by Steve Berman
He went off to sow a final seed as Mr. Bruckner’s gardener.
AFTERWORD
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
—OSCAR WILDE “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
And so you have come to the end of this book, and so we come to the end of this Wildean journey as this is the final volume of my year’s best of gay-themed speculative fiction tales. For a decade I’ve sought to gather from sources popular and esoteric what I thought best for readers in this field. My efforts have always been to entertain neither gay readers who happen to enjoy stories of aliens amongst us, knights challenging dragons, and men facing ghosts from their past, nor spec-fic aficionados who are open to stories about a man’s passionate desire, if not love, for another man—I’ve sadly learned in my more than twenty years of reading, writing, and editing that the two camps rarely creep outside these Eulerian Circles or discover the intersection, which is where my heart and imagination lie.
To those of you who have enjoyed this series, thank you. I wish I could continue editing it forever, but practicality, never my strong suit, demands that it end and I would rather it end well rather than having me utter odi et amo.
When I began Wilde Stories in 2008, only one story from the book came from one of the major sources of speculative fiction, a piece by Rebecca Ore from Clarkesworld. One story came from an anthology published by a major publisher, Lee Thomas’s tale from Ellen Datlow’s Inferno. The rest were small presses’ releases, many very small and aimed at a decided gay male audience. If you wanted to find a great gay fantastical or weird story, your pickings were decidedly few.
Since then more and more of the stories I’ve reprinted for the series have come from the “mainstream” of spec fic publications. Most of the little gay venues with names like Velvet Mafia, Blithe House Quarterly, and even my own Icarus, have folded. When you grow up Jewish, you encounter the word assimilation in a different light than when you grow up as a science-fiction fan. I think readers nowadays have greater opportunities to find quality gay spec fic when they go to the bookstore, when they go online.
Another observation is the demographics of gay spec fic have thankfully widened. Ten years ago there was one person of color in the table of contents, Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco. And while there are four times as many in this volume, it’s less than half of the total, yet I’m pleased that I found greater diversity in whose stories were told and by whom.
I must thank the many kind folk who helped me bring this series to life and deserve to be part of the eulogy: Toby Johnson, Alex Jeffers, and Matt Bright provided the pleasing armatures for the stories; ten years of marvelous artists provided welcome façades that attracted the eye; to all the authors who allowed me to share their voice, especially folk like Hal Duncan, Rick Bowes, and the late Joel Lane. I appreciate the efforts of editors like Ellen Datlow, Gordon Van Gelder, John Joseph Adams, and Julia Rios, who alerted me to stories they thought I might want to include. Thanks also to Brit Mandelo who brought attention to queer spec fic at a time when few people did and paved the way for greater coverage of such books.
And lastly, thank you, Mr. Wilde, for allowing me to make a clever play upon your name; your story to me has always been an inspiration, the first decidedly queer man-made monster.
Good night,
Steve Berman
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Richard Bowes has over thirty-five years in the genre written six novels, four short story collections and over eighty stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, plus the Lambda Literary, Million Writers, and International Horror Guild awards. More of his stories have been reprinted in the pages of Wilde Stories than any other author.
Matthew Bright is a writer, editor and designer who can never decide which order those come in. His fiction has appeared in Nightmare, Tor.com, Steampunk Universe, Clockwork Iris, A Treasury of Brenda and Effie, Glittership, and others. He is the editor of several anthologies, including Clockwork Cairo and The Myriad Carnival. He lives in Manchester, England, where he designs books to pay the bills and keep his dog in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed. Find him at @mbrightwriter on Twitter or Matthew-Bright.com online.
Martin Cahill is a writer, reviewer, and essayist living in Astoria, Queens and working down at the tip of Manhattan, just askance to the Statue of Liberty. He is a Clarion Graduate and is currently a member of the NYC based writing group, Altered Fluid. He has been published in Nightmare Magazine, Fireside Fiction, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He also writes nonfiction for Book Riot, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and most recently, the Barnes and Noble Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog.
Christopher Caldwell is a queer Black American living in Glasgow, Scotland with his partner Alice. He was the 2007 recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship to Clarion West. His work has appeared in Fiyah, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination.
John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com among other venues. His translations have been published or is forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF and other venues. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
Sean Eads is a librarian living in Denver, CO. He has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, Lambda Literary Award, and the Colorado Book Award. His first short story collection, Seventeen Stitches, was published in 2017. He is originally from Kentucky.
Greg Egan is the author of twelve science fiction novels and more than fifty short stories. He has won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Japanese Seiun Award. He lives in Australia.
Singer, musician, writer and artist Joseph Keckler has garnered acclaim for his rich, versatile voice and sharp wit. He performs widely and has appeared at Lincoln Center, Centre Pompidou, Miami Art Basel, and many other venues internationally. He is the author of numerous songs and short pieces and several evening-length performance pieces and plays; his work has been featured on BBC America and WNYC.
Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel Warchild won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild and her third novel Cagebird were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English and the Spectrum Award. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Nalo Hopkinson, John Joseph Adams, Jonathan Strahan and Ann VanderMeer. Her fantasy novel, The Gaslight Dogs, was published through Orbit Books USA.
Adam McOmber is the author of My House Gathers Desires: Stories, The White Forest: A Novel and This New & Poisonous Air. His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review and Diagram. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Sam J. Miller’s work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Crawford, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, as well as the World Science Fiction Society Award for Best Young Adult Book, was long-listed for the Hugo and James Tiptree Awards, and has won the Shirley Jackson Award. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, won the Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult Novel and was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017. His latest book, Blackfish City, was an Entertainment Weekly “Must Read.”
A.C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in places such as Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Tor.com, and the Year’s Best Horror Volume 10, among other places. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and a novella, Catfish Lullaby, forthcoming from Broken Eye Books. Her work has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and winner of the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a monthly review
column to Apex Magazine, and the Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read series to The Book Smugglers. Find her online at acwise.net.
Devon Wong lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works in research communications and has just begun studying photography. In his spare time, he climbs rocks. His short prose fiction has been published by Strange Horizons and Tightrope Books. His comic book work has been published by Top Cow Productions, Outré Press, Comics Experience, and Source Point Press.
Xen is a New Orleans-born Southern boy without the Southern accent, currently residing somewhere in Seattle. He spends his days as a suit-and-tie corporate consultant and business writer, and his nights writing genre-bending science fiction and fantasy tinged with a touch of horror and flavored by the influences of his multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual background—when he’s not being tackled by two hyperactive cats. He writes contemporary romance and erotica that flirts with the edge of taboo as Cole McCade. He wavers between calling himself bisexual, calling himself queer, and trying to figure out where “demi’ fits into the whole mess—but no matter what word he uses he’s a staunch advocate of LGBTQIA and POC representation and visibility in genre fiction. And while he spends more time than is healthy hiding in his writing cave instead of hanging around social media, you can generally find him @thisblackmagic and blackmagicblues.com.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
The first gay story Steve Berman remembers reading was Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, The Cities” and he remembers the rush of forbidden excitement gripping him as well as the terrible shame that he could not openly share his passion because he was a closeted freshman in college. He no longer has such worries. If you cross paths with him, please tell him what gay stories you adore.