Today on the site we’re headed inside Why On Earth, a YA sci-fi anthology edited by Vania Stoyanova and Rosiee Thor that just released from Page Street on Tuesday! Here’s the story: 

What starts as a simple rescue mission for a crew of teen aliens to recover one of their own soon becomes an interstellar encounter no one will forget.

Captain Iona is organizing an impromptu retrieval for her brother, an undercover alien posing as a movie star. But her efforts go awry when a technical malfunction turns her heroic rescue into an unintentional invasion. With tales of disguised extraterrestrials stuck in theme parks, starship engineers hitchhiking to get home, and myth-inspired intergalactic sibling reunions, each story in this multi-author anthology explores the universal desire to be loved and understood, no matter where you come from. After all…aliens are just like us.

Edited by beloved YA author Rosiee Thor and YA talk show host Vania Stoyanova, the anthology crosses genre bounds to bring in tropes from romance and contemporary adventure with stories from Alex Brown, Beth Revis, Emily Lloyd-Jones, Eric Smith, Julian Winters, Laura Pohl, Maya Gittelman, M. K. England, Rebecca Kim Wells, and S. J. Whitby.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

And here’s a peek inside its queer stories from some of the contributors!

“Prologue: No Strangers to Love” by Vania Stoyanova and Rosiee Thor

When we first sat down to discuss the complexities of the shared narrative and world building for Why on Earth we knew one of the most important things would be creating aliens that felt real and strange, but also familiar. In “No Strangers to Love,” our job was to set the stage for all the other stories, and that meant creating a canonical group of aliens for all the other authors to work with. So much of this was a collaborative process with all our wonderful contributors as we all worked together to create the aliens’ personalities and quirks, but even before we passed the baton over to them, we knew we wanted the worldbuilding of the aliens themselves to be inherently queer. In the prologue, it was important to us to establish the genderfluidity of the aliens and show a group of friends from another galaxy entirely who work together, tease each other, and share unbreakable bonds of love just like us! 

“Red Carpet Blues” by Rebecca Kim Wells

“Red Carpet Blues” started as a silly little question about how Axariam the alien became Max Spencer, definitely human heartthrob and movie star. While I loved throwing in fun bits about Hot Dog on a Stick and making up my own pop band and gay werewolf movie lore, I found the heart of the story in the ways that Max (alien) and Hannah (human) relate to each other: they’re both dealing with exasperating sibling relationships; they’re both huge fans of the best TV show on Earth, “Fairies & Feuds”; and they both have some gender stuff going on. Hannah is just at the beginning of her gender exploration, and she recognizes herself in something Max says about how he’s used his cloaking device to change his human appearance. (Imagine if we all could access alien cloaking devices! What a world that would be.) I love how expansive queerness is, and how much room there is under its umbrella to grow and change, experiment and reconsider oneself, so I really enjoyed having the opportunity to show the very start of a character’s journey in this very goofy story.

“Impact Crater” by Maya Gittelman

The aliens crash-land just as Alex Richards-Reyes runs away from coming out to his dad as transmasc. It’s not that Alex’s dad won’t be supportive, it’s that telling him without his mom and brother here feels wrong. Acknowledging a phase of life Alex never expected to reach without them. Graduation, college, living openly as a guy—means he’s starting a whole new phase of being a person that his mother and his brother will never get to see. 

So when the aliens come, Alex kind of doesn’t care. He just ran out on his dad at a really crucial conversation. Worse, he just left. Like his mom did. Until Alex actually meets an alien. An alien who, like him, is trying to hide who they are. 

“Impact Crater” centers two queer boys with queer relationships to their gender. It’s about the specific queer, trans longing of wanting to be a boy, desiring boyhood, not only its personal identity but the rhythms of interpersonal intimacy that trans boys aren’t often allowed to access. The gender euphoria that comes with being genuinely seen, and desired, by someone whose relationship to gender excites you, and makes you feel safe.

It’s about the alien making us recognize our humanity. About the simple fact of the wonders of space—a universe fuller and wilder, weirder and more familiar at once—making us reckon with the fullness of our own individuality. Queerness and transness as natural and thrilling as our place in the galaxy.

“A Taste of Country” by M.K. England

I was asked to write for this anthology right on the heels of finishing my upcoming YA sapphic romance (the Dungeons & Dragons-themed Roll for Love), so my mind was very much still on queer folks in rural areas at the time… as it is most days, given where I live and who I am. When I read Rosiee and Vania’s setup for Why on Earth, I immediately glommed onto the flicker of something between Iona and Moysah and knew just what I wanted to do with it. What happens when you take Moysah—a genderfluid alien with no barriers to loving who they want to love—and plonk them down in front of a baby rural lesbian trying to pay her way into college with cows? Cassie may not be able to have what she wants in her current situation, but she can absolutely make sure Moysah gets the chance to declare their feelings for Iona. It must happen. Cassie will make it happen.

Get in the truck, loser, we’re going to LA—and we’re going to make an uncomfortable amount of cow jokes until we get there.

“Parts of a System” by SJ Whitby

“Coming out” is one of those strange experiences that’s both a watershed moment and a complex evolutionary process. It can be breakdown or rebirth or spark a journey in a new direction. My own coming out as nonbinary was complicated and fraught, although very different from Tee’s. I felt a desperate need to be seen as changed, to be recognised as something other than what I had been. Yet at the same time, that very desire can lead to rupture and collapse as the system around you reacts. I wanted to write about that moment and its aftermath, and the terrifying process of building (or rebuilding) your connections with the world. I’ve been lucky enough to restore many of those myself, and also to build new ones, and I wanted Tee’s story to reflect those possibilities—and that hope—along with the added benefit of a charmingly awkward alien trying to understand their own place in the universe.