Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006
Read by James Moran
Borrowing a page from Arsenal’s successful Queer Fear series, Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel alchemize a love of sci-fi and queer lit into a respectable if slightly uneven anthology. The eight contributions in The Future is Queer transgress the boundaries of sexuality, science-fiction and the future, mainly through a dystopic lens.
The best stories comment on current political issues, including controversial wars. In “The Chosen Few,” Caro Soles describes the almost-exclusively all-gay marine squadron which goes on a questionable secret mission somewhere in the Ekvanistan Nations. They don’t know exactly why they’re fighting, but Liam is determined to join his lover Jack. The nature of the war is, at best, quite dubious.
In Joy Parks’ “Instinct,” a climate of political homogeny has driven all sexual identity into the mainstream. There are also gated, heterosexual-only suburbs. The queer protagonist wants to return to a time when gays were fighting for not only rights, but their own turf. Parks makes shrewd observations at a time when some members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community think that queer culture has become too mainstream.
Candas Jane Dorsey’s “…the darkest evening of the year” describes a bisexual protagonist celebrating the winter solstice. If the state were to discover his ceremony, police would descend on his enclave of mixed sexes. Dorsey excels at conveying the dark, end-of-the-world feeling that, during much older pagan times, made pagans fear that the sun would not return in the New Year.
Other stories, such as Timmel Duchamp’s “Obscure Relations,” involve clones interbreeding in an experimental compound. Readers can easily get confused with the large cast of characters, some of which have switched bodies. Rachel Pollack’s “The Beatrix Gates” has a great but somewhat pedantic sexuality identity message about green people truly wanting to be red people all their lives.
One very novel and interesting find in the collection of mixed gems is a comic strip written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Bryan Talbot.
Labonte and Schimel have assembled an admirable and necessary collection that spares no political, religious or ideological commentary about an often dark future. Even when unsuccessful, Future contributors tackle the here and now, which both sci-fi and queer lit, at their best, ought to do.
