While speculative fiction is hard to define, Rjurik Davidson offers one attempt at a definition, and at the possibilities opened up by speculative fiction:
“Speculative fiction—an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, horror and other non-realist forms—has always been peculiarly suited to political radicalism since the form investigates a world that is ‘other’ to our own, a world which is in some way changed or altered. It is a thought experiment: by developing this sense of estrangement, science fiction asks us to think back upon our own society. Crudely put, the departure from our empirical reality attracts those who would change that reality.”
– Rjurik Davidson, Writing Against Reality
“While portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) characters didn’t become relatively common in science fiction, fantasy or horror until after the early successes of the Gay Liberation Movement in the 1970s, that didn’t mean that there was “no there there,” to borrow a phrase from Gertrude Stein. Of course, most of those early LGBT characters were depicted in coded terms, their identity only hinted at. Homosexuality was illegal nearly everywhere in the world and could carry severe legal and social consequences if it was discovered. Most queer authors flew under the radar or paid the consequences. On the page, queer characters portrayed their same sex interest with a significant glance, a passing comment or a bit too much interest in another character, an interest that often turned villainous or ended in tragedy.
Early science fiction and fantasy writers who openly experienced what one of Oscar Wilde’s lovers called “the love that dared not speak its name” and wrote fiction about it paid dearly for that choice. William Beckford, the gay author of the Orientalist fantasy The History of Caliph Vathek (1786), began his life as one of the richest men in England and ended as a bankrupt disgrace in France. A century later, Wilde himself, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), The Canterville Ghost and assorted fantastic tales, would be imprisoned on sodomy charges and end his life a broken man.”
– Catherine Lundoff, "Out of the Past – LGBTQ Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Before 1970"
In Queens of Noise, Mixi fronts the Mangy Rats, a motley found family of queers, crust punks and werecoyotes. Mixi and their band know they're gonna win the Battle of the Bands final showdown, no matter what it takes. But to make that happen, they'll also have to contend with poser goths, murderous chickens, and a bullshit corporate takeover ruining the best bar in town.
What does hope look like when everything is lost? Now, more than ever, we need to revel in the bright spots amidst the darkness. The twenty-three stories (and two poems) contained here, as well as the roleplaying game Dream Askew by Avery Alder, imagine queer community in myriad futures interrupted by collapse.
Who knew that balancing human interaction with supernatural peril could be so complicated? Rich with the urgency of feral youth, The Scapegracers explores growing up and complex female friendship with all the rage of a teenage girl. It subverts the trope of competitive mean girls and instead portrays a mercilessly supportive clique of diverse and vivid characters.
Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales: the magic in Isabel Yap's debut collection jumps right off the page, from the joy in her new novella, "A Spell for Foolish Hearts" to the terrifying tension of the urban legend "Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez".
Laura Mauro, a leading voice in contemporary dark fiction, delivers a remarkable debut collection of startling short fiction. Human and humane tales of beauty, strangeness, and transformation told in prose as precise and sparing as a surgeon's knife.
In a dying railroad town, a conjoined twin wallows in purgatory for the murder of his brother. A disgraced surgeon goes to desperate ends to reconnect with his lost love. When redemption comes with a dash of black magic, the two enter a world of talking corpses, flesh-eating hogs, rude mimes, and ritualistic violence.
The world has gone mad. Cities are abandoned. Dreams invade waking minds with an invisible threat. Otherworldly violence lures those who oppose it to become acolytes of a nameless cult. As three characters unveil the unknown enemy and discover their common emotional bonds, dissonant realities intertwine and unite in a cosmic battle across hallucinatory dream planes.Time is the winning predator, and every moment spirals deeper into the heart of the beast.
Five authors of strange fiction bring you their own unique vision of the macabre and the glorious violently colliding. From full-on hardcore horror, to decadently surreal nightmares, and noir-fueled psychosis, to an eerie meditation on grief, and familial quiet horror, Beautiful/Grotesque guides us through the murky waters where the monstrous and the breathtaking meet.
These seventeen stories explore the ways in which identity can go beyond binary from space colonies to small college towns, from angels to androids, and from a magical past to other worlds entirely, the authors in this collection have brought to life wonderful tales starring people who proudly define (and redefine) their own genders, sexualities, identities, and so much else in between.
This volume features stories that are anything but invisible: the women in these tales are not hiding and are not easily overlooked but rather are choosing the harder path, the more dangerous route, whether that leads to love or loss or adventure. Every one of these is emblematic of the new vitality to be found in lesbian-themed tales of wonder, the eerie, and the miraculous.
Rooted in rhythm, threaded with magic, these tales encompass worlds that begin in river bottoms, pass through spectral gates, and end in distant uncharted worlds. These stories describe the pain that often accompanies the confines of sanctuary and the joy that is inextricably bound to the troubles of hard living. Nine Bar Blues sings a multiverse of fully realized worlds that readers will remember for ages to come and cherish from page to heart thumping, foot-stomping page.
Dominion is the first anthology of speculative fiction and poetry by Africans and the African Diaspora. An old god rises up each fall to test his subjects. Once an old woman's pet, a robot sent to mine an asteroid faces an existential crisis. A magician and his son time-travel to Ngoni country and try to change the course of history. A dead child returns to haunt his grieving mother with terrifying consequences.
