Wibbly-Wobbly-Timey-Wimey Pride!

I will always love speculative fiction, and most of my favourite reading experiences when I was younger—The Chrysalids, Witch, A Wrinkle in Time—involved time, space, and/or psychic abilities of some kind. The vast majority of my early writing landed in spec-fic—as is likely obvious to those of you around here on the regular. Even when I tried to write my first romance short story, it ended up involving ghosts and healing…

My first novella? Time travel—sort of. In Memoriam, my wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey romance about an editor who learns he’s quite literally running out of time, and then also learns he has access to the moments of his life he regrets through his journals, and starts making different choices.

And changes time.

So, today, on my journey through Pride Month recommendations, let’s talk tales from differen dimensions, ones that change time, space, or history—or all of the above—and left me completely wowed…

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So much of spec-fic is based in “what-if?” and sometimes what authors do with that leaves me absolutely gobsmacked. So, first off, allow me to introduce you to a city where the queer people have built a country of their own. That’s right—an entire city where queerness is enshrined as not just tolerated or accepted, but is, in fact, the central pillar of society.

Awesome, right?

Not so fast. Because if there’s anything Redfern Jon Barrett knows how to do, it’s to take something binary—good or bad, gay or straight, you name the dichotomy—and then shatter the false binary into something way, way, way more nuanced and fascinating than you ever considered.

Meet Proud Pink Sky. I freaking loved how Proud Pink Sky took the dangers of respectability politics, alongside bi-erasure, the hostility and ignorance around polyamory, the internal trans-hate within the queer community, and the focus on false binaries—all from within our real-world queer movements—and plays them out on this stage.

A glittering gay metropolis of 24 million people, Berlin is a bustling world of pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenagers William and Gareth, who flee toward sanctuary. But is there a place for them in the deeply divided city

Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering high rises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district—not until she and her family are trapped in a queer riot. With her husband Howard plunging into religious paranoia, she discovers a walled-off slum of perpetual twilight, home to the city’s forbidden trans residents.

Challenging assumptions of sex and gender, Proud Pink Sky questions how much of ourselves we need to sacrifice in order to find identity and community.

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Next up, why have one universe or timeline when you can have an infinite progression of them? The idea of a “multiverse” isn’t a new concept to science fiction, and I love the idea of alternate history, alternate timelines, alternate iterations of people or places and watching the “what-if?” play out over and over again.

Now, take all that through a queer lens of not only sexuality, but gender, and space-time, and then wrap it up in a plot with an organization intended to maintain order through, well, everything everywhere, and you’ll start to get an inkling of what’s coming from Sander Santiago’s One Verse Multi.

Paced just perfectly enough that the mind-bending realities protagonist Martin King faces down don’t completely overwhelm the reader (I am not so clever as to grasp quantum physics on the first go round) and weaves in one of the most extraordinary—and yet totally grounded—love stories I’ve read in a really long time.

For the last ten years, Martin King has been a rift repair technician for the Multi-verse Protection Corporation (MVP), closing gaps between universes. But he is ready for a change and joins a research team tasked with answering some exciting questions. “Exciting” quickly becomes “troubling” as the team learns that the multi-verse is on the fast track to a collision event that could destroy everyone and everything. MVP is there to help, right? Maybe not. Everything changes when Martin is kidnapped by an anti-MVP group who claims MVP is secretly propelling the collision.

And if the multi-verse issues weren’t enough, several men make Martin rethink what it means to be single or even monogamous. Martin’s growing feelings for Luca, the data manager on his research team, and Tidus from the FOX universe, help him understand what’s truly at stake. Only one thing is certain, Martin must figure out how to keep the multi-verse and his love life from collapsing into chaos.

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Okay, hit me with your otherworld, other-universe, other-time best queer stories, and don’t go light on the quantum physics. Or… well, do. But I’ll try and work through the possibilities…