San Francisco — Lethe Press has set a May 5 release date for editor Brit Mandelo’s debut anthology “Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction.”
A collection of 17 sexually themed sci-fi stories, "Beyond Binary" explores how “identity can go beyond binary from space colonies to small college towns, from angels to androids and from a magical past to other worlds entirely.”
The book is drawing favorable comparisons to the award-winning, LGBT sci-fi anthology series “Bending the Landscape,” published in the late '90s by Meisha Merlin Publishing.
"Beyond Binary" includes works from Keffy R.M. Kehrli ("Bonehouse") Ellen Kushner ("A Wild and Wicked Youth"), Catherynne Valente ("Palimpsest"), Sarah Kanning (“Sex with Ghosts) and Liu Wen Zhuang (''The Metamorphosis Bud'').
“‘Genderqueer’ can be a label, but it’s also an umbrella term that contains a multiplicity of other identities which slip, subvert, or explode restrictive, binary ideas about selves and bodies," Mandelo wrote on her Tor.com blog Queering SFF. "The potential for experimentation, change, fluidity and non-normative construction of self is huge — whether it’s today, or in the Renaissance, or in the future, or on a whole other world.”