B.R. Sanders's Blog, page 11

Book Review: THE ABYSS SURROUNDS US

Amazon | Goodreads

Notes on Diversity:

We are A+ on the diversity front here, folks.

The lead, Cas Leung, is a woman of color! And so is her pirate adversary Santa Elena! A number of other characters of color are scattered throughout, as well, yay! Which also highlights that this is a book about women driven by women. Men are around, but the plot revolves around and is pushed forward by the decisions of agentic women.

CAS IS ALSO A LESBIAN. Yeah, yeah!

Another major character is from a decidedly impoverished background, which forced Cas into important re-evaluations of both that character and piracy as a whole. I was glad to see an inclusion of class as a factor here, and to see it included in such a personalized way.

At least a couple of the minor characters are dealing with…something. There are hints towards mental illness or disability, but it’s not fleshed out here at all. There is supposed to be a sequel, so there’s a chance we may delve into these characters’ backstories more there.

Review:

Emily Skrutskie’s THE ABYSS SURROUNDS US is a slight book that packs a punch. Do you want sea monsters? Check. Pirates? Check. An impossible queer romance you can’t help but root for? Check.

Cas Leung was raised among Reckoners: giant beasts genetically engineered to protect ships from pirates out on the NeoPacific. Her mother runs a lab; her father is a Reckoner trainer. The business is serious business–the trade secrets so well-guarded that on Cas’s first solo jaunt as a trainer herself, she’s given a suicide pill and told to take it rather than get taken alive by pirates. Not that she’ll run into trouble.

But of course she does run into trouble.

FUCKIN’ PIRATE TROUBLE

And of course she doesn’t take the pill. And so our story begins. Cas winds up a hostage on The Minnow, at the mercy of the pirate queen Santa Elena, who has somehow procured a Reckoner pup. Santa Elena ties Cas’s fate to Swift, one of the handful of her chosen to battle it out as Santa Elena’s heir. If Cas fails, they both die. If Cas succeed, Swift inches closer to becoming captain herself.

What follows is a flurry of plot: Cas has to birth, raise, and train the Reckoner pup, which she names Bao. She enters an uneasy dance with Swift. They keep saving each other’s lives, but why? There is a weird trust there, but is it really trust? And the more Cas learns about the pirates–these people she’s been taught from birth not to think of people at all, to consider instead statistics, counts of death–the cloudier her moral compass becomes.

As an evolving narrator, Cas is wonderfully drawn. One thing I absolutely loved about this book was that she shows such substantial growth over the course of the book and absolutely none of it has to do with the fact that she’s queer. There is no coming out narrative here.* There is no coming-to-terms with that part of herself. If anything, she must come to terms with the fact that she’s fallen for a pirate (not that the pirate’s a girl).

What Cas grapples with instead is a sharpening of her own ethics. What purpose should the Reckoners serve? Are the pirates truly the blight she’s been told her whole life? She comes to think one thing, but then events on the ship will push her another way. She realizes how much she’s been insulated from the grand complexities of life, how much her privileges allowed her to reduce those complexities to neat binaries for her own comfort. This is a book that asks hard questions and does not flinch from the gritty truths it stirs up.

Swift, too, is wonderfully drawn. She is a study in disassociation, in survival. In compartmentalization. She resonated hard with me because I’ve been there, carving off bits of yourself to hand over in order to do what you have to to get the job done. By the end of the book she comes together from her disparate parts into a fully fledged person just in time to break your heart.

I’M ROOTING FOR YOU CAS & SWIFT

The big failing of THE ABYSS SURROUNDS US is that it’s so fleeting. Basically everyone besides Cas and Swift are sketches. Santa Elena has more depth than most of the other characters, but even she is still a sketch–Bao, the turtle-like sea monster has more depth than she does.  The worldbuilding is strong, and the relationship between Cas and Swift is beautifully rendered**, but the ciphers that were the other characters nagged at me. I would have liked the plot to slow down just a hair, just long enough to drag other characters into the plot and flesh them out. Hopefully we’ll see more elaboration of the secondary characters in the sequel.

