In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dean Leetal and William Shaw join Dan Hartland to talk about reading queerly: How do, should, and can reviewers and critics interested in LGBTQ+ people and their representation approach texts both avowedly queer and apparently heteronormative?

Dean's review of Charmed and Dangerous by Shelly Page

Will's review of Dead Boys in Space by Sara Youngblood Gregory

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 25: Reading Queerly

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I'm Dan Hartland, and in this episode I'll be joined by the researcher Dean Leetal and the writer Will Shaw—both of whom, of course, have recently reviewed for Strange Horizons.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we talk about SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it's going. In this episode, we talk about reading queerly. How do, should, and can reviewers and critics interested in LGBTQ+ people and their representation approach texts both avowedly queer and apparently heteronormative?

We talk about fan fiction and poetry, queer joy, and our age of retrenchment. And we wind up asking not just how we might read more queerly, but how we might in the future find queerer works still.

But we began, as is traditional, with those two recent reviews for Strange Horizons.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Right, both! Thanks so much for joining me. We're recording this in June, which is of course Pride Month. And I'm very happy that both of you are here to talk about a couple of the reviews that we are publishing in June. Of course, this episode will go out early July, and the theme for this episode is, jumping off from both of your reviews, reading queerly.

And we are going to think a bit about what that might mean—like, why we might do it, how we might do it. But I thought we could start, as we usually do in these episodes, with the granular stuff of these two most recent books that you've read, and think about those first and then kind of read outwards, because I think there's a lot here that we might want to unpack.

Will, let's start with your book. It's Dead Boys in Space. Why don't you tell us about it? So obviously people can go and read the review, but give us a thumbnail sketch. What is this book? What's it about?

William Shaw: Well, it's about lots of things, in the classic way of poetry collections!

So, it is a poetry collection by a poet called Sara Youngblood Gregory. As the title suggests, it's about space colonization and the AIDS crisis. So, most of the poems in it are written from the perspective of a queer woman whose brother is one of the men who died of AIDS between the ’80s and the ’90s.

And the book opens with the image of this narrator figure imagining her dead brother not dead, but living in space. And so there are sort of variations on that theme, including quite an extended piece in the middle of the collection, which imagines a lunar colony. So what if, instead of this cohort of millions of people who died of AIDS, the US government essentially sent them to the moon?

It develops a bit from there in some sort of interesting ways. The collection also intersects things like climate grief and contemporary queer struggles. I quote some of the material in my review, talking about the cost of PrEP and talking about book bans and the wider homophobic backlash of contemporary US.

So as I say, it's about lots of things, but it's sort of centrally about the AIDS crisis, it's about grief, and it's about space exploration—the intersections of those three things.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, well, that was gonna be my question really: Do you get a sense from the book of why? And then, secondly, what was your sense of how successful is this project of fusing what might to many seem like historical questions—because of course the HIV/AIDS experience of the 2020s is completely different—so a historical experience with then this kind of alternative future, science fiction-y experience. How does it fuse those two things together, the speculative and the actual, and to what effects?

William Shaw: One thing that I sort of foregrounded in the review is the way in which homophobia intersects with US imperialism.

So the midsection, which is titled “Dead Boys in Space,” it's sort of the title piece of the book, posits this alternate future where the US government takes this population, which the professor describes as having an expiration date, and sends them to sort of do the dirty work of setting up a lunar colony. And I think in doing that, it's quite an ingenious way of demonstrating the ways in which homophobia is intertwined with reactionary politics more generally, but particularly with US imperialism.

And it's something that I think we're certainly encountering right now as a very aggressive, imperialistic US administration is also riding a wave of renewed homophobia in the US in particular—other places as well, but I'm predominantly exposed to the US and the UK. I think the use of that sort of alternate history, I think is useful as a political critique, and talking about the ways in which these things are historically intertwined. They do exist in relation to one another.

There is a sort of intersectionality, I suppose, to the book's project. And I read a couple of interviews with Gregory that came out since I wrote the review, and one of the things she talks about in them is the way in which the moon, for example, is used quite frequently in … lesbian poetry, I think is the example she gives.

