cover image Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity

Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity

Edited by Lee Mandelo. Erewhon, $18.95 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-1-64566-086-6

Mandelo (Feed Them Silence) presents a joyful and impressively varied array of speculative fiction centered on queer resistance and survival in imagined futures. The stories tend not to take themselves too seriously, as evidenced by Nat X Ray’s “Trans World Takeover,” in which trans teenagers whose high school is aggressively anti-trans decide to take over the world by sneakily administering hormones to trans the genders of those, like trig teacher Beryl Shanks, they dislike. Some entries are much more fantastical, such as Esther Alter’s “The Shabbos Bride,” in which the trans Jewish protagonist’s prayer to change her body is heard and responded to by “the divine feminine Shechinah,” who appears to her as a beautiful, seductive woman. There are times when the writer’s passion for their imagined future of queer community is such that it deprives the story of intrigue, as in Sam J. Miller’s “The Republic of Ecstatic Consent,” which paints a utopian vision of queer communal living, caretaking, and love, but doesn’t move beyond simply describing what that might look like to deliver a real story. For the most part, though, this anthology strikes a delicate balance between silliness and sincerity. It will give hope to readers who feel the future looks bleak. (May)