Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Queer and QBIPOC MCs
Published on: 27th May 2025
ISBN: 1645660877
Goodreads
Revolutionary and visionary, these twenty-two speculative stories edited by Lambda, Nebula and Hugo finalist Lee Mandelo explore the vast potentialities of our queer and trans futures.
From self-styled knights fighting in dystopian city streets to conservationists finding love in the Appalachian forests; from social media posts about domestic “bliss” in a lottery-based, state-housing skyscraper to herding feral cats off of one’s scientific equipment; from street drugs that create doppelgangers to dance-club cruising at the edge of the galaxy— Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity interrogates the farthest borders of the sci-fi landscape to imagine how queer life will look centuries in the future—or ten years from now.
Filled with brutal honesty, raw emotions, sexual escapades, and delightful whimsy, Amplitudes speaks to the longstanding tradition of queer fiction as protest. This essential collection serves as an evolving map of our celebrations, anxieties, wishes, pitfalls, and—most of all—our rallying cry that we're here, we're queer—and the future is ours!
Inventive, moving, and hopeful, this fresh anthology contains never before published stories by some of our most prominent and emerging LGBTQIA+ writers,
Esther Alter • Bendi Barrett • Ta-wei Chi, trans. Ariel Chu • Colin Dean • Maya Deane • Dominique Dickey • Katharine Duckett • Meg Elison • Paul Evanby • Aysha U. Farah • Sarah Gailey • Ash Huang • Margaret Killjoy • Wen-yi Lee • Ewen Ma • Jamie McGhee • Sam J. Miller • Aiki Mira, trans. CD Covington • Sunny Moraine • Nat X. Ray • Neon Yang • Ramez Yoakeim
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
I am so angry I could fucking SPIT, and also I feel like I’ve fallen through the looking glass because somehow, everyone else seems to approve of this collection. DID WE READ THE SAME BOOK, PEOPLE?
About half of these stories are objectively good. But almost none of them MEET THE FUCKING BRIEF.
This is, supposedly, a collection of ‘stories of queer and trans futurity’. I took that to mean we’d be seeing what-if futures that were at minimum queernorm, but were hopefully actively queered in some way. Maybe they’d mess with gender, or sexuality, or family structures, or romantic set-ups (I was expecting so much more polyamory, you cowards). But whatever we got, I thought queer and trans futurity inherently, definitionally, meant we would not be dealing with queerphobia.
That’s not what this is.
(Also, why is it queer and trans? Queer includes trans. Trans is queer. I hate how many times I had to write ‘queer and trans people’ in this review, like those are two separate categories. Trans people are queer! The whole point of queer as a noun is that it’s inclusive OF EVERYBODY. And if the intent was ‘we want to specifically spotlight that we feature trans stories!’ then you failed, because you don’t, there’s very few trans/nonbinary characters and virtually no gender fuckery whatsoever. FAIL.)
But Sia! you say. You just misunderstood! That’s not what it meant. That was never the theme. It was just – queer and trans people in the future. No promises about the future being good for queer and trans people.
Firstly, it says RIGHT THERE ON THE COVER, ’22 tales about joy and survival’. (:added later: that tagline was removed from the final cover. I WONDER WHY?) And when I reread the introduction, twice, to see if I’d hallucinated this assumption of mine–
As I’m writing this introduction we find ourselves in a frightening reactionary political moment both in the USA, where I live, and across the globe. Whether it’s the growing momentum of right-wing violence, which always oppressively targets gender and sexuality, or the resurgent popularity of “radical” (conservative, essentialist) feminisms destabilizing years of labor by queer, trans, and women of color feminists to create a vision for shared liberation . . . we’re stuck in a rough timeline right now. But I need to believe, in a teeth-grit furious sort of way, that as artists and scholars and activists and everyday queers we have futures to strive towards. I need to believe that we’ll create better potential futures for those who come after us, exactly how others did before us. Stories, I think, help people survive while carrying all our pleasure, and joy, and rage, and grief, and love along with us. Envisioning other and better potentialities, speculating on how our alternate futures might arrive while seeing other peoples’ differing imaginaries alongside our own, might help us get closer to the horizon.
