Oh! Wow! Space opera fans, you have to read this: Kit by Val Kubera. It's part crime drama, part political drama, part horror story, part romance, and 100% space opera.
The title character is a Tentari, who are hermaphrodite humanoids. Kit and a younger sibling are the only survivors from a starship that was destroyed under suspicious circumstances. They survive as best they can on a large space station inhabited by all manner of unsavory characters. He (I'll address the matter of pronouns in a minute.) has some memory chips given to him by his parent that contain information that everybody wants. He is taken in by a merchant ship captain who was close friends with his parent and thus the wild ride begins.
The author uses male pronouns when referring to the Tentari which is grammatically correct, I suppose, but it feels wrong in a number of ways. One, it reinforces our human tendency of binary thinking - every creature must be either male or female. I found it nearly impossible to think of Kit and other Tentari characters as anything but male. It also at times felt awkward and ridiculous since the author remained consistent in using the male pronoun even when referring to a character nursing an infant. I think it would have been preferable to use made up pronouns, such as Mary Gentle did in The Golden Witchbreed with the neuter pronoun ke.
Anyway, very minor quibble. Overall it was a fantastic, exciting, edge-of-your-seat, unputdownable book. A few scenes are not for the squeamish and there are a couple of fairly explicit sex scenes but nothing that a reasonable person could call "gratuitous," in my opinion.
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