When you slip through the cracks, no one is there to catch you. Monique learns that the hard way after her girlfriend Donna vanishes without a trace. Only after the disappearances of several other impoverished women does Monique hear the rumors. To save the woman she loves, Monique must descend deeper than the known underground, into a subterranean world of enigmatic cultists and shadowy creatures.
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate sixteen-year-old nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colorful delights of Queen Elizabeth I's court. By the close, three centuries have passed, and he will have transformed into a thirty-six-year-old woman in the year 1928. Orlando's journey is also an internal one--he is an impulsive poet who learns patience in matter of the heart, and a woman who knows what it is to be a man.
When the human ambassador Genly Ai is sent to Gethen, the planet known as Winter by those outsiders who have experienced its arctic climate, he thinks that his mission will be a standard one of making peace between warring factions. Instead the ambassador finds himself wildly unprepared. For Gethen is inhabited by a society with a rich, ancient culture full of strange beauty and deadly intrigue - a society of people who are both male and female in one, and neither.
When Commander Rallya of the patrol ship Bhattya hires Rafe as their new Web officer, she knows she is taking a risk. As an oath breaker, Rafe has suffered the ultimate punishment - identity wipe - but luckily for him, there's no one else around qualified for the job. It's difficult to maintain the glow of acceptance however, when his past is chasing him across the galaxy in the shape of an assassin, intent on dealing once and for all with Rafe, whatever the cost.
Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought--with varying degrees of success--to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption.
Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the present. The book portrays the effects--and ravages--of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body.
Knowing that imagining a brighter tomorrow has always been an act of resistance, editors Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams invited an extraordinarily talented group of writers to share stories that explore new forms of freedom, love, and justice. They asked for narratives that would challenge oppressive American myths, release us from the chokehold of our history, and give us new futures to believe in. They also asked that the stories be badass. The result is this spectacular collection of twenty-five tales that blend the dark and the light, the dystopian and the utopian.
This volume examines Canadian and Québécois literature of the fantastic across its genres--such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, indigenous futurism, and others--and considers how its interrogation of colonialism, nationalism, race, and gender works to bridge multiple solitudes. Utilizing a transnational lens, this volume reveals how the fantastic is ready-made for exploring, in non-literal terms, the complex and problematic nature of intercultural engagement.
In Bellona, dead centre of the US, something has happened. The population has fled; madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young poet, lover and adventurer, known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender and sexuality, 'Dhalgren' is a literary marvel, a groundbreaking work of magical realism and one of the most profound and best-selling science fiction novels of all time.
Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won't set her free without a service. The emperor has called his necromancers to action, and Harrowhark is set on Gideon attending her as bodyguard. If Gideon survives, she'll be a hero, and a free woman. If not, she can look forward to eternity as a shambling bone-servant.
Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.
In South Africa, the future looks promising. That is, if they can survive the present challenges. It's up to a young Zulu girl powerful enough to destroy her entire township, a queer teen plagued with the ability to control minds, a pop diva with serious daddy issues, and a politician with even more serious mommy issues to band together to ensure there's a future left to worry about.
Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers--John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard--who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world. Drawing on unexplored archives, thousands of unpublished letters, and dozens of interviews, Alec Nevala-Lee offers a riveting portrait of this circle of authors, their work, and their tumultuous private lives.
A crew of outcasts tries to find a legendary ship before it falls into the hands of those who would use it as a weapon. A washed-up treasure hunter, a hotshot racer, and a deadly secret society... They're all on a race against time to hunt down the greatest warship ever built. Some think the ship is lost forever, some think it's been destroyed, and some think it's only a legend, but one thing's for certain: whoever finds it will hold the fate of the universe in their hands.
A dark lord will rise. Such is the prophecy that dogs Gil, a washed-up mercenary and one-time war hero. Gil is estranged from his aristocratic family, but when his mother enlists his help in freeing a cousin sold into slavery, Gil sets out to track her down. But it soon becomes apparent that more is at stake than the fate of one young woman. Grim sorceries are awakening in the land.
Long after the Towers left the world but before the dragons came to Daluça, the emperor brought his delegation of gods and diplomats to Olorum. As the royalty negotiates over trade routes and public services, the divinity seeks arcane assistance among the local gods. Aqib bgm Sadiqi, fourth-cousin to the royal family and son of the Master of Beasts, has more mortal and pressing concerns. His heart has been captured for the first time by a handsome Daluçan soldier named Lucrio. In defiance of Saintly Canon, gossiping servants, and the furious disapproval of his father and brother, Aqib finds himself swept up in a whirlwind gay romance. But neither Aqib nor Lucrio know whether their love can survive all the hardships the world has to throw at them.
Elisha Wilder's family has been ruined by debt, handed down to them from previous generations. His mother never recovered from the Dociline she took during her term as a Docile, so when Elisha decides to try and erase the family's debt himself, he swears he will never take the drug that took his mother from him. Too bad his contract has been purchased by Alexander Bishop III, whose ultra-rich family is the brains (and money) behind Dociline and the entire Office of Debt Resolution. When Elisha refuses Dociline, Alex refuses to believe that his family's crowning achievement could have any negative side effects--and is determined to turn Elisha into the perfect Docile without it.