*This is not, in any way, to knock coming-out narratives. Ariah is one, after all. They are important! They are validating! It’s just that they aren’t the only narratives that queer people have, and it’s refreshing to see another one thrown in the mix.

**I especially loved the acknowledgment of the power imbalance between Cas (the hostage) and Swift (the captor). That the coercive element of their relationship was brought to light, named, and recognized.

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Short Story Rec: EACH TO EACH

“Each to Each” by Seanan McGuire was published by Lightspeed, issue 49,  (June 2014). You can read it for free here.

They didn’t mention the pain. Maybe they thought we’d all see the writing on the wall, the endless gene treatments, the surgeries to cut away inconvenient bits of bone—both original issue and grown during the process of preparing our bodies for the depths—the trauma of learning to breath in when submerged, suppressing the millennia of instinct that shrieked no, no, you will drown, you will die, no.

And maybe we did drown; maybe we did die. Every submersion felt a bit less like a betrayal of my species and a bit more like coming home.

There is so much to love in this story, which is a chilling, challenging and ultimately rebellious piece of feminist military science fiction. When over-population finally pushes us below the waves, the women of the navy are pushed below first. They undergo slow, painful, cumulative sets of genetic modification, becoming more and more fishlike, increasingly mermaidish, in order to explore and claim the seabed for the United States. The story unfolds from the perspective of a sailor in transition–an amphibious woman who can still walk on dry land but who has gills and whose work takes her hundreds of feet into the dark, cold waters.

What grabbed me most about the story was the realism of it, the frankness of it. That, yes, there would be a reluctance to make the naval mermaids fat and blubbery and seal-like even though that’s perfectly logical because: PR nightmare. Those mermaids still have to be fuckable! That of course trans men would be accepted into the program but trans women wouldn’t be. The complexity of why this is happening–the weight of the worlbuilding all hinted at here–goes beyond control of women’s bodies, though that’s surely part of it.

By the conclusion of the story we’re presented with a narrative that is at once unique and familiar. The Little Mermaid but utterly inverted. A silent rebellion. A story about choices and loss and gains. A story about unforseen consequences and the reckoning they cause. Everything about it works.

Author Interview: Ben Berman Ghan

I’m pumped to have Ben Berman Ghan drop by and answer some questions about his debut novel, Wychman Road! 

Ben Berman Ghan is a Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer, novelist, and student at the University of Toronto where he studies literature and English.

Wychman Road is his first novel, and the first book in his series The Wychmen Saga for Zharmae Publishing Press. When not writing, Ben is being distracted by cats, snow, and what he suspects to be aliens camping out nearby. His mind currently holds over half a century’s trivia on comic books, and he finds writing about himself in the third person very strange.

 

You’ve worked on Wychman Road for a long time, right? How many iterations has it gone through? How has it evolved over time? 

Yes! Oh man, yes. I started working on the very first draft of Wychman Road right at the end of 2011. I finally had a finished version of the rough draft a year and a half later in 2013, and I was only 17 at the time. It went through a lot of changes.
One of the biggest was amendments to the timeline. Originally Joshua Jones was born in 1915 and got his powers in the midsts of the great depression. But I set it back to 1899. Joshua was also initially to act like a recovering drug addict, but I dropped that as well. Also, Christopher Patera [the main antagonist] once dressed like a flamboyant sixties gangster, but sadly it had to go as the darker, far more serious villain took his place. Nothing about the original Christopher survived from the first draft to the printed page.

~

Was the friendship between Joshua and Peter always the core focus, or did that crystallize as you honed in on a final draft?

Yes! My intention was always making this book about the friendship between these two characters. This is a kind of love story, in that it isn’t a love story. I also wanted to write a friendship between two male characters where they are allowed to love each other. No ulterior motive, no manipulation or masculine sensitivity. They just love each other. I think, whatever else, I, at least, achieved the relationship I wanted.

~

Amazon | Goodreads

I was fascinated by the glimpses we got of Thought Walker society–the truces, the arcane  relationships.  Where did these ideas come from?

