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 name, in a sense, is […]
Theology, with Drag(ons): How Fantasy Queers Religion 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 and literature, bi/pan erasure still
Recommended Reading: Bisexual/Pansexual Characters in SFF 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 is a long-standing tradition, quite
The Glasgow in 2024 Question Contest 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 same feeling – a strange
A Realm of Hope and Yearning: Queer Fantasy and Religion 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 a character like me and
Shine On: 6 Aspec SFF Books To Light Up The Future 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 between the 1920s and 1950s
L. D. Lapinski’s Strangeworlds Travel Agency: Queer stories for young readers 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, widening my reading, and meeting
Taking Pride in My Writing Read More »
For our first Glasgow in 2024 book club meeting, the book we read was Silk and Steel, a collection of SFF short stories each of which was structured around an F/F romance. Some of the attendees mentioned not having read much or any romance before, so I volunteered to write a list of recommendations. In
Recommended Reading: Queer SFF Romance 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 time in my teens. Russ
Dissecting Joanna Russ’s The Female Man Read More »
I grew up isolated and very much in the closet – an industrial and shipbuilding town down the river from Glasgow, as conservative and homophobic as such places always are, and a Catholic family with its institutional abhorrence of sex and the body, let alone sexuality or gender diversity. All the same it was a
Finding a Safe Space in Fandom Read More »
