There Was and There Was Not: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

To be queer is to be strange, fantastic, and outside the normative box. Considering how easily those words apply to speculative fiction, it’s not surprising that some writers of SFF have engaged in a great deal of play with the concepts of gender, identity and sexuality. But how far back could we say the tradition of speculative fiction goes?

The best place to begin might be with individual experience. Everyone has a different story about the first book they read with a queer character who wasn’t just the villain or the guy who died in the first chapter. The purpose of Queering SFF by Lee Mandelo is to highlight those books and to share those experiences with each other.