Recommend: queer short stories

This time for our series on reader recommendations, where we shamelessly use you to add to our reading lists, we’d like to hear your suggestions of queer/LGBTQIA+ short stories that can be found online. To be clear, we want to hear about all the letters (and more) in that abbreviation, not just lesbian and gay stories, so hit us up with all the intersectional diversity you can think of. As always, to prime the pump we’ve asked a few editors, authors and other friends for their ideas. Read and enjoy, and then please tell us some of your favorites in the comments!

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Rachel Linn (author page)

Full disclosure: “Something that Needs Nothing” (New Yorker 2006) isn't really speculative or fantasy fiction, though Miranda July’s way of seeing and describing the ‘real’ world often transforms it into an alternate reality.  Her writing feels like a more surreal version of The Catcher in the Rye, one in which you’re even less sure if the narrator’s perceptions are unreliable or if the world itself is.  I was intrigued the first time I read the story, but even more so after talking to a football player who was assigned it as a reading for a college class and chose to analyze it for his final paper.  He said he "related to the narrator's voice", which, coming from someone so different from myself, reinforced my impression of the story’s bizarre accessibility.  When the narrator says, "We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant that we were not alone in this world," I think most of us know what she means.

Also, I should note that this story is explicit and—like much of July’s writing and performance art—plays with offensiveness (and therefore might not be everyone’s cup of tea).

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Jo Thomas (Journeymouse)

“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky (Apex Magazine 2013). What I like about the story with respect to queerness is the lack of detail about identity until the very end and, even then, it can be interpreted several ways. The writer uses first person so, if one realises the writer is a woman, there's a tendency to assume the narrator also is—but their gender identity isn't revealed until the narrator calls themself “the paleontologist’s fiancée with her half-planned wedding.” Likewise, the paleontologist love in question isn't definitively called a man until the very end and that only serves to show that the narrator and, presumably the love, recognise that identity for sure. So, with the the narrator saying that their love is called “a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of, regardless of whether it had anything to do with you or not,” there is still an ocean of possibilities over gender and identity. There is room for questions—the most important possibly being why does the reader see it like that?

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Claudie Arseneault (author page)

When asked for recommendations, choosing what to promote and fan over is often the hardest part of the task. Today I’ve picked two very different stories both featuring aromantic protagonists which I’ve discovered since the start of the year.

The first, “How My Best Friend Rania Crashed A Party And Saved The World” by Ada Hoffman (Unlikely Story 2014) is a near-future science fiction in which social media status heavily influences your place in the world. Emma is a Relator—she might not want to date, but she has over 2000 friends, and she’s ready to use those relationships to help her World Saver best friend. I love the way this piece defies the aromantic loner trope, the fullness of its characters, and how evocative those social media titles are. It’s a fun and free YA story that really stayed with me.

The second is “Nkásht íí” by Darcie Little Badger (Strange Horizons 2014), a brilliant short story steeped in Lipan Apache ghost lore. Friends of misfortune, Josie and Annie investigate a man’s car crash after he insists a malevolent spirit drowned his baby girl. Annie’s grandma has often warned her against restless ghosts. Haunting, tense and beautiful, “Nkásht íí” focuses on the unbreakable bond between two women, simultaneously providing horrified shivers and the warm glow of solid friendship. Easily one of my favourite reads this year.

If you ever feel the need for more free aromantic fiction available online, you can always check Penny Stirling’s great list. Happy reading!

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Rachel Verkade (story; poem)

I first read Tim Pratt's story "Life in Stone" (Escape Pod 2006) in his excellent collection Hart & Boot. It seemed at first a fairly typical story that borrowed much of its premise from the ancient Slavic tales of Koschei the Deathless; a sorcerer has made himself immortal by placing his soul in an inanimate object and hiding it away. The trouble is that now, after many millennia of life, the sorcerer wants to die, and can no longer remember where his soul is hidden. So he hires a skilled but aging mercenary/assassin to find his soul and end his life.

What made the story stand out for me first was the setting—a bizarre future America where magic is rampant, and the characters are as likely to drive their SUV down to the local Italian eatery for supper as they are to fight their way through a den of lake monsters. And the other was the fact that the assassin and the sorcerer are lovers.