And part of her project in this book is sort of in a way taking back the imagery of space exploration and of science fiction more generally. There's a larger project of sort of reclamation, or queering perhaps. So one—because I only had 1,500 words, there are a few parts of the book that I left out—but in rereading it, one that really stood out to me was there's a series of poems called “GRID,” which is obviously a stigmatizing name for AIDS. But she recontextualizes it as a series of literal grid poems, so there will be a four-by-four or a five-by-four grid, which sort of offer different definitions of words and things.

So it's a very difficult thing to describe in an audio medium, but trust me, it looks really interesting on the page. I think that sense of sort of playfulness and reclamation is also a part of the project, and I think gets at what can be brought out of this intersection or juxtaposition.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think I suspect reclamation is a theme we're gonna return to several times in this conversation, because that is perhaps one of the things that reading queerly, if we're gonna use that phrase, can achieve for us.

And, and on that note: Although Dead Boys in Space creates this kind of alternative, hopeful, transformative, redemptive—whatever word you wanna use!—outcome for the ’80s and ’90s, of course it is rooted in the tragedy of that time. And we see this a lot in literature, where the queer figure is a figure of tragedy and great burden.

I think of outside of the genre, you know, something like a novel like A Little Life, right? Which sold a lot of copies, but made a lot of people very sad, right? One of the things, though, that we might want to turn to queer literature for is some happiness, some joy, right? And, Dean, that's where I think your book comes in, so—again, people could have read the review already, but—give us a thumbnail. What have you been reading this month? Tell us about it.

Dean Leetal: This is a really delightful, sweet, happy little book. It's called Charmed and Dangerous by Shelly Page. And it's just this happy little adventure about two girls falling in love as they pretend to date while solving a magical mystery. Magical mishaps are happening in town and in school, and this young recruit of the bureau that's in charge of these mishaps is going around the school trying to solve the mystery.

And it's just happy and sweet and very, very different from the stereotype of queer people being miserable.

Dan Hartland: One of the questions we might want to come to in this conversation is what do we mean by queer literature, right? Are we talking about books by queer people, for queer people, about queer people?

I guess it's all three at different times, but talk to me a bit about—because you talk about this in the review a little bit—your just personal experience of reading that kind of delightful, happy little book. What does it do, you know, as you read it? Because one of the things that strikes me about Will's book … Will's talking about Dead Boys in Space having this kind of political project of reclamation, and it's very serious. And it seems to me that your book is probably doing some really important things, too, but it's wearing them so lightly. What's that like to read?

Dean Leetal: I think in the current climate, and just everything that's going on in the world—including the climate—it's just really important to focus on queer joy and joy for queer people, for queer readers, for anyone who is marginalized especially.

It's important to remember that there are reasons to be alive and to be active and to move forward and to continue just surviving, because it's revolutionary to survive this kind of thing.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. We reviewed another book a few months ago. Jenny Hamilton, another former guest on this, this podcast reviewed a book called Into the Midnight Wood, which seems to me to do kind of similar things where—again, you tell me, Dean, what your experience of the book was—but where the, you know, the queerness is just default, right? It's almost not remarked upon. It just is, and the characters have these wonderful adventures anyway, not in spite or in the face of, but because they can.

Does that sound like something that the book is doing? It's kind of … You know, I don't want to get all Foucault on us, but, like, it's normalizing stuff, right?

Dean Leetal: You can say that it normalizes queerness in a good way, but I also find that it brings out the uniqueness of different queer identities. The characters are kind of butch and kind of femme, and the plot involves a lot of the joy of being femme, for example, in that it looks at her love of rom-coms, which is kind of a girly thing for her to like and easy to criticize, especially for a younger girl.

So the book celebrates it, and it helps solve the mystery. So there's both the joy of exploring what queer identities mean and their uniqueness alongside kind of the normalization you're talking about. These characters … I mean, they could have been straight, but I'm not sure I would be reading the book!

Dan Hartland: It's a normalization that isn't a flattening, right?

Dean Leetal: Exactly.

Dan Hartland: Will, is that present in Dead Boys in Space? Like, how does Gregory look at identity in that way? I mean, first and foremost, of course, by not letting all these people die, already we have a more diverse sort of population in the book, I guess. But how does it approach that?

