Grasp Lightspeed Magazine, June 2015 (Queers Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue) Depicted By Seanan McGuire Kindle
kind of disappointed in this anthology actually, there were only two stories that stood out to me, and I skipped through a few others because I just couldn't get into them.
The two stories I really liked were:
Influenced Isolated, Make Peace by John Chu and
Trickier With Each Translation by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.
Both were very early in the anthology, so maybe they raised my expectations and I'm being unfair on the rest I don't know,
The collection of essays were all worth a read, "She wonders at how change comes in like a thief in the night, dismantling our sense of self one bolt and screw at a time until all thats left of the person we think we are is a broken door hanging off a rusty hinge, waiting for us to walk through.
"
I can't help but nod at how true this statement is, Dealing with change is something we constantly battle with, all the while being perplexed each and every time, We never learn, do we
The narrative of story alternates between two different styles just as the topic of the story dapples in two different versions of memories One version that projects the memories from the past in all its vividness and other, the kind that erodes with each wave that washes ashore.
How will a woman deal with both of these,
The setting of the story is well chosen a woman who signs up for a Alzheimer's clinical trial as a coping mechanism to deal with the death of her Alzheimer's afflicted mother.
The drugs from the trial drop her into a cauldron of her childhood memories, giving her a chance to relive the best moments, She looks for triggers to open doors to her memories, to dive into hallucinations projected by her past, But somewhere in her memories, she meets a person, she has never met in her life before, A companion that she longs for in such desolate times, While her counsellor is convinced that she has imagined a nonexistant person to deal with her loneliness, even as the line between her projected hallucinations and reality start blurring, Madeliene wants nothing more than being lost in the bliss of camaraderie and love,
possibly.
Though I could easily guess who this person might be, this is a story worth reading for the evocative picture that the writer paints, The following paragraph on grief reveals the kind of potential this writer has and I would gladly read more stories by the writer,
Grief, thinks Madeleine now, is an invasion that climbs inside you and makes you grow a wool blanket from your skin, itchy and insulating, heavy and grey.
It wraps and wraps and wraps around, putting layers of scratchy heat between you and the world, until no one wants to approach for fear of the prickle, and people stop asking how you are doing in the blanket, which is a relief, because all you want is to be hidden, out of sight.
You cant think of a time when you wont be wrapped in the blanket, when youll be ready to face the people outside it but one day, perhaps, you push through.
And even though youve struggled against the belief that youre a worthless colony of contagion that must be shunned at all costs, it still comes as a shock, when you emerge, that theres no one left waiting for you.
Worse still is the shock that you havent emerged at all,
Rating :,/
Note : Read this as part of BB's Flash Readathon, August,
I finally read the personal essays from the back of this special issue, which means I finished it! I've been reading this on and off ever since it was published, so I've forgotten a lot of the stories.
I did prefer the Queers Destroy Fantasy! special issue, though surprising no one, From the perspective of Americans fighting for and/or trying to assert LGBTQ rights, this is an important work, It ticks all the correct PC boxes in terms of interviews, artworks, essays etc, Even in terms of selection of authors it choses those who declare their sexual preferences as various subcategories of 'Queer',
But what about the quality of fiction which matters to us, the lesser mortal readers
It's hard to find a duller book,
Except Sarah Pinsker's "In the Dawns between Hours", Claudine Grigg's "Helping Hand" made famous by 'Love, Death and Robots', and RJ Edwards' "Black Holes", I couldn't find anything memorable here.
It's a sad testament and proof in support of the accusation against speculative fiction in West that political correctness is being prioritised at the expense of storytelling.
Not recommended, unless your sole aim is to support the LGBTQ movement, I definitely liked this anthology better than sitelinkQueers Destroy Fantasy!, It felt more diverse and fleshed out,
My notes as I read:
Amal ElMohtar's book reviews were passionate and compassionate: a winning mixture, They almost won me over to try Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory, Almost, because, well, I'm not adding anything to my sitelinkToread list before I bring it down toentries, Ah, wish me luck.
Cedar Rae Duke's essay "Not Android, Not Alien, Not Accident: Asexual and Agender in Science Fiction" addresses an issue that I'm very interested in, Given that in the debate about sexuality, I glide, not so much along the "female male" or "hetero homo" axes, but along the "genderpronounced genderfree" one, any exploration of characters and people for whom sexuality isn't a leading factor fascinates me.
