"I was the definitive outsider, my life nothing like any of my classmates, so I tended to live inside my own head. When I started to read, I wanted to go places that were nothing like the places I had to go every day."
Tanya Huff is a Canadian author of sci-fi/fantasy works. Also, Tanya Huff is scum. In the very best possible way.
Her works include:
- The Blood Books, which were later made into the TV series Blood Ties (2007). Huff actually got to write an episode of the show, "Stone Cold".
- The Smoke and Shadows trilogy that followed up the Blood books
- The Keepers Chronicles trilogy
- The Confederation of Valor series
- The Quarters series
- The Wizard Crystal series
- Scholar of Decay, a Ravenloft stand alone novel.
- The The Enchantment Emporium series, starring the magic-using Gale family.
- The Fire's Stone
- A Woman's Work (a short story collected in different anthologies)
- Swan's Braid & Other Tales of Terizan (a collection of short stories about lesbian thief Terizan which had been printed previously in other anthologies)
She also writes short stories and the occasional standalone novel.
Huff is married to fellow Canadian fantasy author Fiona Patton.
Tropes present in works by Tanya Huff:
- Action Girl: Basically all of her female characters are good in a fight, even if they're not primarily soldiers. Confederation of Valor is the outstanding example, featuring female Space Marines in the lead.
- Author Appeal: Nearly every book she writes has people being freely sexually active with both sexes with little consequence (Eternal Sexual Freedom or Free-Love Future, depending on the setting). She's an openly bisexual woman (married to fellow spec fic writer Fiona Patton) who's featured numerous LGBT+ characters in her works, portraying societies with no stigma against them usually. They're heavily bisexuals, as stated above, to the point of Everyone Is Bi sometimes, but she's also written gays, lesbians and asexuals.
- Enlightened Self-Interest:
- In the Confederation of Valor novels, the Confederation gave the humans, Taykans, Krai, and Silsviss tech bumps in exchange for becoming their warrior races for the war with the Others.
- In Huff's short story A Woman's Work, the Evil Overlady builds hospitals and schools for her citizens, as this makes her popular and less likely to be assassinated. It also enables her to influence what the kids are taught, and who gets to be healed.
- Everyone Is Bi: A lot of her works have bisexuals as the majority.
- Gender Is No Object: Her work usually features societies with no social barriers regarding gender, and sometimes misleads the reader briefly on a character's gender due to the role they're in (e.g. "guards" that turn out to be women). This includes not simply many female soldiers, but also ones who hold the military's highest ranks as well, for instance a marshal.
- Non-Heteronormative Society: The societies which she writes have LGBT+ people and relationships as unremarkable members whom everyone fully accepts (or sometimes they're the majority).