What unfolds is a story about aging, the loss of physical and mental capacities, about memory and the nature of the soul… and about love. About how sometimes what your lover wants may seem unfathomable, and sometimes the kindest thing to do is also the most painful. About two aging men working towards a single goal, each for their own reasons, and how one begins to question those reasons even as he commits acts of horrible violence to reach his end. It's also, of course, a very sad story… but also a very poignant one, and, in its own way, very hopeful. There aren't many older queer badass assassins in fantasy literature, and Pratt's Mr. Zealand makes an amazing impression in only ten pages.

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Trace Yulie (author page)

K.M. Szpara’s “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time” (Uncanny, 2017) is written from a trans perspective, by a trans author, and it isn’t a sweet story of acceptance or an inspiring story about transition struggle; I say this because these seem like themes some readers are more comfortable with. There is of course a space for affirming fiction, and sometimes queer stories just aren’t for non-queer folks, you know? But Szpara’s stories are not on those themes. Oh no, no, no. They are raw and vulnerable, and the narratives situate the reader firmly in the trans viewpoint in a way that I find at times deeply unsettling. And that’s good (at least for this privileged reader). If one goal of fiction is to create situations where the reader identifies and empathizes with the people depicted in the story, they should feel unsettled by the horror of finding oneself in the wrong body, or a changing body. The character’s experience is viscerally, vividly described. The character feels intimately embodied; the stories are about being trans in the body. The reader can’t look away or bounce off that perspective, as it isn’t sidelined into a token side character or pushed into the background. On the surface, “Small Changes” is a vampire story, but the transformative turn from human to vampire resists easy metaphor or resolution. It’s a heavy, dark analogue for the harsh complexities of sex, desire and a intense something-else that defies simple explication. The story was hard for me to read. But I don’t think the story was meant to be comfortable, and I’m glad I didn’t look away. I also recommend Szpara’s “Nothing is Pixels Here” (Lightspeed [QDSF], 2015), an older publication about a different kind of embodied terror, but no less complex and painful. I make no assumptions that these stories are written for a cis audience, but as a cis person I came away with a measure of empathy I didn’t know I lacked before reading them.

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Please tell us about more great online queer stories in the comments!

Recommend: Optimistic SF

This time, we're asking for recommendations of optimistic science fiction. Please leave your suggestions in the comments below. First, a few ideas from editors, authors, reviewers and other friends:

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Tracie Welser (author page)

A common enough complaint about science fiction is that much of recent writing in the genre is dystopian or deeply pessimistic. Gone are the golden age stories about exploration and hope, to which I say "good riddance," as much of the sense of wonder and speculation of those years drew heavily on imperialist themes and angles of approach to "others." It seems inevitable that trends such as social suppression of dissent, growing divide between economic classes, environmental degradation and rapidly changes in technology produce distinctly dark responses from science fiction writers. Lauren Buekes' Moxieland comes to mind. In the early aughts, this complaint seemed louder than usual (just search for "positive science fiction" to take a peek at posts from Time and others decrying the grimness of SFF books and film). There were even suggestions that negative stories stifle scientific innovation, rather than inspire.

I, for one, think dystopian narratives while not inherently hopeful are backdrops for hope, where solidarity and struggle are elevated. The popularity of dystopia themes in young adult fiction (ie, Hunger Games) is not so surprising, as the sub-genre is inclined to take risks and whack fascism firmly on the nose, a sensibility enjoyed by young readers and adults alike. Similarly, seemingly hopeless stories, of shattered civilization and economic despair (Oryx and Crake, The Wind-up Girl) offers some kernels of resistance and revolution. Attempts at overtly positive science fiction in the recent past are harder to come by.

Two that come to mind are METAtropolis edited by John Scalzi. A series of shared world stories by different authors, the collection posits some realistic (read: gritty) futurism but with hopeful notes about urban community. The second is the anthology Hieroglyph, which includes the notable, playful story by Charlie Jane Anders titled "The Day it All Ended." The history of the Hieroglyph Project itself is fairly interesting, a deliberate effort to create and publish more positive visions of science fictional future.

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Maureen Kincaid Speller (Paper Knife)

The world is not an optimistic place right now; it’s been a long time since science fiction felt optimistic, to the point where the issues explored over the last twenty or thirty years in fiction have become commonplace in daily life. In common with many, I fear for the future and often find it hard to read sf these days because the brain can only stand so much dystopia. It was a genuine pleasure, then, to read Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station recently and to feel that perhaps not all has been lost. Tidhar’s fiction doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions but there is the promise nonetheless that life will continue, and not necessarily a bad life either. The people (and I use this term in the broadest sense) who gather around the Central Station to sell food, tend bar, collect books, solve problems, look out for one another, fall in love, practise their religions, aren’t so far removed from the people I know. It is both encouraging and comforting to know that at least one writer believes in the persistence of ordinary daily life, no matter what.