I suppose this also explains the overall nonsexual feel of my own writing, . . and why some readers get frustrated with it,
There're many kinds of pettiness that people can inflict on one another, In my recent dealings with a querulous subset of Bulgarian fandom, I've experienced my share of them, but Michael Damien Thomas's essay "Queers Digging and Destroying" introduced me to excesses beating anything I could imagine.
My heart goes out to him and his family and indeed anyone who gets such a treatment, for such reasons, Our squabbles are sheer silliness compared to that horror, May we all grow out of it sooner,
Although the main idea of Felicia Davin's "The Tip of the Tongue" was familiar, the tone was warm and gentle, And the story featured sitelinkthe best kissing scene I've read in ages,
Gentle and warm, :
Jessica Yang's "Plant Children" is what I'd call a "mood piece," a story that may go nowhere but makes you relish the ride, Much like my own "Festive" tale in the sitelinkHeroes and Villains cycle, Likeyou knowlife.
It was gentle too, And funny. And it tugged at my heart, the way all subdued, unspoken emotion does,
Amal ElMohtar's "Madeleine" was the third story to boost my faith in the strength of the human spirit and warm me up, Although "calm me down" is perhaps more appropriate, given the state I was in before I began reading it,
And its Author Spotlight contains a lovely summary of the need for anyone to "destroy" any genre:
You also participated in Women Destroy Science Fiction!.
For you, what does it mean to destroy science fiction
It means grinding into a fine powder the conviction that Im not smart or educated enough to write hard SF.
It means obliterating the fear that men I respect will roll their eyes at my attempts, It means facing up to the fact that men who would do that dont deserve my respect, and that indeed men for whom I care deeply rooted for and supported me throughout the process.
It means standing up, shoulder to shoulder, with women and queer people and people of colour against the fiction that things are fine as they are, that nothing needs to be changed or addressed, that our voices are sufficiently loud at a whisper.
Susan Jane Bigelow's "Die, Sophie, Die"about a game critic getting harassed on the Internet after poking fun at sexism in a video gamestruck me hard because I've just found out about sitelinkGamergate.
And I didn't know that Zoe Quinn, of sitelinkDepression Quest, was one of the targets, I don't know what to say, So I'll revert to what I said earlier:
May we all grow out of this sooner,
Shannon Peavey's "Nothing Goes to Waste" is funny and sad and strange and familiar, . . it has all the elements that make a flash piece memorable,
Bogi Takács's "Increasing Police Visibility" demonstrates another way to write memorable flash fiction: focusing on an idea that will set us thinking,
So, what will be the percentage of false positives at airport terrorist checks
Another important reminder in Sigrid Ellis's essay:
Theres no such thing as a queer story.
Thats stereotyping, thats profiling, thats marginalization,
Except, of course, that all sorts of stories are queer,
To be queer is to defy easy definition, Which is also what science fiction does, It defies what is known, what is safe, Science fiction extrapolates and explores, It pushes the edges of the known, Science fiction takes us to live in other peoples bodies, in minds and hearts alien to our own,
There is no possible way that queers can destroy science fiction, Science fiction is already, has always been, queer,
Raven Kaldera's "CyberFruit Swamp" was the naughtiest, most overthetop underthetable experience of the lot.
I cringed and grinned, often simultaneously, throughout the ride, :
Among the essays, there's not a single one I disliked, Even if they weren't literary masterpieces, their honesty always touched me, The one that touched me the most is Jerome Steuart's "When We're Not There, We're Not Here," not only with its raw sincerity, but also with the reminder that we're not just "this" or "that": we can be a little of "this" now, a bit more of "that" laterand many others in between.
Yay, we contain multitudes,
While I hated the dystopian, concentrationcamp premise of Geoff Ryman's "O Happy Day!", I appreciated the exploration of two rare subjects, One: that you can go to extremes no matter which side of the wall you're standing on, Two: that a prison guard is just as imprisoned by the box as any prisoners inside that you need to communicate across the walls in order to give boxes a chance to blow open.
I was similarly torn about Rand B, Lee's "The Sound of His Wings": the paranoid nature of its eternal conflict repelled me, but the characters and the writing, . . my, the writing. .