Because, of course, we're talking about two different types of forms of book here. We're comparing a nove—and Dean, would you describe it as kind of a YA novel, or would you not say that?

Dean Leetal: It’s absolutely a YA novel.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, so we've got a YA novel and a poetry collection, right? Do they do similar things despite that? Like, talk to me about how the book might do some of the things that Dean's talking about.

William Shaw: So, firstly, I'll push back a little bit on what you said earlier, just in terms of the book being very serious. And, like, it is serious. Like, it is writing about very serious part of history. It's also very, very much grounded in the literature of the AIDS crisis and so the notes section is quite extensive, sort of pointing to some of the material that Gregory has used and sort of recontextualized in her poems.

But there is a sense of joy to it as well, so it's partly about—as well as the  militaristic history of actually existing space travel—there's also a lot of playing around with the science fiction fantasy of space travel. Like, the idea of creating a commune in space or on Mars. And there's definitely some really joyful pieces in the collection. So even in some of the bleakest poems there are some sort of moments of humor.

But there's also the poem “The Center of the Universe Is a Small-Town Gay Bar,” which I quoted quite extensively in my review. So there is a sense of joy, but that there's sort of an invocation of that sense of joy with the history that is being written about.

The final image of the collection is this image of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, this existing community art project. But this image of the AIDS Memorial Quilt sort of lifting upwards and flying off into space. And so I think there is … I like to think we can have our cake and eat it too in terms of seriousness and joyfulness!

But it strikes me that—Dean, you mentioned there's a character in Charmed and Dangerous who's very invested in the romantic comedy as a genre. So there's a poem in Dead Boys in Space called “You Ask Me Why I Read Science Fiction.” And so there is I think a commonality in that it sounds like both of these are books about sort of an appreciation of genre.

I mean, is that fair to say? I mean, how does that play into Charmed and Dangerous? Because I think it very much underpins some of the things that, um, Sara Youngblood Gregory is doing in this collection. A lot of it is an interrogation of, uh, not just history, but also the history of genre.

Dean Leetal: Um, yeah. It's the celebration of genre geeks!

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So why is this happening in SFF, right? So it might be, you know, from my perch here at Strange Horizons, I've just got a kind of biased sample. In fact, of course I do. Obviously, I do. I've already mentioned A Little Life, there are many books outside of the genre that we could be talking about. But nevertheless, it does seem to me that SFF has a particular place for this kind of literature, and I'm really interested about this idea of genre being almost inherent to what the books are trying to achieve. It couldn't do it without that.

All this sort of queer joy we're talking about, part of creating that is the kind of act of speculation—because, as you say, Will, quite rightly, we're living at a time ... We are speaking at a time of kind of global retrenchment. So the speculation becomes, you know, sort of a pretty radical thing to do.

Dean, Will's mentioned that the Gregory seems almost conscious of that. Whereas, of course, the Page is trying to approach achieving joy from a slightly different perspective. Do you get the impression that it is embedded in any of that, that it has connections, it's aware of connections with history or with all of that sort of stuff? Or is it trying to just plow its own furrow that's quite separate from all of that? Talk to us a bit about its positionality, I guess.

Dean Leetal: There's a writer called Henderson that suggests that there's a lot of queer literature in sci-fi and horror and genre because it allows us to write, like you said before, stories that are not the stereotypical queer misery. So I think that's part of the reason. I suspect that some of the, part of the, reason is that a lot of queer people who are writing right now are coming from fan fiction, which is such a geeky place to come from. I see a lot of kind of fan fiction DNA in novels coming out.

Dan Hartland: Talk to me about that, because I'm so interested in this stuff! We did an episode a few months ago about Romantasy, and we said similar things: that, you know, fan fiction has just become this incredibly important—oh, a terrible word, but—funnel, right, for writers. What do you see? Like, yeah … expound upon this!

Dean Leetal: I feel like a lot of stories explore things that many fandoms explore or used to explore. I hate to mention Harry Potter, but a lot of stories in queer fiction these days explore relationships between people who are studying in the same academic environment or where there's a lot of difference in class, like in Harry Potter. Well, like in Harry Potter fan fiction!

