Tenea D. Johnson
There’s nothing like an anthology. Novels are fantastic, book series engrossing, novellas a special kind of magic, but anthologies are somethin’ else. Between two covers you can discover a dozen new authors, as well as just as many magazines, presses, and websites you never knew existed and soon find you can’t live without. Anthologies are the internet before the internet, but better. They are curated abundance collected and packaged for your pleasure.
I’ve always gravitated to them—from Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and Does Your Mama Know? to The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, and the problematic but informative Norton Anthologies of Everything. These were the neighborhoods I frequented as a child, the worlds I visited, the places that I loved, even when they didn’t love me back. Rarely though could I find where these groupings met. When I did, they became my favorites: the loveliest edges and corners vibrant with possibility, nuance, and depth.
And here we have one, often longed for and seldom found: lesbian-themed speculative fiction, the best we read that was published in 2012. To be sure, much wonderful work came out last year, but these are the short stories and novelettes we simply could not do without: the fairy tales too long in coming, the re-imagined myths both humorous and dark, the return of a classic vampire and the revenge of a culture, the stories of women back from the dead and into the light, bodies taken and surrendered, the dystopic futures and future returns to the agrarian past that satisfied that deep desire—when only words will do and, for a time, we get to crawl inside their world.
One of the most compelling aspects of speculative fiction is its ability to fulfill otherwise unattainable desires—whether one wants to create a magical society or travel through time, visit an alien civilization or remake history. It also satisfies more mundane reader desires, the ones it would not seem so hard to fulfill. To call a few of these out, I’ll willingly step on this mine: the explosion of “should”:
It should not be easier to find a zombie apocalypse than it is to find a lesbian protagonist in the aisles of your local bookstore. Falling for werewolves and shape shifters should not be more accepted than a transgendered love affair; marginalized people really will still exist in the future; more folks should know that, and more so create like they know it. Someone then must step into the gap, or to be more accurate the gaping holes in the collective visions of our possibilities as human beings. In these pages, someone has. Seventeen someones to be exact.
And here’s one more foray into the embattled Land of Ought: we should blow up the notion of a single literary canon once and for all, and revel in the multiplicity. After all, if a literary canon is central and representative, who does it represent? Where is the center?
Perhaps a best-of anthology can be a political act—à la “I’ll show you my literary canon if you show me yours” As Joanna Russ tells us in How to Suppress Women’s Writing, “there is a false center to ‘literature.’ ”
And this is where it gets complicated, that is to say, interesting, in the space where these stories exist, even where this anthology hopes to: in the center of the ever-expanding edges.
Perhaps an anthology can be such an act when the authors have given such great work, such compelling, beautiful, powerful stories. If so, let this third in the Heiresses of Russ series burn brightly. Let it be both a comfort and a message.
Tenea D. Johnson
Near the Gulf of Mexico
Spring 2013
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