SciFi/Fantasy Anthology Review: We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020 Edited by C.L. Clark and Charles Payseur

SciFi/Fantasy Anthology Review: We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, edited by CL Clark and Charles Payseur: https://t.co/nHFh4uZtqV

Short Review: 8 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) November 2, 2021

Short Review (cont): A solid anthology of queer Sci-Fi and fantasy short stories from last year from a few well known authors (Charlie Jane Anders, RB Lemberg, John Wiswell) and a few less well known. A collection worthy of your time.

2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) November 2, 2021

We're Here, The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020 is exactly what it sounds like - a collection of short fiction by Neom Hemlock and editor Charles Payseur and guest editor C.L. Clark meant to be some of the best in Queer SciFi and Fantasy from last year.  Gonna be honest, I'm a weird reviewer for this material - I read and enjoy a LOT of Queer SF/F....but am a cis hetero male, so while I can empathize with queer characters and stories, my understanding of what they're going through is entirely from second hand knowledge.  So take it for what it's worth.  

Anyhow this collection is a solid collection, with a few clear winners - even if there isn't anything that's quite "blow you away" good.  It's a solid mix of authors I expect many readers to have heard of (Charlie Jane Anders, L.D. Lewis, John Wiswell, RB Lemberg, etc.) and authors who were new to me, and the mix works pretty well.  It also is a collection of stories that largely lean towards bittersweet or heartbreaking rather than fun and joyous - this doesn't make these stories bad - and more than a few are powerful - but if you're looking for an enjoyable and fun collection, this isn't really going to deliver for you.  

Some more specifics after the jump:

We're Here features sixteen stories, not seemingly arranged in any particular order, and all of short story length, but even there some are significantly shorter than others (or at least feel that way).  With the exception of one story, each story is its own independent creation as far as I can tell and not related to any other world - and the exception, Charlie Jane Anders' "If You Take My Meaning", doesn't require the reader to have read its predecessor (her novel The City in the Middle of the Night) to enjoy it.  

Which is not to say, as you should expect, that common themes aren't featured in a number of the stories.  More than a few of the stories feature queer characters with unaccepting parents or friends and trying to deal with both their love of their homes and the rejection they feel there (Body, Remember; Rat and Finch are Friends; Everquest) while others deal with queer characters trying to figure out themselves (Voyage to Queensthroat, The Wedding After the Bomb, Monsters Never Leave You, To Balance the Weight of Khalem).  As I noted before the jump, a good number of these end in bittersweet or heartbreaking directions, but there are a few more enjoyable stories (Salt and Iron) or even heartwarming in the end (The Wedding After the Bomb).  

To highlight a few of those stories that I thought were particularly good:

Voyage to Queensthroat by Anya Johanna Deniro - a story of a trans woman helping another trans girl, who first appears as part of a group of transphobic boys, escape a bigoted army, when she will eventually turn out to be a just and progressive space emperor.  

The Wedding After the Bomb by Brendan Williams-Child - a story of a protagonist after what seems like a nuclear bomb strike separates them from their friends, two former lovers who are now getting married, who is struggling with their own body and the decision whether or not to get top surgery....and takes a trek through the wild now untamed (due to radiation) wilderness to get to the wedding and finds answers in nature as to who they themselves really are.  

Salt and Iron by Gem Isherwood - a woman who was never appreciated by her ungrateful father, even after she cut off her own human hands as a result of his debts to a lord of faerie and replaced them with iron ones...now down on her luck but refusing to beg she heads to a village cursed by fae to try and cure the curse for the reward money, but finds someone and something there that she never expected - a very enjoyable story that ends on a really nice note.  

There are a whole bunch of others I thought of highlighting, but I'd like this review not to go on too long, and there's also 1-2 short stories (including the very first in the collection) that didn't really work for me at all.  So it's not the strongest collection of stories, but it's still pretty good, and if you're looking for queer fic, this will definitely fit what you're looking for.