Crossed Genres has been actively involved in the Outer Alliance from the start. I interviewed owners Bart and Kay back in 2009 for OA Spotlight #8, and they’ve been industriously celebrating, promoting, and soliciting queer content for the duration of Crossed Genres Magazine‘s run.

Earlier this month, they announced that the magazine will be closing. This is sad news for those of us who have loved anticipating each new theme for the past three years, but it’s actually great news, too. The reason Bart and Kay are closing the magazine is so that they’ll have more time to concentrate on anthologies and novels, like Fat Girl in a Strange Land (whose table of contents just went live today!)  and Broken Slate (which was the subject of OA Podcast #9).

With a solid track record of diverse content, we can certainly look forward to excellent things once the magazine closes, but first, Crossed Genres Magazine is having one last major hurrah. Issue 36, which will come out in December, has the theme: Different. Submissions are open until the 31st of this month, and they’re accepting all sorts of different things for this one.

For this issue, we are open to all types of media. Previously we haven’t accepted poetry, or podcasts, or photography; now we are. We’ll even consider longer or shorter pieces of writing. (maximum 10,000 words though!) This will make the final issue – well, different from anything we’ve published before.

And we’re looking for as diverse a body of submissions as possible to choose from! We want submissions with characters of color, quiltbag characters, disabled characters, elderly or child M/C’s. We want underrepresented perspectives!

Wouldn’t it be lovely to see a lot of OA members in that last issue? I think so! If you have something Different for Bart and Kay to look at, do send it in!

OA Members Talk About Coming Out:

Nicola Griffith shared an excerpt from her memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life. This is a sad, alarming, amusing, and sweet glimpse of Nicola’s teen years before she became a well-adjusted and happily out adult.

Cheryl Morgan reminded us that being out is not always simple, easy, or safe with a post examining some of the challenges trans people face.

Catherine Lundoff agrees that being out is a privilege, and asks that we consider supporting organizations which help queer youth like District 202.

New Releases:

Rigor Amortis, the anthology of zombie erotica edited by Jaym Gates and Erika Holt is available at amazon, and contains stories by OA members Kay Holt and Kaolin Fire.

The Little Death of Crossed Genres, edited by Chris Fletcher and Jaym Gates is available in both electronic and print formats through the Crossed Genres website.

The latest issue of Weird Tales contains Natania Barron’s three part poem about “made” women in mythology. “The Wakened Image” appears alongside pictures by Brigid Ashwood.

Calls for Submissions by Queer-friendly Publishers:

Rose Lemberg would love to see poems with LGBTQI voices for Stone Telling. The current submission window is open until the 21st of November, and at present, Rose says there hasn’t been nearly enough queer content in the submissions pile.

Port Iris Zine is accepting submissions for issue #4 until the 5th of November. See their guidelines for more details.

Karen Romanko is looking for Halloween themed stories for her next anthology, Jack-o’-Spec.

That’s all for this time. Join us again next week, and please share any news you might have here in the comments, on the Outer Alliance google group, or via Twitter (mention either @omgjulia, or @outeralliance)

We Got your Back:

Another excellent project to give hope and support to LGBTQI teens popped up this week. The We Got Your Back Project wants your written or video stories, whether you are part of the LGBTQI spectrum, or a supportive ally. Their site is full of great resources for people who are considering suicide, or people who know others in that position. If you submit something to this project, please let us know and we’ll link to your story.

New Releases:

Sandra McDonald’s story, “Seven Sexy Robot Cowboys” is up at Strange Horizons. It’s got queer content and there’s a link to a video of sexy ice-skating cowboys at the bottom in case sexy ice-skating cowboys are your thing.

Salon Futura’s latest issue features a podcast discussion in which Nicola Griffith, Hal Duncan, Cheryl Morgan, and Catherynne M. Valente talk about writing LGBTQ characters.

Lee Benoit’s novel, Moonspun is out as part of Loose Id’s special Coming Out Day 2010 collection.

Angelia Sparrow’s erotic steampunk romance novella, Sky Rat is available from Pink Petal Books.

JoSelle Vanderhooft announced the table of contents for an anthology she’s editing, Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. The book should arrive in January of 2011, but you can pre-order or request review copies now by contacting JoSelle.

