A review by linguisticali
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History by Rose Fox, Daniel José Older

4.0

"We grew up reading stories about people who weren’t much like us. Speculative fiction promised to take us to places where anything was possible, but the spaceship captains and valiant questers were always white, always straight, always cisgender, and almost always men. We tried to force ourselves into those boxes, but we never fit. When we looked for faces and thoughts like our own, we found orcs and deviants and villains. And we began to wonder why some people’s stories were told over and over, while ours were almost never even alluded to. ... We drew 27 stories that spoke to the true heart of what Long Hidden is: a book of counter-narratives. It is an act of literary resistance. In whispers, shouts, and moans, these stories combine into a collective outcry that is both joyous and mournful, a forgotten praise-song that puts flesh on the bones of our hidden dreams."

This quote from the introduction almost made me cry with delight, as it echoes so many of my own feelings about speculative fiction.

As tends to be the case with anthologies, I found that the stories in this ranged from excellent to average. That said, there were very few stories in here that weren't at least interesting - and many of them were absolutely enthralling. Some memorable ones which really stand out to me are "Marigolds" (LS Johnson), "Each Part Without Mercy" (Meg Jayanth), "A Wedding in Hungry Days" (Nicolette Barischoff) and "Knotting Grass, Holding Ring" (Ken Liu).

For a book focused on the margins of history, however, it had what felt like surprisingly few African stories, with many stories set in North America. This may simply have been an issue of availability, but it would have been nice to see a better balance in that respect.

Even though not all the stories were exactly my thing, I'm really glad that this exists, and really glad I read it. It's a beautiful "act of literary resistance" in a world that really has enough cishet white guys saving the world. More of this sort of thing, please.