How it often starts: with a rush of non-linked ideas. I want to write about flight and apophenia and knowledge in context and about data bias and nonconscious cognitions, and hybridity and speculative spaces, and the joyful upending of inequalities, and the pleasure in being thrilled when reading and discussing and writing. I am holding […]
[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 am the kind of person who learns about everything through books. Fiction has been the place where I have found a space to explore my own queer identities – which I am still exploring. There are stories I have read that have made me question my entire existence through their excellent representation. But not
Trans women in SFF: A view from the inside 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 »
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 »