And, hopefully, we get there together.
—Lee Mandelo
April 2024
This is the conclusion of the introduction. Bolding mine. So yeah, this was supposed to be an optimistic collection.
So: fuck you, Mandelo. Fuck you, Kensington Press. Fuck you, too many authors. This is a fucking trainwreck. It is certainly not a collection of queer/trans-hopeful futures. It’s fucking miserable, and frankly, this is not what I want to read EVER, never mind what I want to read while the world is like THIS.
Let’s go through the stories actually worth reading real quick.
The Greats
The Republic of Ecstatic Consent by Sam J Miller. A glimpse at a queer commune/squat trying to fight for a better future; optimistic tone, despite the setting being a disaster.
The Orgasm Doula by Colin Dean. MC is literally a doula for orgasms, like a hands-on sex therapist – in a world where most people believe everyone has only a set number of orgasms, and when you run out, you’re done forever.
The Shabbos Bride by Esther Alter. A Jewish trans woman gets the body that fits her via a most excellent Shabbos. Wider setting/state of the world unmentioned.
MoonWife by Sarah Gailey. A medium brings back a ghost via the bits of personality left all over her social media. Wider setting/state of the world unmentioned.
They Will Give Us a Home by Wen-yi Lee. A lesbian married to a gay man in a queerphobic dystopia has to play happy heterosexuals to keep her influencer lifestyle.
There Used to Be Peace by Margaret Killjoy. A lesbian joins an order of modern knights to fight back against the rise of fascism in the US.
Six Days by Bendi Barrett. Soft and sweet, a glimpse of a utopic commune. Wider setting/state of the world not directly mentioned.
The They Whom We Remember by Sunny Moraine. In a(n implied utopic) far future where everything about our bodies is under our control, a historian experiments with having a body that can’t be changed.
When the Devil Comes From Babylon by Maya Deane. Post climate collapse, a trans girl is in a fundamentalist commune where she’s supposed to take a cyanide pill rather than accept the temptation of ‘the Devil’ to join the queer utopia Babylon.
A Step Into Emptiness by Aiki Mira, translated by CD Covington. Far-future look at what new neurodivergences might intersect with queerness once humanity starts editing itself. Tragic setting.
Bang Bang by Meg Elison. Far-future second-person short of an elder leading a newbie to a secret queer club – which is constantly getting shot up and bombed.
Fuckers, THESE ARE THE GOOD ONES. Fucking TWO OF THEM are optimistic – Six Days and The They Whom We Remember. Four if we include Shabbos Bride and MoonWife, which don’t tell us what the wider world is like in their time. Six if we accept When the Devil Comes to Babylon‘s happy ending, even if the story itself is miserable, and take The Republic of Ecstatic Consent as a hopeful things-are-getting-better-even-if-they’re-bad-right-now.
SIX. Six are good and meet the brief (maybe). Out of a total twenty-two stories.
(No, Orgasm Doula doesn’t count, that’s a fucked-up take for a society to have on sexuality and also that ending.)
Everything Else
And let’s quickly run over the rest of the collection – these are bad stories. Fettle & Sunder? No fucking plot, random tragedy that fucked me up but had no impact on the story, and a platitude ending. Copper Boys? Is a will-they-won’t-they about matching on gods damned TINDER – and ends with the MC deleting the app rather than finding out if they match! A Few Degrees? Bitter, awful, honestly abusive MC resenting her gf for being a good person and a success in her field. The Garden of Collective Memory? Cool premise (a database of donated/stolen memories) that’s ignored in favour of the MC deciding to cheat on her wife. Circular Universe is an EXCERPT of a NOVEL that is a SEQUEL to ANOTHER NOVEL – what the fuck is this doing here?!