Calls for Submissions:

Circlet Press has four anthologies open right now. Like an Iron Fist: Dystopian Erotica and Like a Moonrise (erotic coming of age stories about animal shapeshifters) both close on the 15th of October. Sense and Sensuality (paranormal Jane Austen inspired stories) is open until the 1st of November, and Like a Cunning Plan: Erotic Trickster Tales is open until the 15th of December.

The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Short Fiction Contest is open until the 1st of November. They’re looking for 5,000-7,000 word LGBT stories in all genres. There’s a $15 entry fee, and the top winners will receive $250 for first place and $50 for second and third place as well as publication in n anthology, which will be launched at the literary festival in May of 2011.

That’s all for this time. Join us again next week, and please share any news you might have (or links to your We Got Your Back Project contributions!) here in the comments, on the Outer Alliance google group, or via Twitter (mention either @omgjulia, or @outeralliance).

News & Notes

*This week marks the inaugural issue of Stone Telling, the magazine of boundary-crossing speculative poetry. Rose Lemberg has done a great job of seeking diverse voices for this issue. It’s full of excellent work, including some queer content.

*Tomorrow, the 18th, Connie Wilkins (AKA Sacchi Green) will be reading at the Strange Horizons fundraiser reading event at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ll also be there as a member of the audience. Do say hello if you see me (I’ve got blue hair, so I’m hard to miss). If you’re on the other side of the country, there’s another Strange Horizons reading with some West Coast authors in Portland, Oregon on Sunday the 19th.

*Bookview Cafe has just released a charity anthology to benefit Gulf Coast oil spill relief efforts. Breaking Waves is available as an e-book for $4.99, and includes a story by Sandra McDonald.

Interview with Bill Tucker

Bill Tucker works as a civil servant with law enforcement officials by day, and writes and edits speculative fiction by night. He grew up in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, but now lives in Boston,  Massachusetts. He’s currently seeking stories for an anthology of LGBTQI science fiction and fantasy. Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows is open to submissions until the 21st of November, and will be published by The Library of Fantasy and Science Fiction (an imprint of The Library of the Living Dead).

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OA: You do a lot of work with The Library of the Living Dead. You wrote one of the letters in Letters from the Dead, and you edited another anthology of zombie stories (The Zombist: Undead Western Tales) for them. What is it about zombies that has so much appeal?

BT: I think zombies are scary and appeal to me for many reasons. I like the apocalyptic nature of zombie stories and the human reaction to them. Zombies are a great metaphors on human nature as it is people who become zombies. They are monsters that are not necessarily supernatural and can grow in numbers like a virus.

OA: Submissions for Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows are open until the 21st of November. What kinds of stories are you hoping to receive? Any things you’re tired of, or would prefer not to see?

BT: I am keeping my mind open to everything… Though romance is fine, I am not looking for extreme erotic stories. Even as submissions are coming in I already have an artist named Ken Cain working on the cover and it looks fantastic so far. It is a celebration to LGBTQ science fiction and fantasy.

OA: What made you decide to put together an LGBTQ themed anthology in the first place? Do you have a personal interest in LGBTQ topics?

BT: As a gay man I enjoy and want to read more LGBTQ fiction – especially sci fi, fantasty, and horror fiction. I believe there is a large readership who wants this type of book and that there is a need to not only have the work of LGBTQ writers represented, but to expose society to LBGTQ ficiton in general.

OA: Other than Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows, do you have any projects out now or coming out in the near future?

BT: There are two books that I expect to come out in the near future. The first is Doomology : The Dawning of Disasters, which I co-edited with Wayne Goodchild. The book includes 23 stories about disaster and apocalyptic events from different perspectives. This book is also being released under the Library of Science Fiction and Fantasy and will be a great read for science fiction fans. The second book is Zombiality : A Queer Bent On The Undead. This book includes 28 stories that blend the zombie and glbt genres in a way that has never been done before. Not only do the stories range in their take of GLBT themes, but also on what zombies are. I believe that this book will appeal to a diverse audience and I am very excited about its release.

***

Thanks, Bill! That’s it for this week. If you have any news about publications, events, or anything else related to LGBTQI speculative fiction that you’d like to see featured in the Spotlight, please let me know by leaving a comment, or talking to me on Twitter.