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Don Riggs (faculty page; alumnus page)

When I was in the 8th grade, I first learned about the Big Bang theory—the actual theory, not the television sitcom. The ultimate implication of the universe starting off with a bang and an unceasing expansion is entropy, which is the tapering off of the energy of the universe until the Heat Death of the Universe happens. I was thoroughly depressed by this, and so, when our next theory was presented, the Oscillating Universe, where the universe expands as far as it goes until it then is sucked back into another primordial point of all matter, which will again explode in another Big Bang, I decided that was the theory I wished to embrace. “Utriusque Cosmi,” a short story by Robert Charles Wilson (in Neil Clarke’s Galactic Empires, 2017), combines the story of a sixteen-year- old girl living in a trailer with her meth-addict mother and her abusive boyfriend, with that of that girl’s future self, “raptured up” to the Fleet of the intelligences of creatures saved from dying worlds, itself pursued by the Invisible Enemy, which ultimately turns out to be a group of Elder Beings that in turn “rapture up” the Fleet and thus survive the next collapse of the universe.

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Stephanie Saulter (author page)

It’s a shame that science fiction isn’t a more generally optimistic genre. Too often we extrapolate possible futures so dire and hopeless the message seems to be that humanity is aboard a rocketship to all-but-inescapable doom, or at best unalleviated misery. I can’t think of too many writers who buck this grim trend, but among the few is the late and greatly lamented Iain M. Banks, whose Culture novels are the ultimate vision of a far-future, galaxy-spanning, inclusive and egalitarian polity in which humans are only one of many species and virtually omniscient AIs, instead of being the harbingers of our destruction, are committed and wryly indulgent protectors of organic life. The Culture’s liberal ethos combined with flexibility and at times ruthless pragmatism allows it to withstand assaults from without and respond to concerns from within. I’d suggest The Player of Games for a first visit.

Another exception is the grande dame of speculative fiction, Ursula Le Guin. Her SF looks at harmful gender and social constructs, the iniquities of politics and commerce, and conflicts between ideology and idealism with an eye less to endless iterations of the problem than envisioning possible solutions. The Dispossessed is an extraordinary book.

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What are some other positive examples of science fiction? Please share recommendations in the comments.

Interview with Isabel Yap

Today, The Future Fire Assistant Editor Tracie Welser talks to Isabel Yap about her story in Fox Spirit Books' Asian Monsters.

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California, Tokyo, and London. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, Book Smugglers Publishing, Uncanny Magazine, Shimmer Magazine, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume 2, among other venues. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is isabelyap.com.

I was enthralled and horrified (in the best way) by your story "Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby." Can you tell our readers more about the tiyanak, the story's monster, and how this story developed?

Filipino mythology is so rich that I had trouble deciding which creature I wanted to explore. I'd always wanted to write a story about a tiyanak and it's not one I'd seen that often, so I decided to give it a shot. Like many Filipino creatures, the tiyanak has many different depictions – in some versions it's a demon baby with sharp teeth; in others it's a baby that reveals its true nature as an old, goblin-like man. I asked friends about any possible encounters and also went poking around online.

Once I decided on using tiyanak, the story's other elements slowly came together. I wasn't planning on the fragmented narrative, but I tried a few times to tell the story directly and it didn't work. I realized the tone and the emotion of the protagonist would have to carry the story. I drew mainly on two themes: one is loneliness and isolation; the other is love without limits. I wrote the entire first draft by hand on a train because I was swiftly approaching the deadline.

On your website is the lovely line “I want the heartache, the broken glass, the stories that nibble at my guts”. This creepy tale of a would-be mother's desperate love is still gnawing at the insides of my mind! Did you scare yourself, writing this story?

I'm really easily scared – I don't watch horror movies usually because the images stay with me for way too long. But for some reason, I write quite a lot of horror, and my own stories actually don't scare me – probably because I feel somewhat in control with how things turn out. But if I'm writing really late at night, sometimes I get jumpy!

Also, that line actually came from an essay that was published on Interfictions – you can read it here! :D

The Asian Monsters anthology features several stories about creatures who appear to humans in innocent-seeming disguise. I've always struggled with stories about monstrous children (Pet Sematary, Children of the Corn and so on). Would you characterize this theme as a horror or the uncanny, and what about this appeals to you?