I could go on – I promise, the ones I haven’t mentioned are bad too – but you get the picture, yeah?
I’d also like to point out that Bang Bang IS THE CLOSING STORY OF THE COLLECTION. Let me say it again: the story where we’re so far in the future that you can travel across the solar system and back in a night? Where, that far in the future, there is ONE queer club that is constantly getting shot up and bombed? IS HOW
WE CLOSE
THE FUCKING
COLLECTION.
Sorry, what? The closing story is arguably the most important in a mixed-author collection. It literally sets the mood/tone for the reader as they finish the book – I don’t know how many times a mediocre collection has been given a glow in my memory because the last story was epic.
So why would you close a collection allegedly featuring HOPEFUL QUEER FUTURES with THAT?
Yeah, I’m angry. I’m fucking furious. I’m annoyed so many of these stories were crap – I didn’t DNF because you can’t, can you, when the next story will be from another author? When you’d be punishing an author or authors you haven’t read because of the ones you did? – but I’m genuinely mad this was declared an optimistic collection when it’s anything but. I’m mad Mandelo apparently can’t keep to his own brief, and didn’t change the official theme after falling in love with the stories he selected (what I assume happened). I’m mad so many authors read the call for stories and sent in what they did! I’m mad so many other reviewers don’t care or didn’t notice that this is a lot of boredom mixed in with a lot of kicking us while we’re down.
What the fuck? What the actual fuck?
Just to add insult to injury – ‘amplitudes’, in physics, means ‘the maximum extent of a vibration or oscillation, measured from the position of equilibrium.’ Which is presumably meant to mean these futures are as far from the now as we can get?
a) they are, as a whole, not NEARLY imaginative for that, almost none of them really tried to come up with unusual or even thought-provoking futures,
and
b) if you’re saying this is the best we can hope for re progress from modern queer/transphobia, then, again, FUCK YOU.
I hate this. The stories I listed in The Greats are great, but most of them don’t belong in a hopeful collection – and the rest are terrible.
This is the best we can have? These are the HOPEFUL futures? This is as good as it can get? FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU. I refuse. I REFUSE. I reject your pathetic, depressing, pitiful futures. We can have so much more than this. Humanity can do better, queer-and-trans people deserve better AND WILL HAVE better. Fuck you for holding this up as something to aspire to, something to hope for, like that’s all we can have, this is the best it’ll ever be. FUCK YOU.
I don’t read short story collections from multiple authors any more. Because it’s always a mixed bag, right? But I took a gamble on this one because damn it, I love sci fi, I love worldbuilding, and I love mixing queerness and transness into sci fi and worldbuilding – and that’s what I thought this collection was. The introduction assured me that IS what this was supposed to be.
Well, it fucking lied.
If you want optimistic queer collections, I recommend Scheherazade’s Façade, edited by Michael M Jones, and Kaleidoscope, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios. (The latter isn’t exclusively queer, it features many different types of diverse MCs.) I remember both having few-to-no duds, though it’s been A Minute since I read either.
But skip this fucking mess.
“Stories, I think, help people survive while carrying all our pleasure, and joy, and rage, and grief, and love along with us. Envisioning other and better potentialities, speculating on how our alternate futures might arrive while seeing other peoples’ differing imaginaries alongside our own, might help us get closer to the horizon.”
I haven’t had the chance to read this collection but I can’t say I’m surprised. Dark stories are very much in keeping with what Mandelo likes to write and how he expresses hope and healing. For him, those things grow from the ability to examine personal truth, particularly rage. I’d call The Woods All Black a very hopeful story, but some folks do get torn apart and the main characters suffer terribly at the hands of the people they eventually eviscerate. I think I would describe his stories as being about survival and the moment a character goes from just surviving to being powerful enough to overcome the adversity and attain freedom, usually by forging a new relationship with another character. He’s also written a fair amount of interesting literary criticism, and one of the topics he’s addressed is the need to allow trans writers to express their rage and grief however they need to. Having the freedom to speak your truth is an inherently hopeful thing, especially when your truth is gross, angry, or weirdly horny.
