Science fiction has often given marginalized people hope for the future. Just ask any women, black people, Japanese Americans, or Russians who watched Star Trek in the ’60s. Like, for instance, civil rights leader and proud Trekkie Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Trek-loving family.
It’s a hope that may also come to queer and trans people — and their family, friends, and allies — from reading the new sci-fi short story anthology Amplitudes: Stories Of Queer And Trans Futurity (paperback, Kindle).
In the following email interview, Amplitudes editor Lee Mandelo explains what this anthology is about, as well as how it came together.
The subtitle kind of already explains it, but what is Amplitudes: Stories Of Queer And Trans Futurity? Are they just science fiction stories by queer and trans authors, are they sci-fi stories about queer and trans people in the future, or are they both? Or neither?
A little bit both and neither, I think.
The first page of Amplitudes has an epigraph by the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, from his book Cruising Utopia, about how “the future is queerness’s domain.”
Or, put another way: something about queerness is always “not yet here,” so we’re always thinking, writing, and living our way toward it.
The stories in Amplitudes are therefore all some flavor of speculative fiction grounded in queer / trans life and culture as a horizon of possibility; they’re all by queer and / or trans writers imagining other possible futures in their work. So, that includes stories that are straightforwardly sci-fi…and also stories that lean near-future social satire, or cyberpunk noir, or even more lyric pieces.
Where did you get the idea for Amplitudes?
If I remember right, I started putting together an anthology proposal back in 2021 after the release of Summer Sons, my debut novel, and another couple years passed between the first inkling of the idea and signing the contract with Erewhon [Amplitudes‘ publisher].
Some backstory: I was the senior fiction editor of Strange Horizons Magazine from around 2012 to 2015, and also guest edited a special issue of queer fiction in 2016…so I’d started to miss editorial work after several years away. At the time, I was also in the middle of a PhD program, and I’d been doing tons of reading in queer and trans theory while thinking more about the connections between it and the imaginative possibilities of speculative short fiction.
And, of course, the desire to edit an anthology imagining possible queer and trans futures — other ways of being, other ways of surviving, other ways of fighting to flourish in community together — was also about making an argument against the escalating increases in homophobia and transphobia in our public culture (which sure hasn’t gotten any better since).
So, were the stories in Amplitudes written for this anthology, were they previously published elsewhere? Or both?
All of the pieces in Amplitudes are original and written for the anthology. Since the project of the book was illustrating a broad tapestry of stories about “queer and trans futurity” — stories that imagined what futures might be possible if, for example, we did things differently — I wanted the contributors to all be explicitly in conversation with the same guiding theme.
contributors Katharine Duckett, Dominique Dickey, and Sam J. Miller
How did you find the stories for Amplitudes? Did you have a call for submissions, did you ask writers to submit ideas…?
The editorial process for Amplitudes was threefold, actually. I first solicited stories from a number of queer and / or trans writers whose work I was familiar with, or who I’d worked with on projects before. I also held an open submissions period over several months, during which I received over 325 stories from folks I hadn’t previously reached out to. Lastly, I solicited stories in translation, and we allocated enough budget to pay both the translator and author full market rate for their labor (with each also receiving an equal split of future royalties).
Overall, I was aiming to guarantee a balance of artistic perspectives, one that crossed through many different experiences of and ideas about queerness and-or transness in the world, wasn’t limited to only U.S. American writers, and was inclusive of new and established voices.
For me, editing an anthology is like curating a conversation between the contributors and the readers, and I wanted to do the best job we could of making it a wide-ranging one. Though, naturally, there’s always room for more books to keep it going far beyond what we did together with Amplitudes.
In assembling Amplitudes, did anyone you approach say, “I’d like to be involved, but you should really talk to this person”?
Hmm, it’s a bit less specific than that, but during our open submissions period I definitely received several stories from writers who’d had the anthology recommended to them by a friend.
In terms of people who I had originally solicited, however, I’ll pull back the production curtain a little to say: on average, for every ten people solicited, maybe half might agree to give writing a story a shot (publishing runs on such a long calendar that some folks are already fully-booked on work for two years out!). Then, over the drafting period, at least half of those will need to withdraw either because nothing sparked or because the piece they ended up writing wasn’t quite a fit for the theme — but I’m always glad to see those go elsewhere instead. Ultimately, I think it’s common to end up with one story from every ten you solicit, at most. But even the people you initially solicited who couldn’t participate will still be delighted to see the anthology come to life one day.
