If anything, Lucia didn't feel worthy of Hawk.