Hope is such a fascinating concept because it means such different things to folks. Lord of the Rings is the archetype of hopeful conservative fantasy but the final journey of Sam and Frodo is grim. Destroying the ring also destroys the foundation of the world the Fellowship set out to save, the new world just fundamentally has a lot less in it as magic passes from the realm. I kind of wonder if what you ran into was different ways people find hope. What you wanted was a guide (and I don’t blame you I want one too) that would help you see your way to something happier and healthier, and you ran up against the sort of writer who finds hope in screaming “f*ck you!” at the hateful universe. I’m reminded of Charlie Jane Anders’s “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue”, which she wrote to overcome her fear of the first Trump administration. The idea I took from that story was “No matter how much you tear me apart you can’t erase the truth of who I was.” Which is a hopeful message, even if it’s bleak that it’s come to that.
Not to write you an essay this subject has just been weighing on my mind these past few days. I’ve been talking to friends who are really struggling with life and also struggling to find any comfort in the usual diversions. Everything feels so inane and unrelated to reality. Even I’m struggling a bit. I still think books are entertaining, but it’s frustrating to feel like none of the stories we tell have anything to do with life, like the only thing I can get out a story right now is temporary distraction. I can tell you what I don’t have much patience for right now is “cozy” though I understand if other people need that.
Do you think all your grief could have been avoided if the book had come with content warnings? I had to slap a bunch of content warnings on the last thing I wrote specifically because upon reread I realized it had the potential to upset people who weren’t in the same headspace I was. I know I’m really struggling to imagine worlds that are bigger than my immediate personal experience which makes my writing kind of grim even when I’m say trying to be funny or sentimental. I wish I could write the sort of story you were craving; it would probably do me a lot of good.
If you decide to read this collection, I’d love to discuss it with you, because I’m genuinely curious about what you’d think of it.
But I wasn’t expecting cosy stories, or a guide. I was *hoping* for stories like Everything For Everyone, which, yes, IS kind of a guide, but what I wanted was this look at a future that is *so different* from anything I could have imagined. EFE is really bleak at times, but it’s still about building a more inclusive future. I don’t think I’d have objected if Amplitudes featured queernorm dystopias – I mean, I wouldn’t want EVERY story to be that, but it would have fit the brief. Queernorm doesn’t mean something ELSE in your setting isn’t messed up.
I’m primarily mad about this collection because it’s bad, and that offends me. I don’t think this is about different definitions/takes on hope (although I think I understand what you’re saying about that) because none of these stories read as the ‘fuck you!’ kind of hopeful to me, and because most of the stories are objectively bad; no plot, no point, platitude endings. And finally, because almost none of them actually engaged with the idea of ‘what might the future look like?’ I didn’t want a guide, I wanted queernorm and thought-provoking, experimental. How weird can you make the future, how far can you push it, can you challenge the preconceptions I don’t realise I have? And this collection is just lazy in its approach.
That all grew into being mad at the (unintentional, I’m sure) messaging. But it started with this being a bad collection. These stories don’t play with what the future might look like. They’re BORING. Why waste my time wasted with this nonsense?
I haven’t read Mandelo’s criticism, but I’ve read his novels and sure, I see your point, he likes hope-through-darkness or whatever. (Though honestly I didn’t think Woods was dark enough, I think he’s kind of cowardly in not pushing his premises/ideas as far as they could go.) But in that case, maybe don’t put him in charge of a collection where the brief is hopeful futures? And even if this is about his individual taste, that doesn’t seem to be what his introduction was saying. ‘Envisioning other *and better* possibilities’ is in the paragraph you quoted. And that’s just not here.