First, congratulations to all the Hugo winners! Lots of awesome stuff up there, including plenty of things by LGBTQI friendly people. Congratulations, too, to all the nominees who didn’t end up taking home a rocket ship of their very own. It was a great crowd this year. Special thanks and congratulations to Cheryl Morgan, who provided live coverage of the awards (alongside podcast superstar, Mur Lafferty), and shared the Best Semiprozine win with Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace of Clarkesworld.

Second, Congratulations to Outer Alliance founder, Natania Barron, for a few things! Aside from being in on the groud floor of the new Geek Mom blog, our fearless leader has a story in the new Dark Futures anthology. She’s in great company as the anthology is full of stories by excellent writers, including two who’ve been interviewed here before: Sara Harvey and Michele Lee.

But that’s not all Natania’s been up to! She’s also agreed to take on editorial responsibilities (along with OA member, Jaym Gates) at Crossed Genres starting next year. Bart Leib and K.T. Holt will still be the publishers, but they’re handing over the editorial reins so that they can focus on putting together anthologies, and managing the Science In My Fiction site, which they started last March. The best part? Science In My Fiction will be publishing short stories each month, which means there’s yet another LGBTQI friendly SF market in the world (here are the submissions guidelines). Hurray!

Next is something not speculative fiction related, but noteworthy all the same: the fine folks at Lambda Literary have posted a call for submissions to a Mothers of Trans Children Project. This will be published by Cleis Press and edited by Rachel Pepper, co-author of The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.

And finally, here’s a thoughtful guest post about bisexuality and gender-bending in paranormal romance by Cecilia Tan on the GLBT Reading blog.

That’s it for this week. If you have any Spotlight-worthy notes, news, links, etc., please let us know in the comments, on the OA google group, or by telling me on Twitter. You can address me directly, or use the Twitter tag #oaspotlight to let me know what’s new. I look forward to hearing from you!

Karen Romanko is a poet and fantasy writer, who loves the sun of Los Angeles and Malibu. She edited the speculative fiction webzine, Raven Electrick for several years, and has edited two previous anthologies, Sporty Spec and Cinema Spec. Her poetry and fiction and have appeared in many places including Strange Horizons and Ideomancer.

CD Covington is a fantasy and science fiction writer who also enjoys tai chi, crochet, and European football (she is particularly interested in the German Bundesliga).  She maintains a twitter feed in addition to her blog. “U* Alexanderplatz (1989)” is her first publication.

Leonard Richardson is a writer and computer programmer. His programming books, RESTful Web Services and The Ruby Cookbook were published by O’Reilly, and his story, “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs” appeared in Strange Horizons. Together with his wife, Sumana Harihareswara, he edited the anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments in 2009.

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OA: Retro Spec is your third anthology (the first two being Sporty Spec and Cinema Spec). How did you get into the themed anthology idea in  the first place, and how do you choose the themes?

KR: I published e-zine Raven Electrick for nine years, but started to feel that something was missing. There was a kind of unity there, but not the feeling of having created a WHOLE that I get from editing and publishing anthologies on a theme, where I work hard to achieve cohesion. That feeling is also reinforced by being able to hold the finished products in my hands, something I couldn’t do with the e-zine. (Yes, I’m aware that I moved backwards in terms of current publishing trends.)

As to the themes, I’ve chosen ones of personal interest to me because I think that editorial enthusiasm is important. At the same time, I’d like to sell some books, so I’ve tried to stick to themes that authors will find inspiring and that readers will want to see treated.

With Retro Spec, I called upon my long-ago history major and my continued interest in retro popular culture. The most interesting aspect of submissions was that the most popular decade was the 30s–I’d expected something more recent.

OA:  As an editor, how do you encourage diversity in submissions to your publications? Are there themes or stereotypes you see too much of? What about things you’d like to see more of?

KR: I like to encourage submissions from women, because they’re underrepresented in the sf/f/h field (and in most professions). That’s one of the reasons why I joined Broad Universe.

In general, my submitters tend to be an enlightened group. (I do request in the guidelines that they not submit anything sexist or racist.) My main complaint is that too many horror writers tend to ignore my caveat about “no gore.”

OA: Are there more Spec anthologies in your future? What else can we look forward to from you?

KR: I hope so. I’ve selected the theme for the next one, but I’m keeping that a secret for the time being.

***

OA: Your story is set in East Berlin just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Why did you choose to write about that particular time and place?

