The stories are familiar dystopian futures, some with artificial feeling tacked on hope, but the two-souled and Indigiqueer takes give them a different tone. Interesting, but no, there aren't really any efforts at portraying a future more comfortable for those who have to declare their gender, or anyone really. ( )

Amazing collection of short stories. None of the authors were previously known to me except Darcie Little Badger so now I can research and find more of these authors works. Highly recommend. ( )

***WHO SUCKED ME IN***
Kazen of Always Doing on YouTube in their Most Anticipated Reads || October 2020 || Always Doing video published on 27 sept. 2020

Stories by indigenious people without the focus being on pain? Sign me up.
I hope it will be stories in which love is the main part and not the massive generational trauma because of colonialism. Which has it's place but somehow I never want that in front and center in my romances. Escapisme ftw

This project was an auto-support on Kickstarter for me, coming from a small press I liked (before they exploded), as its second sf anthology of two-spirit Indigenous stories, and edited by Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed (which I continue to be IN LOVE WITH).

Of course, between me supporting this and reading it, the press went down in flames, publication rights thankfully moved to Arsenal Pulp Press, but all of its reviews and ratings will stay with this edition, surely? Which probably puts this book in a weird limbo?

Which is a shame because I really enjoyed this anthology. None of the stories underwhelmed, a handful of the authors I remembered from the first anthology, and most of them I would love to see more writing from. I really liked all of these, but I think my favorite stories were "Nameless" by Nazbah Tom (an elder teaches her gift of Traveling to call home their people), "Seed Children" by Mari Kurisato (a wise-cracking "synthetic human" fights to secure a future for synthetic children as Withering Earth fails), and "Story for a Bottle" by Darcie Little Badger (a young woman is kidnapped by an out-of-touch rescue boat run by AI that thinks it is saving her).

I hope people continue to find this little gem despite the trash fire it was born into. ( )

I finished [Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction] edited by Joshua Whitehead. Loved it. Only 9 stories yet all quite memorable. Protagonists are a mix of lesbian, gay, trans, nonbinary, and unknown queer-status folks, mostly young, and from Ojibwe, Cree, Anishinaabe, Mi'kmaq, Navajo nations, though some stories did not indicate any specific tribal heritage. One protagonist was white yet focused entirely on her Cree love interest. These dystopian stories include colonies out in space, either spaceships heading out from Earth or long since settled, alternate/virtual reality via cyberspace, colonizing a world via a portal, either increasingly totalitarian government and scarce resources for survival or turtled-up communities keeping the chaos outside at bay, cyborgs, time travel through the spirit realm, but also thriving after the collapse of civilization, and keeping oral history and the relics of writing alive. Definitely worth checking out if you want to experience an indigenous spin on common science fiction tropes. ( )