I’ve spent the last few weeks co-ordinating a whole bunch of lovely posts for Disability History Month, which takes place in the UK from the 18th of November to the 20th of December, which you’ll get to read over the course of the month. To kick things off, I wanted to share an aspect of […]
Disability History Month: Books Featuring Autistic Leads Read More »
[T]he invisible world remained invisible, insensible except by metaphor. . . .Yet the invisible and the visible are both there, and the opposite of real is not unreal -Melissa Scott, Night Sky Mine, 8. I was born in 1955, in a small college town in Idaho, an intensely conservative state in the western U.S. As
Melissa Scott’s Invisible Worlds 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 attracted women in it that
Seeing myself in Fantasy Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
As a non-binary person, I love it every time I read a story that includes non-binary characters (and especially non-binary main characters). There’s more of those stories than there used to be, but it can still be hard to find them, especially given the huge field of SFF short stories coming out every month —
Recommended Reading: Non-Binary SFF Short Stories Read More »
It’s 2021. It’s been over half a century since the year we landed on the moon and threw the first brick at Stonewall and we still haven’t seen an openly queer superhero on the big screen. We have only recently seen science fiction and fantasy novels and stories begin to reflect the diversity of their
We’re Queer, We’ve Always Been Here (In Your F&SF) Read More »