CDC: The last decade of the Cold War influenced me as a child, but its end and the collapse of the Soviet Union were really the first politics I was *aware* of. I started studying German in fall 1989, when I was in 8th grade, then before Thanksgiving break, Germany had changed. Every year on November 9, I watch the video for the Scorpions’ “Winds of Change” with footage from 1989 and 1990. (I feel like I shouldn’t admit that in public, but there you go.)

My first trip to Berlin was for three days in 1997. I remember taking the train across town and being able to discern where the Wall had been. The style of building changed a bit, and there was a lot more construction, but the difference was palpable.

I went back for a week at Christmas 2007. The division line wasn’t nearly as noticeable, but construction hadn’t stopped. (In Berlin, there’s always construction.) This time, I went on a guided tour, and the tour guide was a student of Cold War history, so we got onto that topic fairly often. He asked if I’d heard of Geisterbahnhöfe, ghost stations, and I said I hadn’t. He directed me to more information, which I picked up gladly.

Brief explanation: The city of Berlin wasn’t divided strictly on a north-south line. The Soviet sector had a slight bulge into the western sectors. Transit lines that had been built thirty or forty years (or more, in the case of the street-level trains) before that connected the northern boroughs with the southern now went from West to West through the East. The ruling party in East Germany couldn’t allow trains to stop, because people would be able to escape easily. So they barricaded these dozen stations on three lines, and made the Friedrichstraße station a border crossing point.

I’ve always been drawn to abandoned places and ruins. I knew there was a story in there, but it took me a while (and a lot of false starts) to find it. I wrote about a pair of guards stationed in the sealed-off U8 track at Alexanderplatz, one of whom keeps seeing trains and passengers who shouldn’t be there.

Since Karen bought my story, I’ve spent a month in Berlin, for a refresher German course. I worked on a translation of it, and my teacher really liked it. She’s lived in Berlin since the 80s, and she remembers the guards stationed in subway stations.

OA: As an Outer Alliance member, you support and celebrate LGBTQI themes in speculative fiction, but that doesn’t always mean writing queer lit. Part of being a supportive ally is simply reading, enjoying, and recommending good stories. Can you recommend a favorite or two to us?

CDC: I’m a fan of (fellow OA member) Lynn Flewelling‘s work. The lack of queer SF on my shelves is kind of embarrassing.

OA: What’s next for you? Are you working on anything new and exciting?

CDC: I just submitted a short story to an anthology of military sf starring women, and I’m working on revisions to my novel. The main character of the short is one of the POV characters in the novel.

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OA:  Your story is an alternate history piece about Alan Turing, an important figure in queer history, and in computing history. What led you to write this particular story?

LR: I was vacationing in England in 2009 when the British government issued its apology to Turing. A genuine apology is a kind of alt-history story: there’s this alternate timeline where I didn’t do this, and things are better in that timeline.  There’s also something alt-history-ish that’s stuck with me from The Enigma, Andrew Hodge’s biography of Turing: how arbitrary his death was, how much flowed from one small action. There seems to be a causal chain from Turing reporting a burglary to the police in 1952, to his outing, his chemical castration, and his suicide in 1954. It’s difficult to imagine the British government of 1952 behaving differently than it did, but it’s not difficult to imagine Turing deciding not to report that burglary.

That’s where I got the jumping-off point. I wanted to explore how the world might have been different if Alan Turing had lived out a normal human lifespan, but also what the effect on him might have been of keeping that secret, keeping it even after it was okay to talk about the wartime secrets, and then wondering when it would be okay to give that last secret up.

OA: As an editor of an anthology yourself, how did you encourage diversity in the submissions you received? Is there anything you learned during the process of reading for Thoughtcrime Experiments that would change the way you solicited submissions if you were to do it again?

LR: I can’t really improve on what Sumana said in your interview of her. For detailed analysis I’d point people to that interview or her blog post on the topic. I’ll second her statement that we didn’t do as much as we could have to recruit nonwhite and queer authors by announcing the anthology in relevant places.

OA: Do you think you will ever put together another anthology? Have you got anything other exciting projects on the horizon?

LR: We don’t have any plans for another anthology, partly because our lives are way too hectic right now. But I think we could do another one, testing some other hypothesis about the market. Like “send in your latest ready-to-submit story” or something.

***

Thanks, Karen, CD, and Leonard! Retro Spec is available now through Barnes & Noble and Amazon. There will be an official Retro Spec launch party at the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffee House in La Canada, California on the 25th of Spetember, and CD Covington will be reading from her Retro Spec story next weekend at Dragon*Con.

