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A review by justabean_reads
Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers by Cat Fitzpatrick, Casey Plett
4.5
Twenty five SF/F stories by trans authors, featuring trans characters, collected by trans editors. This came across my radar when it came out seven years ago, but was more recently republished by Little Puss Press, and is available there at a pay-what-you-can rate.
I'm really impressed by this collection. So often, with this sort of anthology, you get one or two gems, rather more dogs, and a large pile of mid, but other than two stories I ended up skimming ("Ma'am, that is too many characters and too much worldbuilding for a short story; put some back" & "Sir, your grammar is too experimental for me to understand what is happening"), I really liked the whole collection. It covers a wide spread of genres, though near-future dystopias are perhaps most common, and there was very little space travel. All of the characters are some form of trans or genderqueer, but not all of the stories centre being trans/transitioning/coming out, and a lot of them are trans people doing stuff. Plett and Fitzpatrick especially wanted to build what a transgender SF/F canon might look like, changing the conversations and dynamics around gender and what it means, and I think they did a great job of curating stories that touch on those issues, while largely avoiding being openly didactic or over-explaining (though, as usual, Ryka Aoki comes in like a bag of hammers).
Really worth checking out.
I'm really impressed by this collection. So often, with this sort of anthology, you get one or two gems, rather more dogs, and a large pile of mid, but other than two stories I ended up skimming ("Ma'am, that is too many characters and too much worldbuilding for a short story; put some back" & "Sir, your grammar is too experimental for me to understand what is happening"), I really liked the whole collection. It covers a wide spread of genres, though near-future dystopias are perhaps most common, and there was very little space travel. All of the characters are some form of trans or genderqueer, but not all of the stories centre being trans/transitioning/coming out, and a lot of them are trans people doing stuff. Plett and Fitzpatrick especially wanted to build what a transgender SF/F canon might look like, changing the conversations and dynamics around gender and what it means, and I think they did a great job of curating stories that touch on those issues, while largely avoiding being openly didactic or over-explaining (though, as usual, Ryka Aoki comes in like a bag of hammers).
Really worth checking out.