There are Victorian masters who are socially unavailable, like in Sherlock, or there are people fighting monsters on road trips, like in Supernatural. And there's a lot of … I feel a lot of hunger for these stories. I really love finding more and more of these stories. They exist in fan fiction alongside traditionally published novels.

Dan Hartland: Does this bring us back again to this idea of reclamation? Beause I find it so interesting, Dean. And you're right—isn't it strange that in a conversation about reading queerly that one of the first properties we bring up is Harry Potter, right? And we all know where the original author of those books has found themselves.

I can't help but think—and again, I've already invoked Foucault, let me invoke Butler—I can't help but think about Butler's question in Gender Trouble, right? How can an ontological regime be brought into question? And one of the answers is, “Well, you take a pre-existing property which is kind of, you know, heteronormative, and you people it with all of these queer people and stories, and you do something different within the world that you love but which doesn't look as you would wish it.” Does that sound like something that queer fiction is doing?

Dean Leetal: Absolutely. I feel like at this point there are so many queer books that reinvent transphobic things or queerphobic things as our own—the ability to retell these stories or reinvent these stories in ways that I would've loved to see as a child that I hope people of all ages enjoy these days.

Dan Hartland: Is there (counterpoint!) is there a danger that—and I think this about other types of retelling too, and we see a lot of retelling in culture in general—is there a danger with all this retelling that we don't do much telling? Because we all agreed earlier in the conversation that one of the reasons speculative fiction is such a great place for queer literatures to grow is because it enables us to create things anew.

Is that something that we think about? Are there books we're reading which you're like, “Oh, yeah. Wow, this is, like, a whole new thing,” or are we kind of stuck somehow? What do we think?

William Shaw: Now, fan fiction is not something that I spend a lot of time in those spaces. I have dabbled in it in the past and it's obviously a very important tradition. It's also a very important LGBT tradition, of course. You can go back to things like Kirk/Spock and sort of the invention of that kind of shipping through fandom. I also think you could perhaps argue that perhaps fan fiction is sort of one iteration—or it's perhaps adjacent to a history—of informal zine publication.

So the epigraph to Dead Boys in Space is from a zine. And so I think about, for example, in Detransition, Baby there's a reference to—I remember this word because I had to go and look it up—but a samizdat of online literature, of online queer literature. And so perhaps fan fiction is sort of adjacent to or has a relationship to that tradition of informal zine and fanzine writing.

So perhaps there is a way to get from one tradition which perhaps exists in the shadow of media properties—to speak in that very ugly, capitalistic sort of way—to something more informal and more freewheeling. I wonder if there's perhaps more potential in that area of retelling or sort of appropriating.

But I certainly think there's plenty of people doing fun, original, interesting things in queer literature outside of fan fiction per se. But a lot of it is not really my area of expertise.

Dean Leetal: I agree with your point about sometimes I miss being told something and not retold it. But there's so much queer fiction that is so unique and tells stories that I have never read before in any way.

Like, Akwaeke Emezi: My favorite book of theirs is this amazing story about angels existing in this utopia/dystopia. I don't even know how to explain it, but it's so absolutely its own thing. I absolutely adore it. It's one of my favorite books, and it's not like anything that I've read. Or Rivers Solomon books: Sorrowland is so unique, tells stories that need to be told that I have not read before. So I'm not worried!

Dan Hartland: Akwaeke Emezi is one of my favorite writers, such a great shout. And, you know, just off the top of my head, in terms of recent science fiction, some of the most popular texts in the genre could be classified as queer. So, you know, you've got the Locked Tomb series, for example. Something like This Is How You Lose the Time War, right? Huge book, and likewise right there in this space that we're talking about.

It's quite an interesting place for queer fiction to be, isn't it? Because it began as this kind of almost guerrilla movement on the margins of literature.

I remember relatively recently—I mean, I say relatively recently, but some years ago!—you go into a bookstore and there would be a special section that you would have to go to for the queer fiction. And now—at least in our genre, at least in science fiction and fantasy—it feels much more embedded.

Does that ... Am I right to feel that or am I being sort of Panglossian and Pollyanna-ish about it?

