Bending the Landscape: Original Gay and Lesbian Writing: Science Fiction - Softcover

Griffith, Nicola; Pagel, Stephen

3.83

224 ratings by Goodreads

9780879517328: Bending the Landscape: Original Gay and Lesbian Writing: Science Fiction

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879517328 ISBN 13: 9780879517328

Publisher: Overlook Books, 1999

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Edited by world-renowned lesbian speculative fiction author Nicola Griffith and science fiction and fantasy publisher Stephen Pagel, this groundbreaking anthology of all-original science fiction stories brings together some of mainstream's and science fiction's most notable and daring writers - gay and straight - creating worlds where time and place and sexuality are alternative to the empirical environment.
Keith Hartman's "Sex, Guns, and Baptists" presents a disturbing view of how the world could end up if the Christian fundamentalists continue gaining political ground; Ellen Klages takes a 90s dyke back forty years to 1950s San Francisco where she discovers her modern sensibilities are utterly alien to the lesbians of the time; multiple award-winning Southern writer, Jim Grimsley, brings us to another world where aliens are all too human. These stories explore physical, emotional and moral landscapes vastly different from the familiar - where nothing is as it seems.

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Review:

This second volume of Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel's Bending the Landscape anthology series focuses on science fiction stories (the first book covered fantasy, and the third will cover horror). The editors asked contributors to "imagine a different landscape... some milieu that had not happened" and then address the theme of Alien or Other, with the Other being a lesbian or gay man. Since the writers include men and women, gay and straight, the results are fascinating and kaleidoscopic.

One of the best stories in this stellar bunch is Ellen Klages's "Time Gypsy," a "lesbian time-travel-romance-revenge story" about a scientist who discovers love in an unlikely way. L. Timmel Duchamp's "Dance at the Edge" is a heartbreaking story of visibility and strength, and Richard A. Bamberg looks at what it might be like to be the last gay person on Earth in "Love's Last Farewell."

Big name authors like Charles Sheffield, Nancy Kress, Stephen Baxter, and Elizabeth Vonarburg contribute stories as well. The science fiction volume, like all the Bending the Landscape anthologies, addresses universal themes of otherness, love, and loss. Great reading for the 21st century. --Adam Fisher

About the Author:

Nicola Griffith: a native of Yorkshire, England, now a dual US/UK citizen. Author of six novels (Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always, Hild) and a multi-media memoir (And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner notes to a writer's early life). Co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original queer f/sf/h stories. Essayist. Teacher. Blogger. Winner of the Nebula, Tiptree, World Fantasy, and 6 Lambda Literary Awards. (Also a BBC poetry prize, some Gaylactic Spectrum awards, the Premio Italia, the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and others.) Wife of writer Kelley Eskridge (and co-owner of Sterling Editing). Nicola lives in Seattle, where she occasionally emerges from the seventh century to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.

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