Thought Walker society is a marriage between Mafia movies and vampire lore. Immortality, infection, can’t enter other’s property, mixed with that strange, almost violent loyalty and structure. I have this idea that if I dive too much into the realm and politics of The Thought Walkers, it won’t be any fun (Hearing about Jedi in the originals was great, being always surrounded by them in the prequels was boring).
That being said, I am going to dig slowly into it! The mythology of Christopher and his siblings will slowly begin to affect the story more and more until the series reaches its climax. There will be six books in total; the Families will become more of a presence with each addition.

~

What’s coming in the sequel?

I think they’re a couple of ways to describe book 2. One part is very much Joshua vs. Christopher. But the second book also serves as the origin story of Allison Kair, where she came from and what happened to her and Joshua so long ago that affected them so drastically.

Additionally, now that Clair knows what’s going on around her, she will be far more active in the second book. We learn a bit more about her, and she kind of sets herself up as Joshua’s moral opponent. A part of this story is the abuse of power. Honestly, a huge part of where my idea came from was watching the original X-Men movies, and being horrified at how okay everyone was with professor X erasing people’s memories. So the Ethics of the Thought Walkers abilities is going to be a part of the sequel in a big way

~
What is your favorite thing about Wychman Road–a favorite thing to write, or character, or scene–and why?

My favorite scenes to write are always Peter and Joshua sitting on the porch of Wychman Road just talking. It’s always just a joy to write those scenes. Even though these stories are dark and full of violence and madness, they still sit down and just talk. I’m also strangely proud of a scene about halfway through the book, where Joshua realizes he’s forgotten how to hold a pen. Whenever I go over that it just breaks my heart; I just really liked it as an illustration of this person who’s so lost and so removed from the world he wants to be in he has to remember how to write his name again.

~

What are you working on right now? What should readers look for from you next?

Of course, more of the Wychman Saga! book 2 is called The Army of Stone, and it should be out in the early spring of 2017. On my computer right now, I’m very close to finishing the 4th book! Outside that, there is something new that I’m working on, something far more bizarre and loopy, and full of spacemen and aliens and not a villain in sight. But I think that’s all I can say about it right now.

~

How can readers stay in the loop and get news about your projects and releases?


There are a couple ways to reach me. I have a facebook page at facebook.com/wychmen & twitter @wychwords.  

I’m always happy to chat or answer questions, I’ve also got a blog at wychwords.wordpress.com where I announce stuff and share articles I’ve written for other sites.


~

Anything else you want us to know? Shout-outs? Words of wisdom?

From what I’ve seen, the greatest enemy of someone who wants to write but can’t is embarrassment. don’t be embarrassed by your ideas or your writing. someone out there is going to like it.




Here’s my review of Wychman Road, if you missed it. It’s a great read, and I’m really looking forward to the next installment of the Wychmen Saga! Also, Ben’s twitter is excellent. 

“The Adviser and the Diplomat” is out on Patreon!

A brand-spanking-new Aerdverse short story is out today via my Patreon! It’s available to any subscriber at the $1 level and up.

I *LOVE* this one, y’all, and I hope you will, too. Here’s a blurb:

Iiva’s place as the Bachelor King’s adviser has always been precarious: an elf at the right hand of a human king is a dangerous thing. But when someone even stranger than Iiva comes to the king’s court, the delicate balance Iiva depends on is thrown into chaos. Iiva must make a reckoning of not only the present and the future, but the past as well.

 

 

 

Book Review: CORAL BONES

Amazon | Goodreads

Notes on Diversity:

Ah, it’s like this book was written just for me! A FAAB genderqueer protagonist!

IT ME.

UGH. ALL MAH FEELS.

So, yeah, Miranda is genderqueer (genderfluid might be a better word for her1?). And Ariel, too! Which I always felt like was probably true, actually, Shakespeare.

