In Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story ‘Dragonfly’ (2001), something very queer happens when the titular character receives her true name. This rite of passage, which in many ways is the cornerstone of Le Guin’s wider Earthsea mythos, rests on the notion that people and things are fundamentally knowable; the … Read more
Fantasy and science fiction offers a space to imagine new worlds and new possibilities, and to challenge established or assumed norms. And yet it is still relatively uncommon – although not as rare as it used to be – to find explicit bisexual and/or pansexual representation in SFF. In media … Read more
We’re bidding to hold a Worldcon in Glasgow in 2024 and we’re certain you have questions about it. We are so interested in what your questions are, we have decided to hold a contest to encourage you to send them to our question-answering team, Team Info. Asking questions of bids … Read more
I first read a fantasy novel with a lesbian couple in it in 1997, the year I started, sort of, thinking about coming out. My final year of high school. It was one of Charles de Lint’s Newport books, Trader, newly published. It was only the second novel with same-sex … Read more
A couple of months ago I came to the sudden realisation that, for this gay lad, fantasy and religion are one and the same thing. Not in the sense, of course, that both refer to things that don’t exist, but rather in that both have always filled me with the … Read more
Thanks to Sean Guynes and Keren Omry, I’m writing a short book of around 30,000 words on Joanna Russ’s The Female Man for their new series, Palgrave SFF: A New Canon. Hopefully it will be published in 2023. I’ve been fascinated by The Female Man since I read it some … Read more
The first time I heard “There are no books with characters like you”, I believed it. I believed it the second time too. And the third. You can probably tell where this is going. I wish I had a neat little story where I stumble across a book that has … Read more
As a pre-teen girl, I adored Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School books. Growing up just outside Watford in South-East England and going to what was at the time a rough mixed comprehensive school involved in pitched battles with other local schools, stories set in the Austrian Tyrol, Wales and Switzerland written … Read more
When I started writing, in about 2013, I used a pen name and wrote erotica. At the time, I lived in the same town in which I’d grown up, and where I played by the only rules I knew: a heterosexual cis-woman in a monogamous relationship. Through learning my craft, … Read more