Dare to Speak Their Name: Including the Queer in Worldbuilding, Fierce & Proud

I was once again involved with Octocon this year. I had the daunting task of moderating the Dare to Speak Their Name: Including the Queer in Worldbuilding. Daunting as I didn't really feel qualified to be a part of it. However, as a reviewer of, and sometimes writer of, stories, I suppose I do have some experience with worldbuilding. The panel ended up being a lot of fun and by the end of it I think we all felt that we could have talked for a good while longer about the topic. 

Here are the details:

Dare to Speak Their Name: Including the Queer in Worldbuilding

"Speculative fiction can give us many opportunities to step outside familiar constructs of gender and sexuality. Whether the world is one without obvious prejudice where all genders are treated as equally as possible and queerness is unremarkable, or one in which gender isn't assigned at birth or just doesn't matter at all, how does SFF queer its worlds? What can these secondary worlds show readers and viewers who had previously only been exposed to straight culture?"

Panelists: David Ferguson (moderator), GOH Philippa Ryder, Helen Corcoran, Quinn Clancy, Robert JE Simpson.

If you missed it, you can check it out on Twitch until the end of October. 

One of the panelists was Quinn Clancy who is involved with the Cupán Fae group. Established in 2015, the group meets weekly to discuss their current projects, collaborate on new ideas and basically provide support to each other. They were selling books as part of the con so I picked up a couple of them on Kindle (I'm sorry. I have to be selective with physical books due to space constraints). I decided on their science fiction anthology, Fierce New World, and their latest anthology, an LGBTQ one, Fierce & Proud. I love a bit of science fiction and have recently decided to make a conscious decision to look at LGBTQ creators and works. I ended up starting that journey with EM Forrester's Maurice, a wonderful gay romance book that spawned an equally wonderful movie starring a young Hugh Grant. However, the Octocon panel made me notice that I haven't really delved much into LGBTQ science fiction. Well outside comic books. Coincidentally, I have recently backed a science fiction comic book Kickstarter called Fanny Galactic, which stars a drag queen and other queer characters. I could go on but maybe another time and another place. Anyway, I started reading Fierce & Proud not even thinking of a science fiction angle but it turns out the writers largely went in that direction (the book doesn't stick to single genre and I must note that I haven't finished all the stories yet). I'm gonna call out two stories in particular as I thought they had clever ideas and the writers managed to pull them off well: Paul Carroll's Man in the Mirror and Kat Dodd's Marked. They are interesting looks into the perception of sexuality and gender. Though I have enjoyed all the stories so far so maybe support the group by checking out one of their books? I may cover Fierce New World when I get to it.

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