Today on the site I’m delighted to help offer a peek inside the upcoming trans SFF anthology Amplitudes: An Anthology of Trans and Queer Futurity, edited by Lee Mandelo and releasing May 27th from Erewhon Books! Here’s a little more about the collection:
Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, ed. by Lee Mandelo (May 27th)
From self-styled knights fighting in dystopian city streets to conservationists finding love in the Appalachian forests; from social media posts about domestic “bliss” in a lottery-based, state-housing skyscraper to herding feral cats off of one’s scientific equipment; from street drugs that create doppelgangers to dance-club cruising at the edge of the galaxy—Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity interrogates the farthest borders of the sci-fi landscape to imagine how queer life will look centuries in the future—or ten years from now.
Filled with brutal honesty, raw emotions, sexual escapades, and delightful whimsy, Amplitudes speaks to the longstanding tradition of queer fiction as protest. This essential collection serves as an evolving map of our celebrations, anxieties, wishes, pitfalls, and—most of all—our rallying cry that we’re here, we’re queer—and the future is ours!
Featuring stories by Esther Alter • Bendi Barrett • Ta-wei Chi, trans. Ariel Chu • Colin Dean • Maya Deane • Dominique Dickey • Katharine Duckett • Meg Elison • Paul Evanby • Aysha U. Farah • Sarah Gailey • Ash Huang • Margaret Killjoy • Wen-yi Lee • Ewen Ma • Jamie McGhee • Sam J. Miller • Aiki Mira, trans. CD Covington • Sunny Moraine • Nat X. Ray • Neon Yang • Ramez Yoakeim
And here’s some insight into the contributions from their authors!
“A Step into Emptiness” by Aiki Mira trans. by C.D. Covington
A Spacer and an Earther meet in a hotel on the moon and fall in love. While the Spacer grew up on a space station, undertakes long journeys, and carries their sisters’ organs in their trans body, the Earther lives on earth in an open marriage with an artist and corrects romance novels written by A.I. What connects both is a neurodivergence, a form of sensory processing that is treated on Earth with medication but not so in space as it is very much desired for space travel. The story not only tells the couple’s queer love story, but also deals with grief and metamorphosis.
“Bang Bang” by Meg Elison
As a queer teenager in a conservative farm town, I learned my own history from banned sources. I picked up the secret language we all use to identify one another and signal across the expanse. I think about the future of public queer life in the context of our history; it is likely we will fight this fight again. I wanted to imagine a future in which that fight goes on, because we still exist. Because we go down like dandelions. Even if you uproot every single one you can see, we are carried on the wind and seed ourselves in the human heart. “Bang Bang” is dandelion fluff among the stars.
“There Used to Be Peace” by Margaret Killjoy
When I wrote this story, the storm was on the horizon. Today, we’re feeling the first patter of rain on our faces, watching the first strikes of lightning. In this story, I wanted to explore the ways in which queer love can express itself in times of conflict and war. I wanted to write about what it would take to challenge ourselves to act nobly in the face of danger without signing away our autonomy to this or that alienated institution. I wanted to write about what it means to have come up reading stories of bravery and honor while at the same time sitting outside of authoritarian society as queers and radicals. The hard times aren’t coming, they are here, and what we choose to do about that will dictate every element of the future.
“Sugar and Shadows” by Aysha U. Farah
“Sugar and Shadows” was conceived of over a decade ago, though in a slightly altered form. Back then it was a jaded detective telling the story of their first big case, and first big failure. Apart from the fact that they were a little more green and a little more incompetent, not much has changed. I was talking to an editor about placing it, and he told me without a hint of irony I should try to make the protagonist into more of a “strong female character”. This was back before this was the level of meme it is now, but it was still very funny. Lane Harper is a strong female character the same way lime jello is a kind of pudding. Suffice it to say, I did not end up publishing the story with him. And now all’s well that ends well.
“They Will Give Us A Home” by Wen-yi Li
“They Will Give Us A Home” drew on frustration at a public housing system in Singapore that ties affordable housing to heterosexual marriage. The story initially started out in 2022 as pure camp–lesbian wife and gay husband that got hitched in order to own their own home realise they hate each other and it devolves into mutual obsessions of murdering each other, finishing with mutual failed murder attempts–but for the longest time I couldn’t make that campy ending land. A couple years later, I entered my mid-20s, and suddenly every conversation was about marriage and engagements and future planning and applying for said housing (or, on the flipside, being barred from it). The inequity of access became very starkly felt, I think, and when I revisited this story to submit for the anthology, I found an earnest angle to it that hadn’t occurred to me before, undergirding the campiness with genuine fear, systemic anger, and the vulnerable want for security and solidarity. I ended up with a story that’s hopeful, which is the main ethos I try to operate on these days.
“Fettle & Sunder” by Ramez Yoakeim
I wrote the first draft of this story ten years ago, in the afterglow of achieving marriage equality, as a pure hypothetical about how this social progress might take a turn for the worse. Little did I know that in the ensuing decade, what’s been intended as ‘near future speculative dystopia’ would quickly become plausible headlines from next week’s news, or next month’s. The original theme for this piece was the tension between the irrational emotional response to a worst case scenario, and the rational practicalities necessary to survive it. Quickly, however, it became clear to me it’s not really about othering, totalitarianism, and oppression, but about how two people in love respond to such adversity. Does it reinforce their bond or fray it? Do differences papered over by years of familiarity transform into chasms that tear them apart, or become resources for resilience? Do they build something greater amid the chaos, or does it break them and cast them aside, fresh wreckage of hubris and cruelty?