I think it's a mix of both horror and the uncanny. Children can be really frightening in and of themselves – there's something about that combination of innocence and being demanding and self-centered, almost to the point of ruthlessness, that makes horror stories about children have more 'creepiness' to them. It's like you don't want to believe it's possible that they can act that way – it goes against everything we know (or think we know). Personally, I always like themes that lend themselves well to ambiguity. I think it's more interesting that way. :)

What are you working on these days?

First up will be working on revisions for some stories I temporarily shelved due to 2016 craziness. One is a novella about a sorceress, a runaway princess, and a bird with a healing song set in a mythological precolonial Philippines. Another is a novelette about ex-child soldiers, trained in the use of weapons called Triggers, who are now bounty hunters...in space! Lastly I've been fascinated by the assignment of roles to boy and girl groups in kpop...I have nothing but that theme yet, but hopefully a story will come to me sometime. I have a lot of ideas, so I'm just working on getting some semblance of a writing practice back. I'm determined to make 2017 a good year for writing!

Interview with Yukimi Ogawa

Today, The Future Fire Assistant Editor Tracie Welser talks to Yukimi Ogawa about her story in Fox Spirit Books' Asian Monsters.

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo, Japan, where she writes in English but never speaks the language. She still wonders why it works that way. Her fiction can be found in such places as Fantasy and Science Fiction and Strange Horizons.

I enjoyed your gruesome and moving story, “Kokuri’s Place”. Can you tell our readers more about the monster, Kokuri Babaa?

Oh thank you! Kokuri Babaa is a monster of an old woman that strips corpses of the skin and eat the flesh, and weaves stuff with the dead’s hair. The part about Kokuri Babaa wearing the dead’s skin afterward is entirely my creation.

In the book in which I learned of her, the caption says she is “feared even more than Datsueba”, and Datsueba is an old-woman monster who strips the dead of their clothes if the dead don’t have enough money with them for crossing the river between this world and the world beyond. I see similarity here, and wonder if one of them had a strong influence on emergence/evolution of the other. Funny (and sad) thing, though, is that Datsueba somehow came to be admired by a certain number of people around the end of Edo era, while Kokuri Babaa is still only a lonely, unimportant monster to this day.

Otherwordly female creatures appear in several of your recent stories, such as the yōkai in “Town’s End”, and the skeleton woman in “Rib”. All three of these stories contain subtle sympathetic touches that made the horrific relatable and even beautiful. Can you tell us what appeals to you about the monstrous feminine?

I love flipping through books that catalogue yokai, and being a woman myself, I guess the female monsters tend to easily catch my eye. These yokai books – especially the ones by Sekien Toriyama, which offer only a few lines of caption at most for each drawing of monster – never go far enough into how they came to be, or why they came to be what they are. It’s just so much fun to try to visualise these hows and whys!

Also, I have to say, I’ve been called "yokai woman" by many people, not entirely in a bad way, but not entirely in a good way either (hehe). Perhaps by depicting the not-just-horrifying aspect of these female monsters, I’m trying to come to terms with this lonely, weird woman that is me.

The stories I mentioned, and especially “Kokuri’s Palace”, are about relationships between marginalized supernatural beings and humans as they come to understand and even aid one another. How did this story, told from alternating points of view, take shape in your writing process?

I remember wanting to tell a story where a human cannot help but call the monster “her”, instead of “it”; and the monster that calls the human “it”, because for that monster, “she”, “he” or any other pronouns just don’t make sense. And to this end, the only way I could think of was letting both of them take the first-person POV.

In my culture we see many stories where humans and monsters cooperate or become friends, and recent examples include GeGeGe no Kitaro by Shigeru Mizuki, and Yokai Watch series. In many of these stories the humans are “the good ones”, with the “good” monsters trying to help the human fight the bigger threat – more evil, stronger monsters. But sometimes I find myself asking, “Really?” And this is a theme I enjoy playing with.

What are you working on next?

More stories of yokai! And a longish story about a lot of patterns and colours. Writing about things I love gives me so much pleasure and peace.

Interview with Eve Shi

Today, The Future Fire Assistant Editor Tracie Welser talks to Eve Shi about her story in Fox Spirit Books' Asian Monsters.

Eve Shi is an Indonesian fangirl and writer. She loves tea, singing to herself, and has lived most of her life in the West Java Province. You can contact Eve via Twitter at @Eve_Shi.

I really enjoyed “Blood Like Water.” Can you tell me about the impetus for this story?