Rose grew up with a jumble of native and semi native languages including Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She began writing poetry and fiction in English as an adult after pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in many places including Abyss & Apex (which published last year’s Rhysling nominated “Odysseus on the War Train”) and Goblin Fruit (which published this year’s Rhysling nominated “Godfather Death”), and her short fiction has appeared in G.U.D., Strange Horizons, and Fantasy Magazine.

Stone Telling is Rose’s newest project, an online magazine devoted to literary speculative poetry. The title is the name of a character from a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the first issue will feature a previously unpublished poem by Le Guin. The first reading period opened on the 14th of June, and will close on the 14th of August.

Rose is on LiveJournal and Twitter, and also maintains a Stone Telling LiveJournal community. She is currently a professor at a large research University in the Midwest.

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OA: Stone Telling is open for submissions until the 14th of August. What sorts of poems are you hoping to receive?

RL: I am looking for literary speculative poems with an emotional core. I’d like to receive poems that blow my mind, bend my brain, make me fly, make me cry, and hopefully don’t make me throw up or throw the laptop against the wall. As you can see from the guidelines, I am pretty open genre-wise, style-wise and length-wise. I am a very open-minded reader, but also a very picky one.

Ideally I’d like to regularly showcase poetry that illuminates the experience of being Other, or encountering Others. Speculative poetry, I feel, is a perfect vehicle to deal with othering; real life also offers us plenty of othering experiences, some incredibly painful and some less so. I want to read poems that consider what it means to feel alienated or lonely or different or changing or belonging to a community that’s different from other communities; I want to read about what it means to grow up in a different place, to speak a different language, to think about the world in different colors. However, I am not going to reject poems simply because they do not deal with the issues I list. I will consider all poetry I receive.

OA: Are you actively interested in poetry with LGBTQI themes?

RL: Yes, I very much hope to receive poetry with LGBTQI themes. Please send them to me!

There are some very fine poets already in the genre who are active in the LGBTQI community, whether or not they choose to explore LGBTQI issues in their work. And you don’t have to be a member of the LGBTQI community in order to write poems that explore these themes. One of my first published poems, “Two Births of a Bird Shaman” (in Mythic Delirium 19) dealt with gender change.

OA: What other themes interest you?

RL: Simply put, I am most interested in speculative poems that explore diversity. To give one example not at random, I would very much like to publish poetry that deals with race, and I’d like to see poetry by people of color (whether or not they are writing about race) in my magazine and elsewhere. I am also very much into disability issues.

OA: Why did you decide to start a poetry magazine in the first place?

RL: I first got this idea last year, when Lone Star Stories folded. Journal of Mythic Arts, another beloved market, folded in 2008. I sorely missed both venues, and asked myself what I’d do if I had a chance to launch my own zine. The answer was clear – I would consider a broad range of speculative (and occasionally, outstanding non-speculative) poems, and I would work hard to promote diversity in speculative poetry. But 2009 was such a disastrous year for me, I had to shelve the idea for a better time – and now I feel that the time has come. I was immensely encouraged by the positive responses from the community, and I feel that together we can create something worthwhile.

OA: Like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, your first language was not English. Do you think this makes you more mindful of the words you choose when you write in English? Does it influence your writing in other ways?

RL: Absolutely. The multilingual experience is at once very enriching, and very humbling. As a poet, I have been shaped by the multilingual poetry I read, and I learned some of my languages through poetry. The humbling part comes from never quite knowing the right words – so have to I use wrong words, odd words, triangular words, words that smell like linden flowers, words that smell like tar. I can make embarrassing mistakes, so I have to check every word, and that makes me mindful. My imagery and rhythms and associations are an amalgamation of everything I’ve experienced so far, and that experience is foreign everywhere. It’s not a very comfortable personal place, but it is also a place of strength.

OA: “Godfather Death” is a Rhysling nominee in the long form category this year. What drew you to revisit that fairy tale in modern poetry?