Dean Leetal: For me personally, I'm not really connected to what's happening in sci-fi and fantasy outside of queer books. I read mostly queer sci-fi and fantasy, and I see these books being nominated for prizes and getting prizes, which is delightful.

I feel at home, I feel comfortable there, but we also need to remember that it's more books that are maybe about the less marginalized types of queers—so definitely Black queer people, disabled queer people, aromantic, asexual, arguably non-binary and trans queer people. From what I've seen, it’s the books that are about the more socially acceptable, liberal, nice queers that I see in these places. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. It's just what I see.

Dan Hartland: I'm not sure you are. So one of the things that really struck me—and one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode, actually, Dean—is precisely that Charmed and Dangerous had an aromantic focus, which struck me as, as you say, kind of interesting and, you know, quietly radical.

It shouldn't be, but you know, you don't see as much of it as perhaps you—

Dean Leetal: I just have to say, it's not officially aromantic. It's kind of my reading of it. I wouldn't want aromantic people to read it expecting representation and not find it.

Dan Hartland: That's really interesting! So one of the things we're doing when we're kind of … Well. So far we've spoken a lot about books which are on the face of it self-evidently queer, right? But there's another way to read queerly, which is to queer books which aren't already. And we've spoken a little bit about how fan fiction does that to existing media properties, to use Will's phrase.

William Shaw: What have I done?!

Dan Hartland: And so. Dean, the Page, you read it in your review quite convincingly as aromantic. But you're saying that you did that, you applied a lens of reading to it. Talk to me a bit about that process.

Dean Leetal: Well, the line between what is on the page and what is imagined is very, very blurry—in general, not specifically in this book. And a lot of queer scholars have pointed out that, had a book been coded as heterosexual, we would just read it as officially heterosexual rather than read it as coded or call it a reading. But still, there are a lot of codings in the book that are aromantic—and, as an aromantic person, I really enjoyed that.

There are queerplatonic relationships, or relationships that I would call queerplatonic relationships, that are kind of friendships but are deeply meaningful and important to the people involved in them. There are people who talk about issues they have with romance. There's the main character starts out just rejecting romance in general.

These are things that I could relate to as an aromantic person, but that's … it's not an aromantic character officially.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Will, talk to us about this, about reading more generally within the genre, what you come across—what you come across explicitly, like literally on the page, what you come across where, as Dean says, you can kind of read in if you wish. Where do you think the genre is at more kind of broadly?

William Shaw: Firstly, like, I never want to sort of give a definitive statement. As a critic, I'm always trying to—I hope trying to—introduce nuance and look at, perhaps, trends and counter-trends and so on. But I think in some ways it's the best of times and the worst of times.

In some ways, there's  terrific progress in SFF LGBT literature. So, you know, we have mentioned This Is How You Lose the Time War. I've recently read Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story collection. Plenty of stories in that collection are very explicit about … you know, they have protagonists who self-identify as queer. I think there are also some stories that are perhaps less explicitly queer, but I certainly think—and perhaps it's just because they're in a collection with a lot of other stories with explicitly queer protagonists—I think there's certainly … you could do an LGBT reading of a lot of those stories and I think it would enrich some of them.

I think more broadly, we're in a period where there are plenty of … Well, maybe not plenty, but we're seeing presses like Tor and big five presses publishing LGBT authors. So, you know, you look at the success of people like, uh, Eric LaRocca or Hailey Piper or I think Torrey Peters's last collection, Stag Dance, you can definitely read as science fiction or fantasy—I think I read one of those stories as sort of Wellsian, which was, which was terrific fun. So there's, in mainstream publishing, are a lot of LGBT success stories and that's terrific. And, you know, more of that, please!

But I think we're also looking at, particularly in the US context, a backlash. There was a piece in Book Riot recently, which the Ancillary Review of Books included in their signal boost series, which is that publishers are becoming less willing to take on LGBT material. Wholesalers and libraries are becoming less able or less willing to stock it. I shouldn't say able—less willing to stock it.

We exist in a moment of queerphobic backlash. I mean, I live in Virginia and, you know, there's a large and very important queer community where I live, but I also drive along the main road to the library and I see signs claiming that the library has child pornography because there are some LGBT books available in it.

