My first curated list of stories for this blog featured stories by contemporary Greek speculative fiction writers, in response to some public conversations on SF Twitter. Today’s list is one I’ve curated in response to more personal conversations taking place in my own life.
I haven’t been wildly talkative about this, apart from using they/them pronouns on my profiles and in my recent bios for published stories and articles, but I am nonbinary. I do not quite identify as a woman, though I am generally read as femme. I keep finding myself on lists of “women in horror” and feeling a confused, uneasy combination of pleased to be noticed as a writer and a bit dysphoric from being so clearly labelled “woman” for all the horror-reading world to see. I don’t quite want to complain about this or ask to be removed from the lists, because my experience moving through the world has certainly almost always been the experience of someone who is seen as and treated like a woman and it would be untrue to my writing and perspectives to reject that experience, but it does feel strange.
Having big nonbinary feelings makes me want to celebrate and amplify the voices of other nonbinary writers. The following 13 stories are all by writers who shared their work with me in response to my Tweeted-out request for stories by people who wanted to be included on a nonbinary SF list:
20 May “The Serpent’s Daughter” by Avra Margariti in Flashpoint Science Fiction.
21 May “A Personal Apocalypse” by Léon Othenin-Girard in Apparition Literary Magazine.
22 May “The Void Door” by V. M. Ayala in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
23 May “The True Name of the Sharp-Toothed God” by KT Bryski in Cossmass Infinities.
24 May “Deal” by Eris Young in Escape Pod.
25 May “The Tent Revival on Galvani H764” by Anj Baker in Dark Matter Magazine.
26 May “Exquisite Corpses” by A. M. Guay in Three-Lobed Burning Eye.
27 May “The Ballad of the Octopus” by Simo Srinivas in *khōréō *.
28 May “To my daughter, in the dark of the moon” by P H Lee in Lightspeed Magazine.
29 May “Notes from a trans-inclusive gender apocalypse” by Ember Randall in Cast of Wonders.
30 May “Along the Inked Tree During the Seasons” by Tania Chen in The Dread Machine.
31 May “Let Her In” by Valo Wing in Dose of Dread.
2 June “Next Station, Shibuya” by Iori Kusano in Apex Magazine.
I received links to so, so many stories when I asked SF Twitter for work by nonbinary writers! I could keep going for weeks, but, as I have previously mentioned, I believe 13 to be the correct number of stories to include in a blog post or songs to include on a playlist. But I also believe in bonus tracks, so, here are just a few more nonbinary stories I have previously read and loved: “A Generation of Darkness” by Lynne Sargent in Orion’s Belt, “I Wear My Spiders in Remembrance of Myself” by Kel Coleman in Apparition Literary Magazine, “That Old Sweet Water” by Rick Hollon in Strange Horizons, and “Dr. Ormeau’s Botanical Menagerie” by Morgan L. Ventura in Lackington’s.