RL: That’s quite a story. In December 2008, I banded with Deirdre S. Moen and Josh Moore to run a charity fundraiser, HelpVera, in order to help the speculative author and publisher Vera Nazarian save her home from foreclosure. The fundraiser was nothing short of amazing – there was such an unforgettable outpouring of love and community spirit. As a part of the fundraiser we ran a charity auction, and I auctioned a custom poem there, which was bought by one of my favorite speculative poets, JoSelle Vanderhooft. When I received JoSelle’s prompt, “Godfather Death”, I had a sinking feeling, since I had never before (or since!) written a poem about death. But I knew this was an important theme for JoSelle, so I dutifully sat down to reread the Brothers’ Grimm fairytale. And then the poem just bled itself from my fingers. I had nothing to do with it.

OA: On the Stone Telling website, you list three examples of literary speculative poetry: “The Seven Devils of Central California” by Catherynne Valente, “The Bone Harp Sings Nine Moods” by Shweta Narayan, and “Hungry: Some Ghost Stories” by Samantha Henderson. Who are some of your other favorite poets?

RL: Non-speculative or speculative? I read a lot of poetry and I read poetry in many languages. Some of my favorite poets composed epic poetry, and are anonymous. I love Old Norse and early Icelandic poetry, and my favorite poet in that language is Egill Skallagrímsson, who lived in 10th century Iceland. As an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time translating various Taliesin poems from Welsh for my own entertainment, and I love those. Russian poetry is amazing. I grew up reading Anna Akhmatova and Valeriy Briusov and Mikhail Lomonosov, who was born a poor peasant and became a 18-century polymath – a scientist and a poet and an artist and a linguist, among other things. My favorite Russian poet is Vladimir Mayakovsky. In English… there are too many to list. I love Ted Hughes and Winfred Owen and Elizabeth Bishop. Speculative poets, in addition to those already mentioned? Ursula Le Guin has been an inspiration for everything I do since my early teens, when I first read a Le Guin novel. It was Rocannon’s World and it changed my world. And Ursula Le Guin is a wonderful poet. Jane Yolen, I think that’s a given. And I was just telling a friend how much I love Delia Sherman’s “Snow White to the Prince”, a poem that is true and heartbreaking. And last but not least, Amal El-Mohtar.

***

Thanks, Rose! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Rose’s work, and consider submitting something to Stone Telling.

Djibril has always assumed that explorations of sexual difference were key to science fiction, so The Future Fire has welcomed queer fiction since it began in 2004. The most recent issue has a feminist theme, and Djibril is currently reading for a queer themed issue, which should be out soon. In addition to the magazine, The Future Fire also has a reviews blog, which focuses on reviews for small press publications.

Djibril has lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic, and is currently based in London, UK. He is a formally trained historian with a collection of animal skulls. He maintains a Twitter feed as @thefuturefire.

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OA: The Future Fire is putting together a queer themed issue right now. Can you tell us more about that? Is it already full, or are you still looking for new pieces? Any stories you’ve accepted that you’re particularly excited about?

DA: The “Queer-themed” issue of TFF is basically a spin-off from the Feminist Science Fiction themed issue that we advertised about a year ago and published in January, which was also our 5th anniversary issue (though I forgot to make a fuss about that). We buy stories depending on how excellent each story is individually, and we don’t have any quotas or maximums, so we ended up buying too many stories that fit the “sex, gender, sexuality and gender identity” theme that we’d specified–more than we would normally include in a single issue, anyway. So we decided to divide them into two categories: the first, sex and gender and women’s issues generally; and the second, focussing on sexuality and gender identity, will be the “queer issue”. We’re still very much open to submissions on this theme, up to about the end of the month to get into this issue; but as we say, there will never come a time when queer stories are unwelcome in TFF.

Beyond that I can’t say very much more about what we’re looking for. TFF publishes speculative fiction with a focus on social and political themes (think 1984, Island, Fahrenheit 451, anything by Le Guin, Dick…), and would like to see more cyberpunk than we do. We have always valued the cosmopolitan, stories that address diversity and tolerance, stories by underrepresented groups (including non-Anglo scifi). This issue will be no different, except that it will further narrow that focus to stories that address issues of sexuality and gender identity, which have always been a key part of science fiction, I think.

In the stories we’ve taken on already, there are two main approaches: either there is a queer protagonist whose difference and difficulties reflect other differences or forms of alienness/alienation in the same or other characters; or queer protagonists only represent the queer struggle against very real repression in a dystopian, slightly exaggerated world. These approaches are both fine, of course; maybe there are others.

OA: What made you decide to start The Future Fire, and what are some of the upsides and downsides to running an online magazine?

