Books queer SFF What If Things Were Different? — Five Works of Queer and Trans Futurity Celebrating queer SFF stories about making communities, surviving together, and maybe even flourishing By Lee Mandelo | Published on June 24, 2025 Art by Dan Rossi Comment 0 Share New Share Art by Dan Rossi Even in the earliest stages of editing the anthology Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, I knew the book would open with an epigraph from the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia—where he argues that “the future is queerness’s domain.” Or, put another way: something about queerness is always “not yet here.” We’re always thinking, writing, and living our way toward it. I’ve got a tattoo of this phrase, not yet here, under my left collarbone; it’s a reminder that there are future possibilities out there somewhere, no matter how rough things get in the present.  Speculative fiction, too, is grounded in thinking about what has been, what is not, and what could be. In sf, we imagine our way into other worlds and other futures! Given that, I think there’s a natural connection between queer/trans life and culture and speculative fiction itself—it’s in those horizons of possibility. It’s in futurity: how we think about where we’re at right now and where we might be able to get from here, for better or for worse—and also how we imagine making communities, surviving together, and maybe even flourishing (despite all the forces working to the contrary).  This sense of “queer futurity” was the guiding theme for Amplitudes, and it was on my mind constantly as I selected and edited the stories gathered within it. However, “queer futurity” is also a theme that runs through many, many other queer speculative stories—including these five books and films I loved, each of which deals with queer pasts/presents/futures while offering imaginative possibilities for continuing queer and/or trans existence. Metal From Heaven by august clarke But isn’t this a second-world fantasy novel, you may be asking? Yeah, it is, and that’s why I think it’s required reading for thinking about “queer futurity”—and also for seeing what stories can really do when we’re elbow-deep in imagining other possible worlds than these. To put it bluntly: Metal From Heaven absolutely fucking rules. I rarely get as excited as I did while I was reading clarke’s deeply-grounded yet expansive constructions of queerness, gender, anarchism, and revolutionary resistance. This book is toothsome, horny, hallucinatory, sometimes-nasty, and what I like to call ‘compassionately unforgiving’ in its visions of what surviving the world together as queer and trans people can require. What was it that hooked me first, though? There’s a scene, early on, where a young Marney receives the recently-deceased Tita’s black suede jacket—smelling of cigars and lilac perfume—and climbs onto a lurcher (picture a motorcycle) behind a big, thick, strong woman who inspires immediate, passionate admiration. Marney then rides away with her and her people, becoming part of a new world: an underground world, a resistant world, an utterly queer world. If you know, then you know, and it only gets better from there. Blackouts by Justin Torres At a place known only as the Palace, isolated in the desert, the narrator tends to an elderly queer man named Juan Gay as his death approaches. Juan has a project he’s passing on to the narrator, alongside his own life-stories: reclaiming the queer histories contained within the sexological publication Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. He also wants to hear the narrator’s life-stories too: how he came to be at the Palace, what happened around the time when they originally met while institutionalized, and more. Storytelling and strange queer temporalities form the core of Blackouts, particularly in the dreamlike and unmoored weirdness of the Palace. Sometimes the novel explores the queer past as another country, another world, which we must at turns imagine and invent and uncover from where it’s been so thoroughly redacted/destroyed/obscured. Sometimes it’s about the awkward and painful present of living your life post-dislocating-disaster, arriving in the form of a breakup or a relapse or a recurrent trauma—and sometimes it’s about the potential queer futures we find in stories, or in our relationships to one another, especially cross-generational ones that show us where we’ve been… and where we might still go. I haven’t even gotten into what Torres is doing with the physical object of the novel, either, what it’s like to hold in your hands. The inclusion of archival photos, the pages from Jan Gay’s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns with the thieving homo/transphobic doctors’ notes all blacked out, the choice to print with brown ink instead of black… it was electrifying to experience as an artist. But I’m going to cheat and borrow from the blurb as my closing pitch, because they’ve said it best:  “The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? […] A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.” Uranians by Theodore McCombs If it’s more short fiction you’re after, McCombs’s Uranians was one of my favorite sf collections of the last few years. Whether we’re talking about the titular novella “Uranians” or the other stories in the collection, like “Laguna Heights” and “Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles,” the quick-witted prose and cleverly speculative conceits of each piece are a delight. Sometimes an upsetting delight, when the push and pull of a well-crafted queer story that tangles with trauma and desire leaves you feeling wrung out after—but still, a delight nonetheless.  The novella that anchors the collection is also, perhaps, the piece that resonates most with the idea of “queer futurity.” Sure, it’s a science fiction piece set on a generation ship. But more to the point, it’s shot through with ideas on the strange nature of queer temporality (plus so many intertextual references)—which is made even stranger by the closed world of the ship. Furthermore, the protagonist’s entanglement with arts like opera and poetry drives the story just as much as the dramatic conflicts with self and other that unfold throughout, so it’s got layers. (And I would be remiss not to mention that I also appreciated, very much, how McCombs handles queer eroticism and desire in this collection.) We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, series editor Charles Payseur Want even more short stories? Then I’d recommend picking up the Neon Hemlock anthology series We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. Series editor Charles Payseur works with a guest editor for each volume—including Ryka Aoki (forthcoming), Darcie Little Badger, Naomi Kanakia, CL Clark, and L.D. Lewis—to put together a collection of (as it says right there in the title) the best queer and trans speculative short fiction from previous year. One thing I really appreciate about this series is that the stories always come from a variety of publications. I’ve usually only read a handful of them before picking up the new volume. In the 2023 collection Darcie Little Badger edited with Payseur, there are stories from well-known magazines like Fiyah and Lightspeed… but also stories from original anthologies published by both big and small presses, like Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology and Worlds of Possibility. The editors have provided a much-needed service by drawing queer and trans sf from venues where it might’ve otherwise slipped readers by during the previous year—and then presenting it to us anew, like a gift. I Saw the TV Glow dir. Jane Schoenbrun I can’t ignore how much of my time has been occupied by excellent queer/trans film and television recently, so I’ve got to include Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow too. Our leads, Justice Smith and Jack Haven, deliver an intimate, agonizing portrait of coming-of-age shaped by trans longing and suffering alike. Schoenbrun draws techniques from experimental film and horror movies, combines them with the emotional resonances of ‘90s queer-kid fandom for shows like Buffy, and weaves from those threads an affect-driven narrative about what it fucking feels like to be trans in a world designed to crush it out of you. I saw this one in theaters—twice, despite and because of the fact that it wrenched me into my constituent atoms each time—but watching it in a dark living room with your phone tucked away somewhere else and no distractions will work too.  I Saw the TV Glow crosses between fantastical sequences and the characters’ lived realities, often oriented around their shared attachment to the YA fantasy tv series The Pink Opaque (a theme which appealed deeply to me as a lifelong sf/f nerd). Owen’s young adulthood, which is the centerpiece of the film, will strike a painfully relatable chord for many trans audiences. And maybe it hits most intensely for those of us who also grew up in the ‘90s, but I hear tell it lands just as hard for younger and older folks. While I left the theater afterwards feeling skinned, just raw to the air, I also felt more whole—more hopeful, even. The film constantly gestures toward more survivable possible futures for its leads. Maddy, for example, offers a glimpse of how some young trans people do get away: they run from their families, they bury themselves in the earth and experience a kind of death, the “freefall of utter precarity” that transition can feel like… and then come back new, reborn, ready to try and help an old friend onto the same path toward possibility.  But ultimately it was the street chalk-drawing that opens the smothering final section of the film, reading “there is still time,” that really got me. What a powerful message of queer resilience and futurity—that it’s never too late: for transition, for queer becoming, for a life that doesn’t suffocate you into nothingness. Honestly, those are some of the most hopeful words I can imagine. Even within the uncertain space where the film leaves us, Owen still has time, and the Pink Opaque is always out there, waiting on the horizon. Though all five of these stories are pretty different from one another—and from the ones in Amplitudes, too—they all share that resonating belief in queer and trans futurity, queer and trans potentiality. Always, so long as you’re alive: there is still time.[end-mark] Buy the Book Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity edited by Lee Mandelo Twenty-two speculative stories that explore the vast potentialities of our queer and trans futures. Buy Book Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity edited by Lee Mandelo Twenty-two speculative stories that explore the vast potentialities of our queer and trans futures. Twenty-two speculative stories that explore the vast potentialities of our queer and trans futures. Buy this book from: The post What If Things Were Different? — Five Works of Queer and Trans Futurity appeared first on Reactor.

