cover

Editors: Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett

Format: Paperback

After being mildly disappointed with trans-oriented short story anthologies in the past, I was ready to be mostly disappointed in the stories in Meanwhile, Elsewhere, a 2017 anthology of 25 scifi/fantasy short stories edited by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett. To my (pleasant) surprise, I found the experience of reading the anthology deeply enjoyable; while there were a couple of stories I thought missed the mark, the vast majority of stories in the collection were well-written and genuinely did something fun and/or interesting with trans themes in a novel setting. From a story about a group of queer teens that stumble into a haunted house (Jane Lovechild, “Under the Rainbow”), to a story that involves building a personal spaceship to try and find purpose in life while hounded by the corporation that owns the rights to your influencer-cat (Jeanne Thornton, “Angels are Here to Help You”), Meanwhile, Elsewhere truly captures the trans experience. More directly, the collection does a good job of collecting stories from people at various points in (or not in) their transition, from repressor-egg to exhausted queer elder getting bullied by Twitter teens irl. A couple of stories in the collection take advantage of the genre setting to explore future worlds and non-human beings that experience sex and gender in vastly different ways from contemporary humanity. The collection also noticably disproportionately featured trans women, which I personally didn’t really have an issue with, but is worth noting - it took me until the 6th story, whose narrator is a trans man, to remember that this collection was, in fact, nominally a generically transgender collection (in fact, I think there are a total of three transmasc narrators [of the ones that that recognizably fall within modern notions of gender]).

That said, I found that the weakest part of the collection for me was the overwhelming groundedness, for lack of a better word, of all of the stories. Almost all of the science fiction in the collection explored a world only marginally changed from ours, with (for example) one piece of technology to set the fictional world apart. Similarly, almost all of the fantasy in the setting was firmly grounded in “real life+”, where the characters inhabited a recognizably contemporary Earth with some minor magical realism-esque fantastical elements. Of course, in large part this must have been due to the constraints imposed on the authors by the format (hard to do any sort of serious world building in <20 pages), but I was mildly surprised that not one of the fantastical stories was set in a traditional high fantasy-type world, or that almost all of the science fiction was centred on Earth and human civilization, for example. I do wonder if, in no small part, being an explicitly trans-themed collection had something to do with this; being trans is so intertwined with (contemporary) society and our constructions of sex and gender that it may be hard to imagine drastically different worlds where a meaningfully transgender story can be told.

In lieu of trying to say something about every single story in the collection, I’ll mention a few that I particularly enjoyed:

  • Calvin Gimpelevich, “Rent, Don’t Sell”: This story explores the idea of temporary (and permanent) mind/body-swapping technology, and, in particular, would this truly be a godsend to trans people as it seems to imply?
  • Ayşe Devrim, “No Comment”: A trans woman receives the first ever uterus transplant, only to discover that God immaculately conceived a child with the donor of the uterus before she died in a car accident.
  • Cooper Lee Bombardier - “After the Big One”: After the Big One hits, an older trans man has to corral the survivors of the queer support group meeting he was attending into the forest to survive, including some annoying terminally online queer teenagers.
  • Beckett K. Bauer - “Notes from a Hunter Boy: As Filed by Girtrude the Librarian”: Framed as an anthropological artifact from a society where gender is determined by your occupation / role in society. A young Hunter boy details his experiences going through puberty and the struggles that that can bring.
  • Jane Lovechild, “Under the Rainbow”: An egg, a lesbian, and a gay guy walk into a haunted house, where they are forced to confront their deepest desires.
  • Emma Addams, “Thieves and Lovers”: A trans woman works at a bar where everyone, including the staff, dresses up (using holograms) as characters from classic movies.
  • Brendan Williams-Childs, “Schwaberow, Ohio”: A teenaged trans boy struggles to live with his stepparents in rural Ohio, set against the backdrop of a society with the technology for brain chips that can “cure” “mental deficiencies”.
  • Imogen Binnie, “Gamers”: A trans woman reminices about her strained relationship with her girlfriend through the lens of Ocarina of Time.
  • Tristan Alice Nieto - “Imago”: This was, in my opinion, the highlight of the collection - a trans woman is brought back to life using a novel drug that can revive the dead for a couple of days in an attempt for the police to reconstruct her death. She spends the days desperately trying to recover her memories, especially those of a certain loved one.
  • Ryka Aoki - “The Gift”: A young trans girl comes out to her parents and they love and accept her and then she goes to her high school and everyone is kind and accepting. I found this story to be the most unrealistic.