I wanted to base my story on a creature that’s neither very well-known nor associated with women or sexuality. On research, I came upon lelepah, a creature that's usually found by the river. It eats raw fish but supposedly also has a penchant for human flesh. What if the creature transforms into a human? And the story just went on from there.

The main character of this story is an innocent-seeming girl with a dark secret, and I couldn't resist imagining future Wiya as a young woman with all-new troubles fitting in. One of your other recent stories, “The Skin Shimmers”, also features someone who is not what she seems. What is it about the duality of these figures that you find appealing?

Society often expects women to be sweet and compliant, while many of them are the farthest thing from that. Plus, I always like monstrous women – those who wreak havoc, and especially those who are not out to seduce men. So I combined the above into the two stories.

A central theme of the story seems to be vengeance. Is this a common element in legends of the monstrous lelepah?

It isn't. It's something I thought up when exploring the idea's possibilities. If a human couple adopts the lelepah, what would it do for them in return? Does it do so out of a sense of obligation, or is there something else?

What other creative projects are you working on that readers can look forward to?

In English, nothing that will be published soon. In Indonesian: I'm working on a novella for a thriller series. Can't wait to see who the other authors are.

New Issue: 2012:25 (Outlaw Bodies)

"The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers."
--Adrienne Rich

Issue 2012.25

• ‘Winds: NW 20 km/hr’, Stacy Sinclair (artwork by Rachel H. White)
• ‘The Remaker’, Fabio Fernandes (artwork by Robin E. Kaplan)
• ‘Elmer Bank’, Emily Capettini (artwork by Laura-Anca Adascalitei)
• ‘Her Bones, Those of the Dead’, Tracie Welser (artwork by Miranda Jean)
• ‘Millie’, Anna Caro (artwork by Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein)
• ‘Good Form’, Jo Thomas (artwork by Miguel Santos)

Outlaw Bodies is an anthology published by our parent imprint Futurefire.net Publishing and guest co-edited by Lori Selke.
Outlaw Bodies is available from the usual sellers, including:

• Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
• Wizard's Tower Books (e-book)
• Lulu.com

Review copies available on request.

Guest Post: Bodies in Utopia, Bodies in Space

This blog deals primarily in speculations about the future of sex, gender, and society. So does the new publication by The Future Fire, the Outlaw Bodies anthology co-edited by Lori Selke.

The book focuses on characters who are yearning for something more, some way out of the binary that is gender, the divide between the flesh and the digital, the disparities and inequalities that result from those dichotomies, and dares the reader to dream of different spaces, of Other spaces.

This collection points to the body in a very specific way: to ask about its limitations and push beyond them.

Guest post: Decolonizing the Utopian Imperative

For this post, I’m wishing everyone thinking about utopia, imperialism or decolonization would just go read Ursula K. Le Guin’s esaay, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be.” You should go read that and come back.

Still here?

In this musing on the pitfalls of imperialism and its ideological conflation with utopia, Le Guin brilliantly brings together utopian thinking from Robert Elliot and Milan Kundera, notions about communitas via Victor Turner, social theory from Levi-Strauss, philosophy from Chuang Tzu along with some thoughts about the yin/yang of rationalism as opposed to the soft, the social and the unruly, the way of the Trickster. I can’t hope to summarize it here. 

But here’s what the essay inspires me to think about:

On the construct of the New World: as Le Guin says, “Only if a European discovered or invented it could America exist.”

Colonization, not only in the United States but all over the world, is/was based on economics, exploitation of people and resources, but in some sense, it’s also based on ideas. Big ideas like Democracy, Salvation, Order and Capitalism and their alleged superiority to existent social systems and relationships to the environment. Utopian ideas.

Results: subjugation, assimilation and disappearance of cultures, along with appropriation, tokenization and exoticism.

The West is still creating stories about the primitive and the unknown through history and literature: one pretends to tell the objective stories of the world, which ones are worth knowing and how to think about Progress and Civilization, and the other shapes our thinking about people, places and how to think about the Other. Maybe they both do (that landscape is changing, but there’s still a great deal of work to do).

Have you noticed yet what’s missing from my post/rant? Where are the perspectives from the “outside”? Where are the counter-narratives?

If you didn’t read Le Guin’s essay, go read it. While you’re at it, read Cornel West. Read Uma Narayan. Read Chela Sandoval. Read Arundhati Roy, anything by her at all, who said, “The only thing worth globalizing is dissent,” and “Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.”