So I think you never want to be complacent about the success of LGBT literature. And I think it's important for us to do things like this and talk about LGBT literature and use whatever status we might have as critics to lend it attention and prestige and hopefully money. So, you know: Buy some queer books! If, if I can be capitalist for a moment, go and buy some queer books! It'll be good for us all.

And I think it's important that we look to … perhaps to those informal events, to sort of the zine scene or less formal publication avenues and especially to smaller presses and smaller magazines. I think, as I say, it's the best of times and it's the worst of times. Definitely I'm in favor of—and, you know, I enjoy—a lot of the LGBT books that are coming from the big five and things like that. But I, I certainly don't want to make that the sum total of the LGBT material that I deal with, either as a reader and certainly not as a critic.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Which books should we be reading? So if we're in, on one level, the best of times, there must be some great books to read: Tell us all about that, right? Let's talk about some of those. But also, if we're in the worst of times, then what are the few dozen that are doing the intersectional thing, and that we should be seeing more of that kind of book too?

You know, there's two things we can do in this conversation, and should do, which is celebrate where we've got to, but also say, “Well, you know what? There's still some distance to go.” So throw some titles, throw some authors at me, whichever of you wishes to go first.

Dean Leetal: Okay. So there's, uh, Kai Cheng Thom, who wrote Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, which is an amazing, amazing book. There's Rivers Solomon, Akwaeke Emezi, Freya Marske. All these people are auto-buy authors for me.

And again, in fan fiction, here are authors like Astolat, like Candle Beck, who write just poetry. Um, Candle Beck writes not literal poetry, but she writes poetically and beautifully! And Astolat, Naomi Novik, we all love her. That's a few.

William Shaw: Absolutely. I'll add to that—and some of these are people that I've written about elsewhere—but I am a big fan of Alison Rumfitt. Her first two novels and her poetry collection are really very, very funny, very scary, very sort of formally inventive sort-of-horror novels.

I also have, like I mentioned, some fairly basic people I'm a fan of. So Torrey Peters. I read Nevada by Imogen Binnie recently, and Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. So those are some sort of terrific authors who I think are having a lot of mainstream success at the moment. But I'd also want  to uplift Sara Youngblood Gregory, who I've just reviewed!

So, you know, lots of brilliant queer poets out there. And the work being done by smaller magazines: Neon Hemlock publishes quite a lot. They have the yearly We're Here series of LGBT science fiction. I also think Seize the Press have done some very good work, some very boundary-pushing LGBT work, in addition to lots of other good work which isn't necessarily explicitly queer.

Dean Leetal: I'm writing my PhD about non-binary characters who are marginalized in more ways than one. I've been able to find just a few dozen books overall of, in all time, in small presses and independent presses, like everywhere. And that's not a lot.

Dan Hartland: So let's start to think a little bit about where things might go. Given that we're aware that, you know, there's this sort of global retrenchment, given that we're aware—as Dean's informed us from their research—that there is not as much intersectional queer fiction as we might like to see, are those the kind of directions we would look for the next few years of queer fiction in SFFH?

Are we looking at standing ground, trying to make incremental advances on the intersectional front? Where do we see it going? Do we have a sense of the trend moving forwards, or is it really hard to perceive right now?

William Shaw: I don't know that I am perceiving a trend so much as I'm worrying about the trend.

I worry about—particularly living and working where I do, and, you know, I know a lot of writers and LGBT writers in my, just in my personal life—it's always been difficult to get published full stop, particularly as a queer author and so I worry about the erosion of opportunities to get published.

I worry about my ability as a critic to be able to access such material in the future. I worry about, you know, whether or not I'll be able to access queer literature in five years’ time the same way that I can now. So, um, yeah, I suppose I have that perhaps it's a selfish worry as a reader—like, I worry about my ability to read this material, and also for the ability of this material to get out to a wider audience. So I'm not sure what you're thinking, you know?

Dean Leetal: Yeah. The world is becoming darker … But I hope and believe that there are queer writers that are going to keep writing.

