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troutgirl 's review for:
In Our Own Worlds: Four LGBTQ+ Tor.com Novellas
by Margaret Killjoy
This was a free giveaway by Tor for Pride month! It consists of four very different novellas that roughly speaking fall into the "fantasy" genre and all have a LGBTQ theme. Of those the only one I'd heard of before is JY Yang's _The Black Tides of Heaven_ which was nominated for all the awards.
Novellas are always a little bit risky because they often seem to come across as either overly long short stories -- which I'd say the first two here are -- or really short novels, which the Yang is. Of these four, I think _A Taste of Honey_ is the one that truly needed to tell the story in this format.
As a piece of social history, these stories strongly suggest that sexual identity is becoming more fluid. _Passing Strange_ by Ellen Klages focuses on a Lesbian couple with a capital L -- but it's a deliberately old-fashioned period piece set in 1930's San Francisco. Of the characters in the other stories, I'd challenge anyone to say precisely what their fixed gender identity or sexual preference really is -- except perhaps in the case of _Black Tides_ where evidently people get to select their gender in a mysterious process after mostly growing up genderless and using the pronoun "they".
Perhaps more interestingly, monogamous romantic love is almost entirely absent from 3 of the stories. Characters might go to bed with each other out of any number of motivations -- companionship, hatred, reasons of state -- but it's rarely out of a conventional sense of true love. There are still no happily ever afters here.
Novellas are always a little bit risky because they often seem to come across as either overly long short stories -- which I'd say the first two here are -- or really short novels, which the Yang is. Of these four, I think _A Taste of Honey_ is the one that truly needed to tell the story in this format.
As a piece of social history, these stories strongly suggest that sexual identity is becoming more fluid. _Passing Strange_ by Ellen Klages focuses on a Lesbian couple with a capital L -- but it's a deliberately old-fashioned period piece set in 1930's San Francisco. Of the characters in the other stories, I'd challenge anyone to say precisely what their fixed gender identity or sexual preference really is -- except perhaps in the case of _Black Tides_ where evidently people get to select their gender in a mysterious process after mostly growing up genderless and using the pronoun "they".
Perhaps more interestingly, monogamous romantic love is almost entirely absent from 3 of the stories. Characters might go to bed with each other out of any number of motivations -- companionship, hatred, reasons of state -- but it's rarely out of a conventional sense of true love. There are still no happily ever afters here.