I’d really like someone to sit me down and explain how – bar the six mentioned in the review – ANY of these are ANY kind of hopeful. Or validating. Or *anything*. And – this wasn’t supposed to be a collection for authors to express grief and rage. We have collections like that, and if Mandelo or whoever had decided to change the brief for Amplitudes, make the theme that instead, that would have been…a lot better. Still a bunch of bad stories, but at least they’d be appropriate in context then.
This was specifically supposed to be hopeful futures. Not hopeful messages despite bleak situations, like the Anders story. And while you can argue some of the stories have hopeful endings *for the individual characters*, that’s not the same thing as a hopeful future landscape. (And many of the stories do *not* have hopeful endings even for the characters.)
Content warnings might have helped. I think they’d have helped me adjust my expectations before I went in. But content warnings wouldn’t have made this a better collection.
I can’t always handle grim, but what I want is DIFFERENT. I’m not terribly interested in cosy SFF; I see the appeal, but I’ve bounced off of most of the books I’ve tried. But SFF is supposed to be where imagination goes wild, where we experiment – and this is the wildest/weirdest/most experimental queer futures this lot could think of? It’s pathetic.
I think LotR is a really good example of how you can have a hopeful story/future, and that doesn’t mean it’s never dark. I would have had no objection to a collection like that. But this – this offends me as a reader, as a storyteller, and as a queer person. As a reader, it wasted my time; as a storyteller, it’s freaking lazy to come up with futures this bland; as a queer person, I deserve better futures than this.
And honestly I’m very, VERY sick (can you tell) of stories that frame themselves as hopeful when they just aren’t. When it’s supposed to be a happy ending, but your home is destroyed and your family is scattered, or the super cool queer club is the only one in the galaxy and is attacked all the time, or the character gets out but the dystopia is still going strong. Write those stories if you want, but quit dressing them up as optimistic, because they’re just not. Hopeful for one or two characters, sometimes, maybe, but the world you’ve written isn’t hopeful, isn’t one I want to live in. We keep getting this nonsense and I don’t understand why.
Welp, I wrote you an essay back, sorry. It’s going to be a while before I calm down about this one, clearly!
As you already know from GR, I agree completely. Regurgitating fascism, homophobia, and transphobia in grim futures where people are still struggling to survive, and in many cases struggling even more to survive, was not what I was looking for. Perhaps that’s all Mandelo meant by survival – literally living to see another (bleak and ugly) day – but if that’s the sum total of the “vast potentialities of our queer and trans” then I hardly find it “moving and hopeful.” In fact, it’s pretty fucking depressing that our “vast possibilities” don’t involve anything ever getting any better.
I’m okay with darkness and conflict, but I don’t want to just read about surviving another day – I want to read about, at the very least, striking a blow that creates hope for a better future, if not actually changing the world for the better.
Personally, I don’t need content warnings, but I do need honesty and proper representation in a cover blurb. Don’t feed me a bait-and-switch and ‘hope’ I’ll find my own joy.
The more I think about it the less I understand wtf Mandelo was thinking. I really hope he wrote a new introduction, because that introduction is very explicit about this being a joyful collection, which it clearly isn’t. They changed the cover, so hopefully they changed that too.
But as you say, and said in your own review – who is this for? Who wants to read this? One story, one novel, about grimly surviving, fine – the readers who want that read it. But does ANYONE want to be battered with 22 of these, one after another? Who thought anyone wanted this, and why did they think that?
I’m extremely mad about the implied ‘this is as good as queer futures can get’ element. And how is that implication not BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS? To everyone who reads this, but also to Mandelo and anyone else involved in putting this mess together? And of all times to publish it, you choose NOW? Even if they started in 2024, that wouldn’t have been a good moment either. What were they THINKING?
Considering how mid I found Mandelo’s last book, and now this, I’ve no intention of picking up anything of his in the future. But I remain mad, too, at all the authors who sent in the stories they did, when the call went out. I don’t understand why almost any of them were submitted (never mind selected). You heard ‘queer futures’ and you sent in miserable futures? WHY?