Support the creation of new narratives, like We See a Different Frontier. Suggest resources for counter-narrative in the comments below.

Write your own counter-narrative.

Feminist Utopias: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?

In January, I posted to this blog on the subject of utopia, a perfect place. Is such a society possible?

Do certain conditions, such as the absence of crime, poverty, racism and other inequities make for the perfect place? Utopian narrative is a place to explore these questions, but these same narratives could be termed dystopian. Who decides what conditions are the most important, and how can these conditions be established and maintained without creating new modes of oppression?

One way to approach the inherent teetering between utopia/dystopia is to acknowledge and use that tipping point as a point of departure. In feminist utopian literature, narratives often complicate the easy answer, avoid closure, or look to examine multiple perspectives but provide no simple solution.

I hope I don’t have to explain or defend “feminist” here, but I welcome relevant dialogue.

Let’s just say by way of definition that feminist utopias are concerned with the search for equality in the ideal community. They consider both the existence of social stratification based on difference (sex, race, race, class) and the humanist ideal of sameness to be problematic. Gender inequalities are part of the exploration but not the totality. Feminist fiction tends to project its desires for perfect community and to investigate problematic elements of those desires. As such, some may seem neither utopian nor dystopian per se.

Three perfect examples are Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (she even subtitles it “An Ambiguous Utopia”), Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These works look at social inequalities and suggest structures or processes to enable more equitable ways of living, but they’re not easy.

In The Dispossessed, the protagonist Shevek is forced to travel from his anarchist/socialist world to a repressive capitalist one to share scientific ideas which are deemed disruptive and self-serving to the functioning of his community. In The Fifth Sacred Thing, factions within a radically democratic city disagree about how to peacefully resist attack from militaristic invaders. Piercy’s novel presents an alternate society that may or may not be the hallucination of a mentally ill narrator.

Compare these narratives to utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which projects a desire for the perfect human community or dystopias like Orwell’s 1984 which predict extreme, dim futures as cautionary tales. Their approach is humanist, focused on repression of citizenry, not issues specific to women's social roles and intersections of identity.

What are your thoughts on these intersections, and what other texts explore this?

What's useful about this kind of literary exploration?

“I Never Did Like Smart-Ass Utopians”

guest post by Tracie Welser

Part 1 of 3 guest posts on Utopian Narrative


Utopia is an obsession of mine. I find literature that explores notions of a perfect place very appealing. People living peacefully and work together in harmony, who wouldn’t want to live in a place like that? Who wouldn’t want to read about that?

Apparently, lots of people. It’s a “no-place,” they say. Or “it could never work, it always fails in the real world, so why bother with it?” For some (and I’m basing this on discussions I’ve had), talk of egalitarian society causes a sort of anxiety about political correctness, or liberal guilt, or anger/concerns about the evils of Socialism.

As Pandora says to her niece in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, “I never did like smart-ass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring.”

The first big question seems to be, what constitutes the “perfect place,” and for whom? Is it a beautiful, unspoiled place very far from anywhere else, where perfectible dreams are possible? To Thomas More, credited with coining the word “utopia” in the 16th century, the perfect place meant a land with no unemployment, no overpopulation, no religious bigotry, and the elimination of private property (although, oddly enough, slavery was okay).

The dream of a perfect place depends on where you’re standing, the historical or cultural moment from which the dream arises. That perfect place may exist in a possible future, or in a place, or even in a past “Golden Age.”

In the U.S., the utopian ideal could be considered a founding principle of the nation and the driving force behind colonialism and westward expansion. The New World was New Eden, a collective fantasy, a dream of a better world. Never mind that the land was already occupied.

In fiction, these worlds exist as thought experiments. Narratives encourage the reader to reflect on social problems and possibly even solutions. Speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy have a way of doing that.

Utopia, then, is dreaming, yearning, for something that doesn’t quite exist and never exactly will. But is it problematic that these worlds don’t, won’t or can’t exist?

Fast-forward to modern ideas of the perfect place. Let’s dream a little bit.

What would your ideal society look like, your perfect place?

How about a society where equality is the norm for people of all races and genders and ableness of body, where inequity and violence have been eliminated?

What problems or tensions do you foresee?



Suggested Reading
Ivana Milojevic and Sohail Inayatullah, "Futures Dreaming: Challenges from Outside and on the Margins of the Western World."

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream (A non-Western utopia)

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed


(Next month: Feminist Utopias: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?)