Maybe we'll find them on different platforms, or maybe it's no longer going to be traditional publishing—independent publishing, and just, I don't know, people putting their things on Archive of Our Own. I don't know. I don't know. But they're … we are out there, and we're gonna keep being out there.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, one of the things that I was going to say was something that platforms can do is make it very clear that they are welcoming places for this literature and the writers of this literature, which I know at Strange Horizons—there is always more you can do—but at Strange Horizons, we try to make it clear, particularly to self-published indie authors, that they should submit their books for review to us and we will consider them.

That's something, you know? It's a small thing, but it's something that we can do to help provide writers with a platform at a time when perhaps there is concern elsewhere.

As critics, we can read these books. As writers, we can write them. As readers, we can read them. But both of you are right to point out: “Yeah, well, but where are we gonna get them from?” What's the channel? What's the connection between these three critics, writers, readers? And, ultimately, that is platforms like AO3, like Strange Horizons; and all we can do is keep those as welcoming as they need to be.

I have a kind of thing in the back of my head: To what extent is queer literature an opportunity and to what extent is it a lane which books and writers are kept in?

You know, when we're talking about, quote-unquote, queer fiction, we've spoken a little bit about reading all fiction queerly, which I think is great. But when we're talking about specifically labelled as queer fiction, is it great that that's a thing? Is it a safe space? Is it a platform where people can feel that they are able to express their art? Or is it a kind of pen in which those books are, are kept?

Do we have thoughts on that? Like, I'm not sure what I think.

Dean Leetal: My answer is really that I don't know. I'm not one of the authors we're talking about, so I don't know how they feel about it. Yeah. I know a lot of authors mention that they love being queer, feel strongly about representing in that way, but maybe there are others who don't feel like that and maybe they write different things as well. I don't know.

William Shaw: Yeah, this is something else. This is sort of a vector that I worry about in terms of censorship: In an age of book banning, is it potentially making the banner's life easier to say, “Okay, here's the LGBT section of the library or of the bookshop or whatever.”

But at the same time, I would never want to deny an LGBT author's right to identify their book as, “This is, this is a queer book.” Maybe this just speaks to how I'm feeling in this political moment, but I'm thinking a lot about—I'm worried a lot about—literature in general, but often particularly LGBT literature.

And so maybe I ought not to be letting that sort of paranoia about censoriousness dictate how I approach this literature. Certainly, I would never assume to dictate how an author should and shouldn't understand their own work. But, uh, yeah, I don't know. I can sort of see perhaps the ambivalence that you're sort of identifying here.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, because there's a question as well between is it the author identifying this book as queer, or is it the marketing department? Is it a vector for sales more than it is for expression? To go back to my question towards the start of this conversation: Are we talking about books by queer people, for queer people, about queer people?

And the answer is all three. But of course, they don't have to hang out together, right? So a book by a queer person does not have to be about or for another queer person. It could be about something completely different. And that's where this question, I think, that I'm asking comes from: How do you sort the books in a way that enables expression but doesn't limit it?

William Shaw: I don't know. If I figure it out, I'll write in! You know? It'll be, it'll be good!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah! That makes sense! Is there anything I've missed?

Dean Leetal: You mentioned wanting to talk about places to find queer books. So I have two shout-outs in that area. One way that I love finding queer books is at the Queer Liberation Library. It's this wonderful project where you can get queer books for free through the library if you officially promise that you are in the United States. They have a wonderful collection that's still growing, and it's, it's a really exciting project, especially in these days.

And there's also LGBTQ Reads, a website that I mentioned—the news of queer books coming out as they come out is on there. It's really useful.

And TikTok critics or Bluesky critics like Disco Barrington—who's an author now as well—and RKJ Reads talk a lot about queer books, and it's just a great way to find out about new releases and old releases, and I recommend.

William Shaw: I'll say I also like yearly anthology series. So I particularly like—I mentioned We're Here earlier—I'm also a fan of the Brave New Weird series from Tenebrous Press. They put out all sorts of sort of interesting offbeat fiction. A lot of it is queer or explicitly deals with queer topics. That can be a useful vector, particularly if you just, if you just like short fiction. That can be a useful way to find interesting new authors in short fiction, so I will shout out that as sort of general principle.

