The Future Is Queer: A Science Fiction Anthology

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario. He is co-editor of
Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the
Second World War.

Science fiction should suit a gay and lesbian audience, but none of the
books that comprise the queer literary canon are drawn from this genre.
Nonetheless, science fiction allows writers to comment on current events
from the perspective of an imagined future, projecting today’s issue
into another era or society.

While previous sci-fi authors have played the queer card in their
works, it’s not a genre where gays and lesbians have made a noticeable
impact: the editors don’t cite any literary ancestors for this
collection. The current selection of seven short stories by eight
writers was culled from more than 100 submissions.

The stories raise many issues of deep interest in the gay and lesbian
world: military service, cloning, assimilation, mental health. There are
six stories by women, two by men. (Neil Gaiman and Bryan Talbot
co-author one story.) Most authors will be new to gay and lesbian
readers, although a number have won science-fiction awards; fans of the
graphic novel will know Neil Gaiman for his Sandman series.

The type of story varies greatly. Gaiman and Talbot’s contribution
consists of four pages of a comic strip, while Hiromi Goto’s work is
of novella length. There are no graphic descriptions of sexual activity
in the volume and the queer aspect is sometimes only tangential to the
plot line. However, by encompassing a variety of forms and styles, the
collection offers a tantalizing peek into science fiction from a queer
perspective.