There is a new coleader in The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard. Since 2021, Heritage has been tracking the laws of every state (and the District of Columbia) governing the conduct of local, state, and federal elections. And for most of those years, Tennessee has stood alone at the top of the state rankings. An early adopter of best practices like banning private funding in election administration, Tennessee was the first state to reach the ninety-point mark, and it currently sits atop an impressive 91 points. But thanks to Arkansas, Tennessee’s no longer alone. Having improved its score by eleven points since 2023, Arkansas joined Tennessee in a tie at 91 points in April. The state’s most recent improvements exemplify the straightforward means that all states can implement to ensure that their voter rolls remain accurate and current.  Arkansas now checks new voter registrations for the improper use of commercial or industrial addresses as residences. It investigates the number of individuals registered at a single address and similarly named individuals registered at the same address. It also uses credit agency data to verify the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements to identify noncitizens who have registered to vote. Not only that, but it formally banned ranked choice voting, an opaque practice that creates an ad hoc majority by reallocating votes based on voters’ second, third, or fourth preferences, assuming the voter has given any thought to those at all. Meanwhile, Tennessee hasn’t rested on its laurels. It remained in shared possession of the top spot by entering into new agreements with other states to share voter registration information. These arrangements are vital for identifying voters who have moved and registered to vote in a new state while remaining registered in their old domicile.  Two other states deserve mention for their recent diligence in pursuit of election integrity. Credit, six points worth, goes to Idaho, which, much like Arkansas, adopted a full spectrum of measures to ensure accuracy of its voter rolls, including the use of alien verification. Those changes have catapulted it to 62 points, putting it in the top half of states. West Virginia also earned four important points by eliminating its once numerous exceptions to the photo-ID requirement for voting. That’s a common sense safeguard of elections, and one providing a great foundation on which to build. Given the part-time nature of most state legislatures, changes will be fewer in the coming months. But 2025 has already seen nine states improve their scores—and hopefully, more states will adopt the spirit of state pride and healthy competition and try to match or outdo the current leaders. In the meantime, congratulations to Arkansas and Tennessee.   The post The States Leading America’s Drive Toward Secure Elections appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Recent amendments proposed by the UK government to the Crime and Policing Bill will raise concerns for those monitoring the expanding surveillance toolkit available to public authorities. Not yet enshrined in law (these changes are currently advancing through Parliament) their implications are already substantial. A new cluster of amendments, starting with NC63 (referenced on page 12 of the June 12 draft), outlines a framework where online information can be extracted from seized electronic devices. The power would enable a senior officer to authorize the extraction of data from online accounts accessed via a lawfully seized device, such as a smartphone or computer, without the need for independent oversight. Put simply, if a device has been confiscated during an investigation, any content in cloud services or digital platforms that was accessible through that device prior to seizure could be reviewed. Examples include giving officers to email inboxes, cloud storage, and social media platforms. The scope is intentionally confined to data that existed and was accessible at the time of seizure, and not new content acquired later. Handling protocols are set out for sensitive categories like journalistic and legally privileged materials, though questions remain over how robustly these safeguards would function in real-world enforcement scenarios. The list of officials eligible to wield this authority extends beyond the police to include immigration enforcement, insolvency officers, and others, further widening the net of access. A separate provision, NC68, extends this capability specifically to port and border authorities, underscoring the government’s intent to institutionalize this practice across multiple enforcement fronts. Of particular note is amendment NC70, which revises aspects of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. This would effectively grant lawful authority for what qualifies as interception when such account access occurs, provided it aligns with the new extraction powers or other preexisting statutes like the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act 2022 and certain national security laws. What sets this proposal apart is the absence of independent scrutiny. Unlike interception and equipment interference warrants under the existing Investigatory Powers framework, which demand approval from a Judicial Commissioner, this regime relies solely on internal sign-off from senior officers. The only prerequisite is that the device must have been lawfully seized and be in the force’s possession. This move blurs the boundary between device-based searches and remote account access, raising new issues around whether such digital reach could be construed as interception. Importantly, the amendments do not introduce new powers to compel individuals to disclose passwords or encryption keys. Those coercive powers remain contained in separate legislation. While presented as a streamlined mechanism for securing lawful authority, these amendments further illustrate how the UK’s surveillance laws continue to evolve in a direction that prioritizes operational convenience over independent accountability. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK: New Proposed Powers Let Police Raid Suspects’ Digital Lives appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