I also think in terms of reading queerly, if you like, maybe it links back to the fan fiction angle we were talking about earlier. But I sort of have previous about this. I think I wrote a piece for Strange Horizons talking about reading a very old science fiction story called “Helen O'Loy” through sort of a queer lens. And so I think there is an element of … I think it's important and useful to do things like that.

So I also think about: One thing I'm a bit of a fan of is Sherlock Holmes and it's very difficult to read Sherlock Holmes—or I find it very difficult, I'll say that—in 2026 without thinking of the queer lens that people have brought to it since Arthur Conan Doyle was writing.

And so that obviously intersects with more modern media fandoms, things like Sherlock. But I think that element is important, and it's something that I find very interesting and fun and worthwhile, particularly as a critic. That's something that I think is an important part of a healthy ecosystem and reading diet in addition to material that is explicitly by, about, for LGBT people.

Certainly, I never want it as a replacement, but certainly I think, particularly if we're dealing with a very censorious environment, the act of queering textually might become even more important than it already is.

Dean Leetal: Oh, it can’t be the only thing—it's problematic to rely on unofficial representation as representation—but it's one of my favorite things to do just for my personal enjoyment and for my research.

I've written about Shakespeare's As You Like It as aromantic, asexual, and genderqueer. Obviously, Supernatural fan fiction is where my heart lives, it's just fun. It's detective work, and it's play. I think I find more enjoyment in reading things that are not officially queer, but are very obviously queer, more than I find it in reading things that are officially queer sometimes because it's just fun.

It's fun to find the queerness and pull it out!

[Musical sting]

William Shaw: It was a good onversation. I, you know, I hope the listeners all enjoy it. You know, that'd be great.

Dan Hartland: Would podcast again, yeah! [Laughter]

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts - have you listened to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com? Because really there is no excuse not to.

Our last episode on reviewing writers with a long back catalogue illustrated the attraction of novelty by failing to inspire as much discourse as our earlier episode on debut writers. That said, Intergalactic Mixtape picked us as that week’s A-side, which is never a chore. We agree with Niall Harrison, though, that novelty bias is never entirely surprising—and yet also with his view that reviewers should probably worry *more* about established writers than we do: They come with more context than newer ones, and, as Niall says, “how that is handled can alter the shape of a review a lot.”

Rachel Cordasco also wondered aloud about how to approach the multiple books question: When she approached the Legend of the Galactic Heroes series, for example, she reviewed each of its ten volumes individuals and then did a separate review of the entire series. This is serious commitment to context. Regular correspondent Wm Henry Morris said he tends to pick only a few books from an oeuvre with which to sample it—not unwisely, he tends to focus on the ones he thinks he might like the most.

On which note, Paul Kincaid wrote a fascinating piece for his blog reflecting on the episode. “I firmly believe,” he wrote, “that you cannot be a critic unless you read widely, read outside the narrow focus of what you review. Except, and herein lies the dilemma, it can sometimes feel as if the context outweighs the text.” He says this was the unspoken fulcrum of our discussion, and as ever the great man is right: In fact, striking balances is a theme we seem continually to return to in all kinds of contexts.

Hana Carolina, who appeared on our episode on debuts, welcome how the discussion of oeuvre was—yes—in dialogue with that earlier debate. That debut discourse continued, too, in a post by Lorraine Wilson, fresh from her shortlisting for this year’s Clarke Award, who wrote a great blog post on the topic from a—quote “non-debut husk of an author” perspective. She had good thoughts on the value of the debut writer’s perspective—and also on why "the reviewer's [only] duty of care towards me extends only to the limit of common decency.”

Finally, Locus’s Ian Mond—for it is he—wrote that he is slowly catching up on the show. Hello to you, Ian, listening to this some time near the heat death of the universe! He mentioned having nearly finished the “first season” of the show, which got me thinking: If we split this entirely seasonless podcast into seasons, where would we be now? Opinion was split between somewhere deep into the disappointing season four and somewhere near the begining of the annus mirabilis of season 2.

As ever, thoughts on this and all topics to reviews at strangehorizons dot com. See you next season.