AND. Foz Meadows includes in her portrait of the fairy realm many fairies of color, even as they are described in fantastical ways. Moth might have skin like a moth’s wings–“whites and browns in a calico patchwork”–but her kinky black and silver hair clearly signal she is a person of color. Queen Titania, likewise, has kinky hair and her “skin is the colour of burnished copper.” That’s right, the most powerful person in the story, the fairy queen herself, is coded as Black. Puck, too, has horns but is also brown-skinned. The preponderance of brown fairies normalized the idea of fairies of color within the story itself.

Content Warning:

First a very small spoiler and content warning:

If you are triggered by incest, you may want to tread carefully with this book. Meadows is careful to state that nothing actually happened between Prospero and Miranda, but that that island was desolate and lonely, and that when she came into adolescence his looks lingered. She definitely felt unsafe. There was definite squick (none of it, course, any fault of Miranda’s; the text is clear on this point). There was a definite sense that something could have happened without her and Ariel’s joint intervention. Just a heads up.

 

Review:

Ok! Now, without further preamble, the review itself!

Coral Bones, by Foz Meadows, is a novella which follows Miranda, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest2, after her return to Europe. Miranda sails away, marries Ferdinand, and that’s supposed to be happily ever after, yes? But what if no. What if being raised by a form-switching fairy on an isolated island steeped in magic leaves Miranda with an altogether different understanding of the world and of herself.

What if the reason she left the island in the first place is not, precisely, because she was madly in love with Ferdinand?

What if there is more than one brave new world out there for Miranda to explore? What if there is more than one brave new Miranda for Miranda to explore?

For Miranda, all of these are questions of gender, and all of these are questions of role expectations, and all of these are questions of agency all at once. It’s really a story about self-determination and self-acceptance, which is very much my jam. But Miran-Miranda (as she comes to refer to herself) is extremely smart, and her allies–Ariel and Puck3–are clever and helpful and respectful. They are both so well-drawn; each are utterly recognizable within the frames of their Shakespearean origins but have been brought to life again as more realized and more weathered creatures. They have worries. They have entanglements.

Truly, I wish this novella was longer. Let me clarify that I don’t think it needed to be longer; the story was well-paced and well-developed. It had a complete arc. I just want more! It ended, and my heart wasn’t ready to move on. But what happens next? What happens now that Miran-Miranda is at Titania’s court? What happens next?

FOR FOZ MEADOWS TO WRITE A SEQUEL TO THIS NOVELLA. TELL ME MORE STORY, PLEASE.

I wanted it to be longer partly because here is a main character that thinks and feels and reflect on gender, who embodies gender and experiences it, so very much like I do. And that is incredibly rare. In describing her fluctuating experience of gender to Puck, Miran-Miranda says:

My heart is a moon, and some days I am full and bright within myself, a shape that fits my name, and then I fade, and mirrors show only a half-light shared with a silhouette, an absence my form reflects; and then, in the dark, I am dark altogether, until I regrow again. Why should such a thing be any more difficult to grasp than the fact that some think me dead, and yet I live? The contradiction is only in their perception of what I am.

I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything that captures my experience as a genderqueer/genderfluid person as honestly or with as much poetry as this. (This also gives a sneak peek at Meadows’ writing, which has lovely Shakespearean flourishes and wordplay throughout).

Beyond that, while Coral Bones is essentially Miran-Miranda’s coming-to-terms tale (coming-out-to-self? Is there a better term for this narrative?), the ending is so full of promise and action that I am desperately curious about the adventures that Miran-Miranda is sure to have after the final line. Just as in The Tempest, the ending posits that this is a new, exciting chapter for her. And I would love to witness it.

I am kind of a Shakespeare nerd. And I’m genderqueer. And I used to work at Renaissance Faires where, as a child, I dressed as a Puckish type fairy. Literally I am the target audience for this novella. But, truly? I don’t think you have to be any of these things to love this book. Miran-Miranda’s tasks and journey to the fairy court have tension and stakes. The plot moves. The writing is clever and not overly Shakespearean, just enough to give nods. You don’t even have to be familiar with The Tempest or Midsummer. The novella presumes no prior familiarity with the source material; you can simply pick it up and go, which I think is one of its great strengths. If you are at all interested in feminist fantasy or in trans/non-binary fantasy, or in really cool fairies, I strongly recommend this fabulous short read.

