Queer Planet is here!

Hi all,

It's July, and this year that means a super summer special from us: a bumper-sized month focusing on queer SF by queer creators from around the world. It's all introduced by Brit Mandelo, who rejoined us to help guest-edit this month:

These stories, four in total, come from across the globe (Sri Lanka to Finland to America)—and also span genres from science fiction to portal fantasy. There are queer people of various genders; there are androids and birds and mothers; there is religion, politics, resistance. Relationships and families are varied as well. While it would have been excellent to have five times the budget and fives times the stories, I'm pleased with the four that we've selected for your perusal and proud of the work they do, separately and in concert, and alongside the poets, critics, essayists, and artists also included in this special.

And the first week is almost a special within a special, since not only do we have Vajra Chandrasekera's latest column, we also have his story "Sweet Marrow":

At first, the murder is universally mistaken for a run-of-the-mill political assassination. Ulna, her laptop overheating on her bare thighs and the screen's brightness turned up so high that it lights up the bedroom like the sun (which Sweet Marrow long ago gave up complaining about, opting instead to put a pillow over her head and snore herself to sleep), writes her daily report informing on the conversations she'd participated in or overheard that day and this is the definitive trend. She gossiped with dozens of people in the hours of excitement and anxiety after the news broke—a flurry of messaging on the faux-encrypted chat networks; a phone call from her mother, crypted only in the ancient tides and pressures of the matriline; interstitial conversations with neighbours, taxi drivers, people standing in line at the supermarket while she was buying eggs and that weird shampoo that Marrow likes; falsely casual conversations building trust with the witnesses and suspects she's interviewing (often without them knowing they were being interviewed) for her regular caseload; even the morning call with her handler Hamat (it's still odd, after all these years, to inform on her handler in a report that she'll be submitting to her handler, but this is long-established tradition). All day long, everyone discusses the murder as if its strategic, structural nature is a given.

What else is there? We have a second column, by Penny Stirling; we have poems by Marina Berlin and Darren Lipman; we have an interview with artist Alex D. Araiza, whose work provides this week's cover; and of course we have reviews, starting with K. Tait Jarboe on Memory by Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría.

So dive in! It's been a pleasure to produce, and it's a pleasure to present to you now.

-- Niall