At the beginning of a year like this, when everyone is finally going to have to take sides, it’s comforting to think that in our future, machines will remember us from stories like these.
This review is a slightly revised version of one which first appeared in BSFA Review 19 (Winter 2022).
Unreal Sex: An Anthology of Queer Erotic Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror edited by So Mayer & Adam Zmith (Cipher Press, 2021)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble
‘I’ve always thought of sexual and textual as basically the same word’, confesses So Mayer in the dialogic introduction to this anthology. Some of the most influential approaches to literary criticism over the last thirty to forty years are rooted in this premise and often revolve around a teased-out analysis that enables a playful, extended deferral of meaning. However, when the texts under consideration are not just metaphorically sexual but directly concerned with sex acts, as the stories collected in this anthology are, that rather short-circuits the process. There is no hiding behind academic or any other readerly protocols when holding Unreal Sex in your hands: you either open it, and thereby open yourself to it, or you don’t. Not that there is really any choice because everyone is at least going to want to have a look at the contents page.
A quick perusal of the titles demonstrates that these stories, like other potential encounters, come in both types: those where you know what you’re getting into at the outset and those where you don’t. The former category includes the first and last stories in this collection. Gracie Beswick’s ‘Swipe Right for Non-Humans’ works beautifully both as an opening story and a recognisable slice of SF. It draws us in with the promise of cute aliens and delightfully introduces us to an NSFW version of Becky Chambers. In contrast, at the other end of the anthology, Alison Rumfitt’s ‘Boy in Maid Outfit Found Dead Handcuffed to Radiator in Girlboss’ Basement 11/08/2024’, has a title that is a mini flash fiction in its own right, and which tells us exactly what is going to happen. The proof of the anthology will be if we follow this story as willingly as Beswick’s and allow ourselves – in the terminology of the above-mentioned literary critics – to be interpellated into the subject position of the first-person narrator by going along with the ride even though we know the inevitable outcome. And, of course, I did.
However, perhaps at this point it would be best if we leave our critic chained to the radiator and forego the traditional platitudes suggesting that writing about sex ‘necessarily defaults to a realist mode, like porn, which is boring because of the flattened affect of exhaustively having to deal with all those specific body parts …’ blah, blah, blah. Realism be fucked! As Adam Zmith points out, ‘both poetry and porn thrive on repetition’ and these stories would make a supercomputer experience! Mayer concurs that they ‘engage the parts and feelings that the Western canon suppresses’. For example, the knowledge that ‘Beauty needs other people. Beauty is the flail of the orc in the throes of orgasm’ – my favourite line from Vivien Holmes’s ‘Circuit Jam’ – implies an entirely different, and oppositional, set of values to those of classical bourgeois individualism.
Among the stories in which the direction of travel isn’t signposted in the title, we find ourselves quickly transported into various regions of the queer fantastic, in which sex becomes a means of reconfiguring our relationship with the universe. These experiences can be supernatural as in Anna Walsh’s story of a retired teacher’s session with a medium, ‘Her Hands Moved Shimmering Across Me’. Likewise, despite her earnest assurance that ‘I was never one of those dykes occupied with crystals and horoscopes’, the protagonist of Rachel Dawson’s ‘The Ghostly Cruiser’ has an unforgettable roadside experience with a ghost while driving home one February after a late performance of Blithe Spirit in Machynlleth. In a nice touch, the atmospheric depiction of snow-covered wilderness is enhanced by the magical suggestion that ‘there are still women’s communes hidden in deepest Wales’. [It transpires from the 2021 census, that quite a few trans and nonbinary folk are also hidden away in deepest Wales]. In contrast, the protagonist of Swithun Cooper’s ‘The Neckinger Line’ is a ghost, or undying person, taking part in a ‘QUEER WALKING TOUR WITH ALL-GENDER IMMERSIVE CRUISING!’ The cutting motif of the story reveals an historical cross section of South London’s former docklands.
‘Lipophilic, malleable solids near ambient temperatures’ by Nicks Walker takes us into the realm of the occult as, lured by the promise of animist rituals, an artist tracks down the collection of the Society of the Eternal Wax to a remote castle on the western edge of the Scottish Highlands. To paraphrase the story’s title, wax, like body parts, melts and moulds into new configurations, dislocating time and rendering eternity somehow tangible. Like the artist’s own works, this story functions as ‘both self-satire and a kind of queer transcendence’. Diriye Osman’s ‘Anima Kingdom’, which takes its title from the fantastical club night for ‘femme black blokes’ which its narrator hosts in Peckham, is a warm, witty and weed-laced tale of two Somali neighbours getting together against a Brexit-era backdrop of gentrification and social change.
The other two stories in the volume, Rien Gray’s ‘Synchronicity’ and ‘Personal Time’ by Jem Nash, both play on classic SF storylines. The latter, despite it’s protestations to be ‘smarter than that’, is an enjoyable variation on the ‘Grandfather Paradox’. It reads like a stripped-down version of Robert Heinlein’s ‘“—All You Zombies—”’ (1959) with the memorable addition of a strap-on and the deceptively simple explanation that ‘the rest was kind of just advanced masturbation’. ‘Synchronicity’ is the tale of Kell, an expendable space scrapper making a hand-to-mouth living from deep space salvage, who passes up on the opportunity to make a fortune in order to travel the stars for free with a ‘hot alien symbiote’.
As Mayer argues in the introduction, ‘everything becomes possible because everything becomes sex’. All of the stories in Unreal Sex – especially the SF ones – remind us that our utopian future is not going to be heteronormative.
Prospective Cultures 