“Six Days” by Bendi Barrett
My story in Amplitudes is called “Six Days” and started life as a much shorter piece in 2022 with the frankly unwieldy title: “even if the next collapse is inevitable, we persist”. In both iterations it’s a post-collapse story about a tiny community and its very intentional interconnectedness.
At the center of the piece is a romantic triad that is temporarily losing one of its number—who has some engineering chops—to a project in a neighboring community. The story revolves around the six days that this person is gone and how in that time a truck gets stuck in mud. This tiny, mundane problem becomes a lens through which to view the health of the community, the strength of the triad’s relationship, and even the importance of the protagonist himself to the people around him.
The story isn’t shy about the difficulties of a society that’s clawing its way back from a dark time, but it supposes that if you have to lose everything, then maybe you can also lose shame, too.
“The Shabbos Bride” by Esther Alter
She closed the door behind her and walked up to me. She laid her hand on my thinning hair and withdrew hair, which she gripped, jerking my head back so I was looking upwards at the moonlight-burning eyes of the divine feminine Shechinah. “I desire she who welcomes me,” she said, her voice the blast of a shofar.
“Pocket Futures in the Present Past” by Katharine Duckett
In an Appalachian city, not so many years from now, two queer kids named Kinsey and T.K. stumble upon mysterious portals that pop up in unexpected places, including the library at their conservative prep school. These portals contain objects and missives that seem to come from a future world where queer and disabled people are thriving, where the full potential of the human imagination can be realized, and where one groundbreaking artist—a “futurekin” named Zeri—draws Kinsey deeper into an obsession with disrupting temporal boundaries.
As they enter adulthood, T.K. and Kinsey dedicate themselves to building a collective that can protect these vital links to the world to come and teach others how to access pockets of the future. But when internal tensions and external attacks threaten the existence of the collective, Kinsey and T.K. must discover new ways to fight for the future—or face the loss of their present and past.
“Trans World Takeover” by Nat X Ray
When I started writing “Trans World Takeover,” I was thinking a lot about the conservative fear of the “trans contagion”—the mostly-made-up idea that trans people can turn other people trans by, I guess, existing near them—and how it forces us to tiptoe around the topic of transness to avoid being seen as predatory. I wanted to push back on that concept by stretching it to its wildest extreme: what if trans people were actually scheming to turn innocent cis people trans? How would they do it, and why, and what might go hilariously wrong—or unexpectedly right? Of course, the “contagion” myth hides a kernel of truth: we have to find inspiration and strength in our fellow queer and trans people to help us chart our own futures, and I love how “Trans World Takeover” finds its way to that truth though the wacky world of this moral panic.
Making the characters high schoolers turned out to be key, too—not just because only a teenager could believe this scheme is a good idea, but also because I wanted to write this story for real-life trans kids facing barriers to transition in every direction. And the story touches on questions that trans people of all ages are forced to grapple with: how do you meet your needs when your options are so limited? How do you find your people in a world bent on isolating you? Do you try and flee to relative safety, or do you stay and resist?
“Where the World Goes Sharp and Quiet” by Ewen Ma
The image of a sky raining iron nails in my story has its roots in a Brecht poem, “Finland, 1940”: The sky does not hurl down rain, only iron. Brecht’s poem had stuck with me when I returned home to Hong Kong in 2023 after several years away— it was the only way with which I was able to articulate the atmosphere of suffocation that now permeates the city I grew up in. (Brecht was drawing from his experiences of war and exile back in 1940, but this poem feels especially apt in recent times, even more so in light of the current global wave of Fascism and the atrocity of genocides currently happening in Palestine and Sudan.) I also came out as trans while living in a country where rampant transphobia and xenophobia is on the rise, and forged lasting friendships and relationships with other queer/trans folk whose existence are a beacon in my life to this day. Avon, the protagonist of my story, is lost and floundering after being stuck in an unchanging physical body post-death, but he similarly finds a way forward into a future he wants thanks to his community (and one friend in particular). I guess you can say that this is my ode to the queer friendships that keep us going in a world that can feel bleak and hostile at the worst of times.
“MoonWife” by Sarah Gailey
“MoonWife” started as a story about queer hope. There’s a watery kind of hope that says ‘perhaps I will not need to act in order to see the world change’ — and then there’s queer hope, which is thick and heavy and constant, and which says “perhaps my actions can make a difference,” and “perhaps my love can matter,’ and ‘perhaps no one I love will die today.” “MoonWife” is about someone who makes a living off queer hope by offering impossible connection across an otherwise-unbreachable veil. It’s also about the selves we create through our online relationships and personas, and how — just like love — those selves survive well after we’re gone.
“Copper Boys” by Jaime McGhee
The apocalypse isn’t forever. Earth has died, but it’s beginning to breathe again, revived by coppicers like Kit who work the forest. But even as Kit and kin renew the planet, some habits feel too deep-rooted to question. Some things will always be unnatural…right? “Copper Boys” explores heteronormativity within homosexuality in a world rebuilding from ruin.
***
Lee Mandelo (he/him) is a writer, scholar, and sometimes-editor whose work focuses on queer and speculative fiction. His recent books include debut novel Summer Sons, a contemporary gay Southern gothic, as well as the novellas Feed Them Silence and The Woods All Black. Mandelo’s short fiction, essays, and criticism can be read in publications including Tor.com/Reactor, Post45, Uncanny Magazine, and Capacious; he has also been a past nominee for various awards including the Lambda, Nebula, Goodreads Choice, and Hugo. He currently resides in Louisville and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kentucky. Further information, interviews, and sundry little posts about current media he’s enjoying can be found at leemandelo.com or @leemandelo on socials.