1Miran-Miranda uses female pronouns throughout.

2I remember Meadows tweeting about an idea for a genderqueer Miranda story and I BASICALLY LOST IT because a) I adore Foz Meadows and b) The Tempest is my favorite Shakespeare play. I’m a little obsessed with it.

3Puck’s reworking here is especially ingenious given the way it ties The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream together. I loved him here and generally dislike him in the play, but he was true to form. I got the sense from the novella that he has a peculiar and idiosyncratic sense of loyalty that fits so well with the idea of him.

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A new Aerdhverse story is incoming!

From my Patreon:

It’s done! It’s polished; it’s edited! It needs all the finagling and publishing stuff. You know, a cover. Book layouts. Conversions to .mobi, .epub, .pdf. I’ll record an audio version. All of that prepping and production and finagling will probably take a couple of weeks, but I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW.

Y’all, I really like this one. It’s all political machinations and obliterating self-truth-revelations and unlikely friendships. I hope you like it, too.

It’s titled “The Adviser and the Diplomat”, and it’ll be delivered unto by the end of the month, cross my heart.

B

This story will be accessible to subscribers at all tier levels of my Patreon, starting at $1. For more information about my Patreon tiers and rewards, go here.

Book Review: WYCHMAN ROAD

Amazon | Goodreads

FTC disclosure: I received a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Notes on Diversity:

So, one of the main characters mentions in passing that he’s slept with men and women both. Given that this character is from a different era, and given what I know of the men from his era, I’m honestly unsure as to whether he would accept the label of bisexuality, but there is a mention of queer sexual practice.1

The landlord of the two main characters is named Claire Kamal. She’s described as dark-skinned, brown-haired, and brown-eyed. Y’all, it seems pretty safe to say we have a canonically brown woman in the book. Very little is revealed about her other than this description; for instance I can’t tell you if she is Muslim or Hindu or anything else.2 Just that she is very probably brown.

diversity meter says ‘meh’

It’s not a very diverse book. It’s the story, essentially, of how two white, cis (super)abled young men process very different kinds of masculinities in the frame of a friendship they both need. If you really don’t want to read a book about two white dudes palling around with superpowers and having friend-feelings they can’t hide from each other, then this is probably a pass for you. And that’s ok. That’s why I put the diversity thingie right up front.

But that’s not to say this is a bad book at all.

Review:

The world of Ben Berman Ghan’s Wychmen Road is like ours, except it has a secret. There is a hidden society of Thought Walkers who live among us: they can read our minds and change them. They don’t age, and they’re incredibly hard to kill. They are stronger than us, faster than us, telekinetic, and most of them no longer consider themselves bound by human law.

they are coming to crush all our junkyard cars

Joshua Jones is one such Thought Walker: a man who’s been using his abilities to slip along the fringes of regular human society unnoticed, using his compelling/persuasive power (think Kilgrave) to gently coax a bed for the night or a muffin from a coffee house when he needs it.

Peter Axelson starts the book as a normal kid, a teenager in Toronto about to embark on his senior year of high school. A celebratory night out on the town with his friends turns grisly when they cross paths the man hunting for Joshua Jones. The chance encounter leaves Peter’s friends dead and Peter with the same bizarre abilities as Joshua. Peter finds himself drawn to Joshua, and from there, the plot thickens.

On the surface, this is a story about how Joshua must come to a reckoning with his past and how Peter must come to a reckoning with his future. The abilities they both have come with a price: while incredible, the other Thought Walkers know about them. The Thought Walkers have their own code of conduct and honor (I’d love to see this built out more in the next installment) but its clear from Peter’s introduction that winding up on their radar is Bad News. The plot hinges on these choices: will Joshua succumb to the things he’s done in the past to survive? Are these things that Peter will have to do to survive himself?

