Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

There were moments throughout reading this that I just had to stop and smile and also ruefully wish that trans and enby identities were more common in literature because it was so dang refreshing to hear their all their varied voices. There is a great mix of apocalyptic stories here, along with Whitehead's incredible introduction about how Indigenous folx have already lived through the apocalypse many times over. The stories run the spectrum between identity being central to the plot to identity being more incidental. Let's have more of this, yes?

The stories are familiar dystopian futures, some with artificial feeling tacked on hope, but the two-souled and Indigiqueer takes give them a different tone. Interesting, but no, there aren't really any efforts at portraying a future more comfortable for those who have to declare their gender, or anyone really.

This project was an auto-support on Kickstarter for me, coming from a small press I liked (before they exploded), as its second sf anthology of two-spirit Indigenous stories, and edited by Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed (which I continue to be IN LOVE WITH).

Of course, between me supporting this and reading it, the press went down in flames, publication rights thankfully moved to Arsenal Pulp Press, but all of its reviews and ratings will stay with this edition, surely? Which probably puts this book in a weird limbo?

Which is a shame because I really enjoyed this anthology. None of the stories underwhelmed, a handful of the authors I remembered from the first anthology, and most of them I would love to see more writing from. show more I really liked all of these, but I think my favorite stories were "Nameless" by Nazbah Tom (an elder teaches her gift of Traveling to call home their people), "Seed Children" by Mari Kurisato (a wise-cracking "synthetic human" fights to secure a future for synthetic children as Withering Earth fails), and "Story for a Bottle" by Darcie Little Badger (a young woman is kidnapped by an out-of-touch rescue boat run by AI that thinks it is saving her).

I hope people continue to find this little gem despite the trash fire it was born into. show less

I finished [Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction] edited by Joshua Whitehead. Loved it. Only 9 stories yet all quite memorable. Protagonists are a mix of lesbian, gay, trans, nonbinary, and unknown queer-status folks, mostly young, and from Ojibwe, Cree, Anishinaabe, Mi'kmaq, Navajo nations, though some stories did not indicate any specific tribal heritage. One protagonist was white yet focused entirely on her Cree love interest. These dystopian stories include colonies out in space, either spaceships heading out from Earth or long since settled, alternate/virtual reality via cyberspace, colonizing a world via a portal, either increasingly totalitarian government and scarce resources for show more survival or turtled-up communities keeping the chaos outside at bay, cyborgs, time travel through the spirit realm, but also thriving after the collapse of civilization, and keeping oral history and the relics of writing alive. Definitely worth checking out if you want to experience an indigenous spin on common science fiction tropes. show less

A small but intriguing collection of science/speculative fiction short stories, featuring primarily Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer characters. I enjoyed nearly all of the tales, though SF is not normally a genre I'm drawn to. There were a couple of stories I felt could have benefited from being fleshed out a bit more for greater worldbuilding comprehension, but overall a nice compilation which I chose to fulfill the "SFF anthology edited by a person of color" category for this year's Read Harder challenge.

I only read three of the short stories based on friends saying those are the best ones, and I found even those lacking so I dropped the book. Didn't dislike it though, and if I had less other stuff to read I might have read the whole book, so this rating is meant to be neutral.

History Of The New World: At first this resembled various sci-fi movies to me but then there's an interesting moment of a child making a decision which was a compelling moment, but we really needed to spend more time with the characters for that to really work. Or fleshing out one of the worldbuilding ideas could have worked too, I just needed more of something.

How To Survive The Apocalypse For Native Girls: Very standard bigots being bigots story, felt like show more something I've read before.

Eloise: Similarly to History Of The New World, this one felt like other things, namely Black Mirror plus Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It did something a little bit new compared to Black Mirror but didn't really get into the details and implications of it, which would have been okay, but the big problem is that it entirely misses the kind of character stuff that makes Eternal Sunshine work. show less

Amazing collection of short stories. None of the authors were previously known to me except Darcie Little Badger so now I can research and find more of these authors works. Highly recommend.