Category: Fiction

Mirrored, Out Now in Interzone #301

My latest story is Mirrored, out now in Interzone #301.

Mirrored is the second story I’ve sold to Interzone (see my first Interzone story, the Aurealis Award winning Hollywood Animals in Issue #295). They bought it early in 2024, just a couple of months after my egg finally cracked, but it wasn’t until March or April that I thought back and realised that Mirrored was actually a deeply closeted trans story.

It’s about a model and influencer who becomes dispirited when he realises that not only has a tulpa usurped his social media account, but it is better at being an influencer that he could ever be. I wrote the first draft in 2018 for the first issue of Creeper Magazine, but we received more fiction submissions than we’d expected, so I filed it away and wrote the personal essay Blackbird (PDF, Text) instead. I wrote Mirrored as a sort of neo-Luddite lamentation about the ways social media – and the internet more broadly – forces us to commoditise our personalities and our very selves, how the algorithm strips the humanity from our feeds. And, of course, the story is still about that – and it’s arguably more relevant as larger chunks of the internet are being parasitised by generative LLMs – but also, my dysphoria is all throughout the story.

There’s a section where the main character, Omar, is at the gym working out, but there’s no sense that he enjoys it, that he’s doing it because he wants to, but rather because it’s part of the performance (for social media, or for his gender? You decide!). This section doesn’t match my experiences directly – when I started working out at the start of 2020, I was actually glad to be taking control of my body, though I’m sure the increased muscle mass and “more masculine look” that gave me was a big part of why I felt the need to shrug off masculinity and claim an agender identity. Prior to beginning to work out (which I’m continuing by the way, because muscular women are hot), my only form of exercise was running, and with the issues I had with my body, that usually meant running with the intention of losing weight. Around the time I moved to Melbourne I got down to around 65kg, and really wanted to lose another 5kgs. (Further proof that BMIs are bullshit – I was in the “healthy” range despite the fact that multiple people told me I should audition as a concentration camp victim in the Angelina Jolie film that was due to start filming in Australia.) I look back at the photos from then and I worry for myself. I want to cry for myself because I know how much self-loathing it took to get me to that point. And I realise now that I wasn’t simply trying to lose weight, I was trying to attain a pre-pubescent body shape, perhaps because some part of me subconsciously recognised that the puberty I went through was the wrong one.

And I think that’s all part of what comes through in the story if you’re attuned to it – as Maddison Stoff said after reading the story, it’s gender as self-harm. And that can manifest in all sorts of ways – dissociation, misogyny, exercise, violence, strict adherence to gender norms, et cetera.

I don’t want to drop too many chunks of the story in here – especially as a lot of the parts that read as dysphoric or closeted might not scan that way at first blush for anyone who’s not trans themselves, but I wanted to share one example.

He kept his face obscured—it never looked right in photos

For years I was guilty of soy-facing in photos – something that’s probably common among trans girls who were in the closet when it was a phenomenon. I didn’t know what to do with my face, and I hated how I looked in photos. But if I was pulling a deliberately silly face, then it wouldn’t matter how/how bad it looked. I recognise now that it’s a form of disassociation: I was deliberately putting distance between how I looked and “myself” because I didn’t want to see myself as that man I thought I was and dressed/behaved as.

A common refrain among trans people is that they knew they were trans for a long time, but for various reasons they couldn’t actually come out for X number of years. I never had that though – my dysphoria manifested purely as self-loathing, something I thought mental health drugs and therapy should help with. And maybe they did to some degree, but it was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with only the border pieces. A solid starting point, but utterly lacking where it mattered.

I’m going to spoiler the ending for the original version of Mirrored. If you want to read it first, then you can go and buy the issue either at interzone.press/patreon or shop.interzone.press, then come back here. Otherwise, read on…

I always struggled to see a future for myself. I assumed it was because I would commit suicide one day, and whilst I don’t know that I ever considered it a serious option, suicidal ideation is one of the depression-related symptoms I most struggle/d with. So, the end of Mirrored saw Omar walking into the sea and letting it take him. Far too many trans people take their own lives. Let down by family, friends, governments, and medical systems, demonised by the media, hated by random people for absolutely no reason, they see suicide as preferable to continuing with the pain of life in a society that hates us. As a trans author I simply couldn’t release a story where the main character – who could easily be read as closeted – accepted their own death and walked willingly into it.

Thankfully, I explained this to Interzone’s editor – Gareth Jelley, who does amazing work and has a true passion for SF – and he understood where I was coming from, and was happy to let me write a coda to the story. Omar still walks into the sea and lets it take him, but in the morning a woman washes up on shore.

I won’t say more because the coda means a lot to me – I’ll just say that transition helped me find love for myself, and I was really happy with how I was able to represent that.

I don’t know that I made the story better, but I made it truer, and I made it something that will hopefully speak to trans people, whether out or still figuring it out. And I want to thank Gareth for giving me the chance to make that change. Publishing’s slow pace can be a source of frustration, but here it helped me remake a story into something that really matters to me.