But at a deeper level, I think, this book serves as an interesting exploration of male friendship. The central theme is not running, but staying. It’s a book about a creating a safe place and a home–the title refers to the street where they rent an apartment, something Peter insists on for stability’s sake, and something that Joshua hasn’t done for a long time. It’s a book about found family, and rooting yourself in people who accept you, and it does so very openly, and is about two men having Feelings On The Page in a way that is, frankly, refreshing.

Part of it is because they are mindreaders, sure. But a lot of this is because of the characters themselves. Peter is just a sweet, open guy. Joshua is not, at first, but he opens himself up to Peter bit by bit. I love books about immensely important friendships, and this book definitely qualifies.

SUPERHERO BROMANCE LOVERS REJOICE!

Again, diversity is not the book’s strong suit. And the book is not particularly great with it’s woman characters, either. It features an event I would consider to be a fridging. Claire Kamal has some depth and shading, but honestly, a woman that clumsy probably has an inner-ear medical issue she probably would have gotten checked out by now. I was intrigued by Joshua’s paramour, Alice/Allison, but she was in and out of the book so fast that I didn’t know what to make of her. Here’s to getting more of a glimpse of her in the next book.

I’m hoping for better-defined woman characters in book 2 of the Wychmen Saga, but I’ll definitely be picking up book 2. Ghan may have put all his eggs into a relationship between two white men, but, hell, at least he made them care deeply about each other. And they let each other know that more than once. And that made me care about them, too.

1Good god that sounds clinical. Ok. What I mean to say is that Joshua, our lover-of-both-genders was born and came of age in the early 1900s. He’s been alive this whole time since, “dancing” (as he puts it) with his partners, but there’s no real guessing how he does or does not apply more modern queer lingo/labels to himself. I have SO MANY QUESTIONS about this (mostly because I just love queer characters so much). Like, did he not pursue men until after he got those weird powers and was talked into seeing himself as superhuman/above human morality? Or did it predate? We do see him on a date with a young woman before the powers thing, means it’s possible, but doesn’t confirm or deny anything, I guess. Anyway. All I’m saying is that without more in-text interrogation I’m really unsure about how Joshua would actually self-identify regardless of the glimpse of sexual history he’s disclosed to Peter. NO YOU ARE OVERTHINKING THIS.

2We learn a little about Claire’s relationship to her mother, but that doesn’t shed any light on this. And this doesn’t have to be important at all! Brown people are not defined by their religion, their parent’s religion, anything like that. But I am saying that for two mindreaders to live with Claire in a mostly white city and not accidentally eavesdrop on her experiencing any racial tension, or not to overhear any traces of, say a different culture she may have ties to, leaves me feeling very much that she is brown only skin deep. They are mindreaders who are literally messing around in her brainmeats. I don’t know a single brown person who doesn’t think about the fact that they are a brown person every day. They never heard anything?

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Short Story Rec: MAIDEN, HUNTER, BEAST

“Maiden, Hunter, Beast” was written by Kat Howard, and was published in Lightspeed, issue 68 (Jan. 2016). You can read it for free here.

 

She could believe that a unicorn would make its way here, to this city. It was a place made of myth as well as of concrete and steel, and myth called to myth, even when both were tangible.

Kat Howard’s “Maiden, Hunter, Beast” is only 2,500 words long but manages to weave together three perspectives. The story is consumed by a chase: an ancient unicorn pursued by an old hunter, and a young, modern woman who gets caught in the middle. But Howard fills in enough lore that everything clicks into place.

It’s a story about roles and expectations, and about femininity. The unicorn appears to girl maidens. It’s hunted by a woman hunter. And then the unicorn stumbles across the maiden’s path–this nineteen year old girl who just wants some damn takeout–suddenly she knows what the unicorn is and that it is hunted and what she should do. She just knows.

But nothing is inevitable. There are rules, but within those rules there are possibilities. Howard wrings enormous tension out of the possible endings she lays out of this chase. And there is so much agency in this story. All three characters–the maiden, the hunter, and the beast–all three make important choices along the way. The ending that comes would not have formed had these three particular creatures come together, acted this way, chosen to play their roles or not the way they did. Just a masterful story the whole way around.