DA: The Future Fire was set up kind of naively by a small group of SF fans some years ago–of the five of us there were two left within a year, and we’re still the core of the team. I’m not sure we really had any idea why we were doing this, or what we were letting ourselves in for; between us we had no experience of publishing either traditional or digital. I’d often imagined publishing a small print ‘zine, but I guess it was only ever going to happen when we had the possibility of doing it online. We were most inspired by the trippy paranoia of Philip K. Dick and the postmodern hoaxes of Jorge Luis Borges–imagined writing fake book reviews and event reports and all that sort of thing. It was only after a couple of years that we realized that what we really wanted was to focus on the social and political aspects of speculative fiction, things that we care about, things that can (or should) change the world.

As for the advantages of running an online magazine, the most obvious is just that it’s much less trouble–marketing and distributing a print magazine would be a *lot* of work (less so now I suppose that we could use POD to actually print and distribute, but still having to worry about marketing to make the magazine profitable would still be prohibitive for a volunteer-run venture). The down-side is the flip-side of that coin: because TFF is free, and we’re not interested in running crappy ads, it makes no money. The donations we receive cover less than 10% of our costs, and the rest comes out of our pockets. For a small ‘zine like this that’s fine, I think it’s worth it. The time is actually a much bigger cost than the money.

The correct answer to “what are the upsides of running an online magazine” ought to be that it removes certain restrictions of space and medium, and potentially attracts a much wider audience. If we buy a story that is 20k words long rather than the 4-6k average, we don’t have to worry about how that’s going to affect the page count of the next issue. (We do worry about how long a reader is willing to stare at a screen hitting page-down over and over, so we serialize longer pieces.) We ought to be able to say that we can publish stories with a visual element, animation, audio, interactive features, hypertext fiction, stuff that’s impossible on paper. That is true, but we’ve yet to be offered anything like that. I’d love to see it, but I don’t know what it would look like.

OA: The Future Fire holds mini-cons in the summer in London. What are they like,  and who may attend?

DA: We started out holding joint mini-conventions with Whispers of Wickedness, a British small press magazine of dark and atmospheric fiction, to which typically a dozen people would come, read or perform some of their work, and generally chat about speculative fiction on a Saturday afternoon in a pub in London or Swindon. It’s a lot of fun. Since WoW stopped publishing a year or so ago, we’ve carried on with the TFFcon. Anyone and everyone is welcome. We often see a sample of TFF authors, artists, reviewers and editors, along with friends, fans and assorted randomers. Other magazines or small presses are sometimes represented, or sometimes just send promotional materials or freebies (especially if they’re not based in the UK). For the last couple of years we’ve tried to have a story competition, with entries voted for on the day, and prizes donated by various publishers present.

We don’t have a date for the 2010 TFFcon yet, but it will be announced on our website and in all the usual places. Would love to see some Outer Alliance representation there this year.

OA: How did you come to have a collection of animal skulls, and do you have any favorite, or unusual ones?

DA: I’m not sure any of them are particularly unusual, but perhaps the most random is a stag skull set on a shield, which used to adorn the wall of a zoologist at a Scottish university, and which mysteriously turned up at my door encased in cardboard and polystyrene. I’d like to be able to say that having samples of animals skulls are essential to my archaeological research, but I’m very much an armchair historian, not a fieldworker. I can’t remember the first skull I acquired, but the barn rat is one of my favourites. The jawbone of a shark is also pretty impressive–it’s the only part of the head that isn’t cartilage, so technically I guess it is a skull. For the record, the human skull is a replica, and the goat was not sacrificed.

OA: You say that explorations of sexual difference are the key to science  fiction. Do you have any recommendations on this theme?

DA: I cut my teeth on writers like Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Michael Moorcock, so I guess I’ve always assumed that a genre like science fiction that explores difference, alienness, xenophobia and other prejudices, and social norms different from ours would be full of sexualities and gender identities that push the boundaries as well. Now that I think about it, I’ve been surprised by how much speculative fiction adheres to modern, western notions of heteronormativity and cisgender. Are we really that conservative a genre?

Beyond the above, and equally obvious authors like Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree Jr., Poppy Z. Brite, Joanna Russ, I suspect that your readers can suggest me more good queer science fiction than I can them.

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Thanks, Djibril! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out The Future Fire.