Crisis Actors

Crisis Actors By Maddison Stoff and Corey Jae White

Maddison and I had the basic idea for this story (a traveling troupe of trans actors using tech and theatrical tools to fuck with cogs of the surveillance state) a couple of months before Stop Copaganda was even announced, and as soon as we saw the callout we knew we could focus the story towards it and maybe do something powerful with it. We had a loose plan, and we just needed to get started on the story now that we had a deadline approaching.

On Election Day, we all know what happened. I knew I could let myself wallow in the depression, or I could let the anger through instead and sit down and start on this story. I got the first scene down in one go, making this near-future vision of a fascist US. And then our story was released on Inauguration Day, with Elon Musk doing a fucking Nazi salute on stage.

I’m still depressed, still angry, and I have so much fear (and love) in my heart for my trans brothers, sisters, and others in the US. But fuck the fascists. When we say “death before detransition,” we are not talking about suicide.

Please read this story.

Exopunk’s Not Dead (You Can Read it Online Now)

My story Exopunk’s Not Dead has just been reprinted, so I wanted to talk about how it came together, because it’s an experience that left a bad taste in my mouth in a way that only made sense after I came out.

I originally submitted it to a certain high-paying (now defunct) market with a strict word limit (real heads know), and they asked me to consider rewriting it so that instead of it being a meet-cute between two queer women, it was two men. As this editor saw me as a cis man, they thought the original draft was too male-gazey.
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If you’ve read my work you know that’s not my style. It wasn’t a titillating story about two lesbians hooking up – it was the same sweet and silly meet-cute with an anti-fascist heart that it is now. (The main way the published story is better is that in rethinking the characters I was able to get some good/bad jokes out of their names.)

But I also thought I was a cis man, so I was hypersensitive to that sort of criticism and I went ahead and rewrote the story. They didn’t take it, and In the process of regendering the story I’d done so much work making it better in other small ways it was now too different/difficult to revert.

So I kept it as it was – a story about 2 gay men falling for each other at a punk show – and the punk show aspect of it was the only part that had any relevance to my life whatsoever. And then I sold the story, and that was a good thing, right?
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But looking back at that original interaction, it still hurts. Having my gender, my sexuality, and my transness being denied right to my face, when I didn’t even know they were things I desperately needed to claim.

It doesn’t matter that I didn’t know, it still hurt. Dysphoria is fucking weird.

All My Guns are Gay and Trans and They’re Ruining My Fucking Life

All My Guns are Trans and Gay and They’re Ruining My Fucking Life, novelette written with Maddison Stoff, published on her Patreon.

What if the space marine from a 90s shooter was sent to kill an alien god-ship and the only help he had was from a polycule of sentient, gay and trans guns?

This is the first collaboration that Maddison Stoff and I worked on together is now available free to read on her Patreon. Soon we have something big and very different, coming out, but you can check this one out right now.

 

Night, Rain, and Neon – a Cyberpunk Anthology

Night, Rain, and Neon cover

I think I mentioned some news on the short fiction front, and here is the first of three that I can announce. I have a story, Digital Salt, in the forthcoming Night, Rain, and Neon anthology published by NewCon Press.

The story has some parallels to Repo Virtual, so if you wanted something new in a similar vein, this might tide you over, or if you wanted a slab of new cyberpunk from a bunch of fantastic writers, you could do much worse than this anthology.

From the preorder page:

Released on July 1st 2022, to coincide with the date William Gibson’s genre-defining novel Neuromancer was originally released in 1984, Night, Rain, and Neon is a collection of all new stories written by some of the sharpest and most insightful authors of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk fiction around, curated by editor Michael Cobley.
 
“Back in the mid-80s William Gibson remarked that at one point he saw science fiction as a handy tool that he could use to pry open the cranium of the embryonic digital zeitgeist and do a bit of rewiring. Since then, numerous waves of tech, eco-awareness, politics, music, games, and smart gizmos (wearable and driveable) have washed over and through us. Our dwellings have gone from shells veined with broadband wiring to safehouses infused with plumes of wireless connection while our phones speak and ping and offer oblations to the greater networks that enfold us all.” – Michael Cobley
 
Come see what the near future might hold…
 
Contents:
Introduction by Michael Cobley
Hello, Goodbye – Stewart Hotston
Four Green Fields – Ian McDonald
All The Precious Years – Al Robertson
Forever in Scotland – Callum McSorley
Assets – Keith Brooke & Eric Brown
The Still Small Voice – Louise Carey
Mindstrings – Jeremy Szal
Tabula Rasa – Danie Ware
Collision Detection – Tim Maughan
We Appreciate Power – Gavin Smith
A Game Of Clones – Justina Robson
Accumulated Damage – Simon Morden
The Thirteenth Clone Of Casimir Ivanovitch – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Elijah Of The 1000 Faces – Gary Gibson
VR Enclave – DA Xiaolin Spires
Digital Salt – Corey J White
Terms And Conditions – Joseph Elliott-Coleman
The Goruden-Mairu Job – T.R. Napper
About the Authors
 
Available as an A5 hardbacks and a special edition hardback, signed by all the authors, limited to just 100 numbered copies.

Preorders are open now.

Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies

Read this story by Bo Bolander, now. It’s a shiv of a story – short and sharp, ready to get stabbed in under your rib cage: Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies

So, no. You don’t get a description of how he surprised me, where he did it, who may have fucked him up when he was a boy to lead to such horrors (no–one), or the increasingly unhinged behavior the cops had previously filed away as the mostly harmless eccentricities of a nice young man from a good family. No fighting in the woods, no blood under the fingernails, no rivers or locked trunks or calling cards in the throat. It was dark and it was bad and I called for my sisters in a language dead when the lion–brides of Babylon still padded outside the city gates. There. That’s all you get, and that’s me being generous. You’re fuckin’ welcome.

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

I recently read Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s a response to a H.P. Lovecraft story, but it isn’t horror; instead it (I assume) takes some of the critters and locations of Lovecraft’s work and uses them to populate a beautifully written fantasy tale set in a world that feels familiar yet unique in the same way that Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series does.

I’ve never read anything of Lovecraft’s, and I don’t often read fantasy, but The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is phenomenal. It’s a novella, so it’s an easy read, and you can pick the ebook up for a song.

And because I can, here’s an excerpt from one of Kij Johnson’s short stories, Ponies. It’s a twisted, dark horror tale, with a core of sad childhood truth.

The invitation card has a Western theme. Along its margins, cartoon girls in cowboy hats chase a herd of wild Ponies. The Ponies are no taller than the girls, bright as butterflies, fat, with short round-tipped unicorn horns and small fluffy wings. At the bottom of the card, newly caught Ponies mill about in a corral. The girls have lassoed a pink-and-white Pony. Its eyes and mouth are surprised round Os. There is an exclamation mark over its head.

The little girls are cutting off its horn with curved knives. Its wings are already removed, part of a pile beside the corral.

Read the full story at Tor.com.

The Savannah Liar’s Tour

I’d been meaning to post this for a while, but time does what it does, and here we are… I recently read Will McIntosh’s The Savannah Liar’s Tour at Lightspeed Magazine. It’s interesting, surprising and touching – SF with the feel of contemporary fantasy.

Excerpt:

On the trolley, Delilah pointed out Chippewa Square, a cozy park shaded by huge Live Oaks.

“At last count there were seventeen hundred such squares in Savannah.” She was speaking to everyone, all of the tourists on her trolley, but she was looking right at me. Her gaze sent a thrill through me like nothing I’d ever experienced. “Under no circumstances should you go near any of them. They look friendly, but they bite, and many carry disease—”

According to Delilah, a creature lived in the Savannah River that could swallow the Loch Ness monster whole. The Buddha was buried in a local graveyard.

Today was the day. I was going to speak to her.

With the tourists chanting her name, Delilah stepped off the trolley, took a bow, waved to or shook hands with each person as they exited her magic trolley, onto the cobbled street, back in the real world.

I lingered so I’d be the last off. My heart tripped as I climbed down the steps. As I paused in front of her, I could find nothing to do with my hands. They felt wrong on my hips, wrong in my pockets, wrong dangling like dead fish at my sides.

“Your show is really something,” I stammered. “I’m spreading the word, telling all my friends.”

“I was wondering when you were finally going to talk to me,” Delilah said.

Read the whole thing here.

The Killing Jar

While my original plan was to point anyone reading to one of Laurie Penny’s short stories, first off I’m going to share one of her articles: Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless. If you’re not familiar with Laurie Penny’s non-fiction, she’s been writing about social and political issues, feminism, and various ways these areas intersect for a few years now. If you’ve read anything of hers before, it was probably some of her excellent coverage of the Occupy movement.

It only makes sense that a writer so cognizant of socio-political issues would write science-fiction that is layered, unique and equal parts scathing and accurate in its portrayal of the absurdities embedded in modern society. The Killing Jar is one of those stories that when I read it I wished I’d written it – serial killings as government subsidised art, in a Britain that feels not-too-far from today’s. It reads like one of the better episodes of Black Mirror, but without needing to rely on a tech angle. It also represents a future that could be the logical conclusion to society’s obsession with true crime.

Excerpt:

I feel a bit sorry for Tony. It’s not that he’s not a good serial killer, it’s just that for various reasons things haven’t worked out for him, and he hasn’t achieved the sort of notoriety that someone with his skill set really deserves.

For instance: The last troubled, hard-drinking detective with unorthodox methods who Tony managed to hook into a daring cat-and-mouse game ended up in rehab for alcohol abuse, thus wasting months of painstaking antagonism. He’s alright now, but part of his recovery program apparently involves no longer doing active police work, which pisses Tony off no end after the amount of time he put into the creepy post-crime scene flirtation they had going on.

The new inspector on the case just doesn’t have the same sparkle. Sure, he breaks the rules now and then, but his colleagues generally like him and he’s Tony says he doesn’t have enough personality disorders to be interesting.

Personally, I think that’s a bit rich coming from Tony.

It’s not that Tony is boring, precisely. And it’s not that he doesn’t have any other interests, or things that he cares about with the sort of sick fervor you’d expect from people in his line of work. It’s just that he cares about being a famous serial killer slightly more than anything else.

Read the whole story at Terraform.