No Matter How Degenerate You Think They Are...

The title, spanning the Hawks to Bob Dylan to The Band, focuses on his compositions and performances. The post The Band’s Richard Manuel is Subject of ‘His Life and Music’ Book appeared first on Best Classic Bands.

What are the new Jump Stars codes? With rewards like gems needed to pull top-tier characters, missing out on new redeemables is akin to flushing money down the drain. Get ahead in this anime take on a mobile gaming classic and gain a competitive edge while you're at it with this list of new Roblox Jump Stars codes. Unless you know of Japanese publications, you might think Jump Stars codes are like Climb and Jump Tower codes. This isn't a Roblox game about reaching lofty heights and crashing down like a meteor, though. Instead, it's another anime game that pulls characters from the Shonen Jump publication together for multi-team battles. It's closer to Brawl Stars than Anime Vanguard, that's for sure. Continue reading Jump Stars codes June 2025 MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best Roblox games, Roblox promo codes, Roblox music codes

In another frustrating blow to videogame preservation, Crytek's classic first-person shooter, Crysis, is no longer available to purchase on Steam. While the original was delisted in 2021, you could still purchase it via the Crysis Maximum Edition bundle, which included the game's standalone expansion, Crysis Warhead. However, that bundle has now been removed as well. Continue reading Original Crysis suddenly vanishes on Steam in another blow to preservation MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Crysis System Requirements

What are the new Gather Speed codes? Get up to speed (literally) and breeze your way to the next zone with ease. With new Gather Speed game codes dropping for launch and beyond, you'll be flying through this Roblox experience like lightning in no time. Gather Speed looks to have been inspired by a number of 'go fast' simulators released over the last couple of years, tasking you with simply going faster than ever before. Want to try out the best Roblox game competition? Sonic Speed Simulator codes and Flashpoint Worlds Collide codes are available to get you up to speed. Continue reading Gather Speed codes June 2025 MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best Roblox games, Roblox promo codes, Roblox music codes

They're Not Hiding It: Chicago Teacher's Union President Proudly Says All Kids Are 'Her Kids'