 

 

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The Myriad Carnival is out today!

And I’ve got a story in it!

Amazon | Goodreads

About the Anthology

Roll up, roll up… The circus has long been that dream palace, intoxicating with so many lights and sights, sounds and smells. Sawdust, popcorn, strange animals, make-up, and the sweat of the roustabouts. The circus intrudes into the life of the ordinary and mundane and brings magic. Editor Matthew Bright invites you to the enjoy the sixteen attractions of the fantastical and dark Myriad Carnival.

About “The Sharpshooter” by B R Sanders

Never look too close at anything in the Myriad Carnvial; everything there is an illusion. Beneath the makeup and the wig and the costume in the gunslinger’s tent is Yves: French, genderqueer, armed with an enchanted gun. Trouble comes for Yves, but what happens when the West’s best shot is no great shot at all?

Also, hey, check out this cool trailer Lethe Press put together!

It was a pleasure working with Matthew Bright on this story, and I am so excited to be included in this anthology! I hope you’ll check it out!

Disrupting Publishing Linkspam: 2/16/2016

It’s that time again: that time every week where I round up links to articles written by marginalized people pushing back against oppression in publishing. I’m aggregating as many marginalized voices as possible from as many vectors as possible, and the more intersectional the better. As always if you’ve read something I missed please link it in the comments.

“Sleeps With Monsters: There’s A Counter In My Head” by Liz Bourke for Tor.com

It counts incidences where things follow a trend, and where they diverge. It recognises patterns. Dead women. Sexual objects. Motivating objects. Objectified. Tragic queerness. Queerness-as-a-phase. Women sidelined. Elided. Present but only significant for how they relate to a white able-bodied cisgender man.

It counts whose story gets to be told, and by whom.

It counts opportunities to include people.

And opportunities to include people NOT TAKEN.

“on tragic queerness in sff” tweets by Foz Meadows

Moar from the Lightspeed POCs Destroy SFF (now Horror!) Kickstarter

“The New Frontier Is the Old Frontier” by Tamara Brooks

We do this because there is a core question that eats at us, one that hasn’t changed from childhood: If we can imagine long-term space travel and rifts in time and androids that can have human emotions and beings who can alter reality with the snap of their fingers, why is science fiction having such a hard time reflecting the diversity of the world—current or future?

“In the Middle” by M.C.A. Hogarth

The science fiction and fantasy of my youth was a very black-and-white sort of genre. Like society, it didn’t know what to do with someone in the middle, with one foot in one culture and one foot in another. It taught me the virtues of individuality, but not the virtues of community. It understood the alien and the human, but not the halfbreed. What I read growing up taught me how to survive, but not how to thrive.

“An Army of Claudia Kishis” by Sarah Kuhn

And Claudia was revolutionary in a way I didn’t even comprehend at the time: Japanese-American, artistic, bad at school, temperamental, always dressed outrageously, and often reading a Nancy Drew mystery. She didn’t just reject model minority stereotypes—she stomped them into the ground, usually with some kind of bedazzled high-top sneaker. Plus, she was definitely centered, in that she had entire books in the series named after her (and as early on as Book #2, Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls).

Claudia was my protagonist spark, I realized, and it’s characters like her that I want to bring into and see more of in SF/F.

“The Biggest Tent of All” by S.B. Divya

Science fiction is where we break new ground. This is where we push the boundaries of what is possible, stretch our imaginations to their limits. This is not a genre that belongs to any one subset of human beings. Let’s not forget our roots. Let’s not forget that even today, certain elements of the world look askance at our favorite books and movies. We don’t need petty in-fighting. Our tent is the multiverse, and it’s big enough for everyone.

“Recounting in Rainbow” by Shveta Thakrar

But trying to get other writers and editors to take that seriously hasn’t been as easy as I’d hoped. How do I successfully retell a narrative when my target readership (the North American market) isn’t familiar with the original? How do I avoid being told “your names are too hard”? How do I dismantle the bias-dripping assumption that “your brown protagonist doesn’t have universal appeal”?