When Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this spring, it occasioned both celebration and bewilderment. A genre novel won the Pulitzer! But also, this genre novel? There’s often a tendency to treat the divide between genre and literary fiction as something akin to a class struggle, in which snooty elites look down on the unwashed masses. The truth is, of course, much more complicated, and one way in which this is the case is that—not unlike actual class systems—there are, within both literary and genre fiction, minute and fine-grained distinctions that are sometimes only legible to insiders.
Collaborative writing offers a unique set of structural challenges and opportunities for the reader and the finished text. How do the multiple authors’ voices and visions interact with one another? Is it clear who contributed what portions of the text? Are differences between authors highlighted or minimized and what is the effect of that choice on the work as a whole? And so on. anOther Nemesis by Ai Jiang, Angela Yuriko Smith, Eugen Bacon, and Maxwell I. Gold puts its architectural decisions as a collaborative collection on highly visible display; but ultimately I was left with a lot of questions about whether those decisions were really operating in synchronicity.
In the centre of that brightness queering everything, the materia of human and alien ecology might read and understand each other at last. This, I believe, is the promise inherent in queering the world: a chance to reach for a subjectivity and relationality that allows what was once untouchable, monstrous, and other to become an avenue for expression, for acceptance, and for understanding.
In Davidson's analysis, the temporalization of utopia—and dystopia—made utopia and all that went with it vulnerable to anything that would threaten the association of “the future, novelty and betterment” with each other.
