Customer Reviews

The Future is Queer: A Science Fiction Anthology

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This anthology offers 7 stories on 187 pages, as well as a four page comic strip. To start with it, the comic strip is an embarrassment. Its blaring message is how poor the world would be artistically and intellectually without all the queer people that have been around (you know, the Greek and Spartans, Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, Edmund White, yawn, yawn). It's the sort of thing that may get (just barely) accepted in a GLM student magazine and probably the only reason it got included here was the now big name of one of its authors (text: Neil Gaiman). So don't expect a gay story by Neil Gaiman, it's just not in here (I was fuming when I realized I had been misled into buying this volume for this very expectation). The other stories are a mixed bag: L. Timmel Duchamp writes about the emotional needs of (male) clones; Joy Parks writes about a lesbian who is sort of homesick for oppression in a world where gender change is ubiquitous; Caro Soles writes about a U.S. military where "don't ask, don't tell" is history (gays are just the prime pick for cannon fodder instead); Diana Churchill tells the story of a lesbian couple that, by an appalling intervention of the authorities, got divided in the 90s over parental rights (it is a bitter, wonderfully written piece, but hardly SF), Hiromi Goto tells a Kafkaesque story about an insomniac lesbian whose past selves somehow regain outside lives of their own; and Rachel Pollack tells how transsexuals (who are viewed as being superior to other people) came to rule the world with the help of nano technology. To me, the most touching, poetic story was by Candas Jane Dorsey, telling of a traditional, old religion that worships the celestial movements, surviving in modern times as an underground movement (sexuality is not the point of this story, though there is bisexuality in it). Because of this story, and maybe Duchamp's, I would not say that I regret buying the volume. However, the label "A Science Fiction Anthology" is misleading. Don't expect space operas, extraterrestrical life forms, breakthroughs in information or bio technology: the "S" element is just lacking in all of these stories. And don't expect romantic or sexual encounters, they are also not there. These stories are essentially literary ambitious texts with homeopathic doses of both, the future and the queer.