As literature about exploring and pushing the edges of human experience, it’s not surprising that science fiction and fantasy have always featured characters who are beyond the binary of cis men and cis women. From L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz, who spent her childhood as a boy; to Virginia Woolf’s titular Orlando, who begins life as a man and wakes up one day as a woman; to the gender-cycling Gethenians of Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
Following in this long legacy, Transcendent is the first in a yearly series of anthologies featuring trans themes and characters.
Many of the stories are poetic and experimental, requiring a slower reading to fully absorb the atmosphere. Often a reader must simply plunge headlong into a tale, trusting that they’ll figure it out as they go, or maybe understand it better on a second reading after the piece has had a chance to sit for a while in their head. The effectiveness of this experimental storytelling method can be very subjective, and while didn’t always work for me, other readers will find more meaning in these esoteric stories.
Other stories, like Bonne Jo Stufflebeam’s Everything Beneath You, have the feel of mythology, as if they were modern translations of tales illustrated on sunbaked clay wall frescos, or in delicate inks across unfolding silk scrolls.
There are, of course, stories that fit into our more conventional notions of science fiction and fantasy. E.Catherine Tobler’s Splitskin is magical historical fiction featuring nonbinary Native characters during the American Gold Rush era. Molly Tanzer’s The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad is a modern take on Lovecraft’s gender-swapping pulp tale The Thing on the Doorstep. Margarita Tenser’s Chosen is a riff on one of the most popular fantasy tropes- you can probably guess which one. Where Monsters Dance, by A. Merc Rustad has veins of metaphor-heavy fantasy films like Labyrinth and The NeverEnding Story.
The Need for Overwhelming Sensation by Bogi Takács is a particularly interesting story about a starship literally powered by the magic generated through the pain and pleasure of a loving BDSM relationship.
As with any anthology, some stories did not entirely work for me. Holly Heisey’s Contents of Care Package Sent to Etsath-tachri, Formerly Ryan Andrew Curran, for example, is a short piece about a human who transitions into an alien. For me this plot hews a little too close to the “when I was a kid I identified as a velociraptor” rhetoric that transphobes use to try to delegitimize trans identities. But perhaps that’s part of the point of the story?
Transcendent is an important milestone in more direct representation of trans folks in speculative fiction. You can get a copy of this and the other books in the series from Lethe Press, from Bookshop.org, or from Amazon.
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