Aside from having to fit the theme, what other parameters did you set for these stories? Was there a word count, for instance?
The story parameters were honestly quite broad. The only restriction in place was that we would accept absolutely no GenAI involvement for any submitted stories. I went back to find our original call for subs, and I’d written the following:
“During a time of rising threat against queer and trans people’s flourishing, this anthology project aims to imagine other, better worlds as an act of literary resistance. Inspired by the words of José Esteban Muñoz, ‘the future is queerness’s domain,’ these stories explore what might happen if the oppressive status quo of the here and now is rejected — instead asking, but what if things were different? Whether speculating on new technologies and cultural shifts; imagining community politics through utopias and dystopias; exploring the materiality of how queer and trans people navigate an ever-changing world as well as their own relationships; or something else entirely: the stories Amplitudes seeks will offer engaged, imaginative perspectives on “queer futurity.”
“Amplitudes aims to gather together the works of writers from many backgrounds envisioning the dynamic, resilient possibilities of queer and trans futures. The editor welcomes fiction that is playful, serious, sexy, experimental, frightening, hopeful — or all of the above, in hopes of revitalizing our queer imaginations and inspiring dreams of new possibilities. Amplitudes is open to any and all forms of speculative fiction, including cross-genre and/or literary works. (In other words, feel free to get weird with it!)”
— and that still fits the final book well, I think.
contributors Meg Elison and Nat X. Ray
Also, you obviously wouldn’t have included anything that was homophobic or transphobic, but did you want the stories to be positive? Like, did they have to show a future in which queer and / or trans people are okay, or were writers able to write stories where things have not gotten better, and maybe even gotten a lot worse?
No, “futurity” doesn’t necessarily correlate to straightforward “positivity” for me, particularly in our current local and global political reality.
The stories do, though, all share a resistant, critical belief in what futures we as trans / queer people from various backgrounds and perspectives can create together. A shared sense of hope runs through the anthology — even when that hope is hard-won, complicated, or partial — alongside a determination that queer and-or trans life is worth living and that flourishing is, despite it all, still possible on our horizon.
Borrowing from my own intro, “Some stories are whimsical, some are tenderly mundane, some are frightening; others are horny, political, provocative, or mournful. Still others consider speculative possibilities around problems like urban planning and climate change, while some might simply set out to cruise you.” While some of the stories deal explicitly with transphobia and homophobia, others don’t necessarily do so. But when readers experience all these stories in conversation, I hope a bigger picture of the potentiality of queerness and queer-trans futures emerges.
Hollywood loves turning short stories into movies. Do you think any of the stories in Amplitudes would work really well as a movie?
Depending on the kind of movie…any of ’em could work! Given the different flavors of the stories in Amplitudes, some could be short films; others might fit a cinema blockbuster experience; definitely a few would need to be experimental, due to prose style alone; at least two could be either-or horny queer art film slash artistically directed queer porn. (And hey, while Hollywood isn’t exactly big on making queer movies these days, indie directors should totally come calling…)
So, is there anything else you think a potential reader might want to know about Amplitudes?
My favorite thing about Amplitudes is, probably, that the gathered stories and contributors — taken together as a whole — approach queerness and transness expansively: not as neatly-labelled concrete identity categories to be “sorted out” and classified, but as dynamic ways of seeing, knowing, and being in an otherwise cisheteronormative world. Our contributors hail from more than six countries, and their stories engage with many different kinds of queer and-or trans futurity…while also sharing a commitment to the central artistic and political premise. That is, in microcosm, how I want to imagine possible queer and trans futures: together.
Finally, if someone enjoys Amplitudes, what science fiction short story anthology should they read next?
I recommend the Neon Hemlock’s We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction series edited by Charles Payseur and with individual volume editors (such as Ryka Aoki, for the forthcoming 2024 volume).
For a slightly older series, Lethe Press also did four volumes of Transcendent: The Best Transgender Speculative Fiction from 2016-2019.
