Grace’s resource-rich planet is home to an exceptional diversity of plant and animal life, and has become something between a wild west and a police state due to sanctions levelled against its few inhabitants for their resistance to any development that might disturb its fragile ecological balance.

The novel follows two interwoven timelines: the romance that develops between Mia and Grace when they meet as boarding school students, and their reunion five years later when Mia and the crew of architectural restorers she works with come to Grace’s embattled home planet at the edge of the galaxy. Although the story’s central characters-the protagonist, Mia, and Grace, her first love-are driven by their passions, the lives of everyone in On a Sunbeam are defined by a galaxy-wide struggle for resources. The reimagined gender matrix of this universe does not, however, make it a utopia.

In depicting parents responding to a relationship between women with the joy and lack of hesitation that remains reserved for heterosexual couples in our world, Walden draws on the defamiliarizing conventions of the sci-fi genre in a smart and surprising way. After decades of every coming out story resulting in crisis, more books and films now imagine happier coming out experiences but this is the first time that I have encountered a queer romance at which no character bats an eye. Characters casually refer to each other’s “moms,” and those moms express unabated excitement when their daughters find their first girlfriends. The fact that the absence of male-identified characters escaped me until I was a third of the way into Walden’s absorbing comic is a testament to how deftly she realizes this social landscape. However, imagining a world that is entirely gender-neutral or female is as much a part of the speculative thought experiment behind On a Sunbeam’s fictional universe as are its fish-shaped spaceships, extraterrestrial storms, and hoverboards. The romances, betrayals, and narratives of personal growth at the heart of her story are set against the backdrop of space exploration and interplanetary conflict. Walden’s stunningly-illustrated tale, adapted from a webcomic of the same name, is a captivating piece of science fiction.

It took until page 179 of Tillie Walden’s new graphic novel, On a Sunbeam, for me to realize I was reading a story in which every character was female or nonbinary.

On a sunbeam tillie