Transcendent 3 : : the Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction

Locations
Call Number: 808.83 Tr
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	808.83 Tr	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"The stories in this year's selection are sometimes grim, sometimes cheerful, sometimes quirky--but always full of emotion. Editor Takc̀s has assembled a wide range of non-cis experiences: from an intergalactic art heist to the everyday life of a trans woman through the lens of horror movies; non-binary parenting in the far future, to a unique method of traveling back to the past. Steampunk, ghosts, even deities, all can be found in these stories that show how transness can relate to and subvert so many themes at the heart of speculative fiction. The introduction also includes a section on year-to-year changes in transgender SFF, and assembled longer-form trans highlights"-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Amazing New Speculative Fiction submitted by Meginator on June 26, 2019, 10:28pm Content warning: Each of the authors in this collection provide content warnings for their stories at the end of the editor’s introduction. I highly recommend consulting these, as some of the content is rather dark.

This collection of short speculative fiction runs the gamut stylistically and thematically, but each story centers trans/nonbinary characters and/or creators, making for a very welcome change of pace and implicitly encouraging (if not forcing) readers to consider additional types of experiences beyond those they directly encounter. Nearly all of the stories feature protagonists who are explicitly not cisgender, and most engage with trans-adjacent themes in one way or another. The best among them map trans experiences onto familiar genre territory, from vampirism (it’s a unique, fresh take on the theme, I promise) to dystopia and even time travel (again, a surprisingly new spin on this well-worn trope). Some authors had me laughing out loud, and others had me in tears, making for a pleasantly varied reading experience and highlighting the importance of seeking out a range of representative voices, as every individual person has a unique perspective on the world regardless of their many intersecting group identities.

Despite encountering a handful of stories that didn’t really resonate with me (expected from any anthology, really), I really enjoyed this collection and hope that it is a sign of increasing representation for trans/nonbinary authors and characters to come.