CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

SHORT SPECULATIVE FICTION

BY TRANSGENDER WRITERS

Deadline: December 1, 2015
Length: up to 10,000 words
Anticipated publication date: Fall 2016
Paid: Yes (rates to be determined)
Contact email: specfic@topsidepress.com
Submit work to: https://topsidepress.submittable.com/

Topside Press is now accepting submissions for an anthology of short speculative fiction by self-identified transgender writers. Speculative fiction can include science fiction, horror, fantasy, alternate history or any fiction which envisions a world that is fundamentally different from our own.

Our goal for this anthology is to showcase the talent of a diverse range of authors and catalyze the next wave of meaningful, moving, and politically engaged speculative fiction.

About the Editors: Cat Fitzpatrick co-edited Sybil Lamb’s 2014 novel I’ve Got A Time Bomb. Her zines include “At least It’s Short,” “You Have Ripped Your Dick Off,” and “I Walked Through The Desert.” She is a poet, essayist, and professor at Rutgers University-Newark.

Casey Plett is the author of the short story collection A Safe Girl To Love and wrote a column on transitioning for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She contributed to the Topside Press anthology The Collection: Short Fiction From The Transgender Vanguard and her work has been featured in Rookie, Plenitude, Two Serious Ladies, Anomalous Press, and other publications. She lives in Winnipeg, Canada.

About Topside Press: Topside Press is a small independent publisher that began publishing transgender fiction in 2012 with The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. In 2013, Topside published the ground-breaking novel Nevada, by Imogen Binnie. Find out more at www.topsidepress.com.

As Metropolarity formed with the desire to publish an anthology of scifi based in the experiences of marginalized Philadelphians, we found it incredibly difficult reaching others in our city who understood that what we meant when we uttered the words “science fiction” was notthat of the imperialist white supremacist colonizer gaze. During our call for submissions period in 2012 we received a number of works with uncomfortably misogynist themes, negative stereotypes against sex workers, implicitly racist, gratuitously violent depictions of ‘urban’ life and more. The submissions we received that were in accordance with our own desires/needs made their way into our first zine, published in 2012, available in free PDF form here. 

I bring all this up because we have spent the days since our formation working to show and prove what it is WE mean when we say “science fiction.” These past couple seasons we have been invited to several stages, not only to read our work but to explicitly discuss that our scifi is our reality. People want to ask us how we are affected by the racist and anti-black backlash against public efforts to “diversify” sci-fi, yet they don’t ask what kind of sci-fi we write. People want to ask us what we think about cyborgs and transhumanism in the future, yet don’t consider that we are writing about being trans and human right now. They want to ask about speculation and dystopia while speaking of smart cities and data structures, yet they have no interest in discussing clandestine corporate/government surveillance, increasing police states, and violent national borders. They don’t want to talk about the drought, the infrastructure-destroying storms, the fracking earthquakes, our deliberate dialects, the disappearing schools and increasing prisons, OUR post-apocalypse. They want to talk about the might and legacy of colonizers over and over and over and over and over again. 

Science is fiction. Some believe science is inherently good, an infallible process that somehow has no ties to its own history & development alongside capitalism’s Progress, and LOOK at how far we’ve gotten, LOOK at how far we have yet to go! We believe prevailing Western “science” is, under the legacy of colonizers, but one more propaganda narrative of the white supremacist control state. There are so many scientific voices that have been erased, kept out, that go on unheard, that are not even considered science – where is the funding, where is the press, where are the textbooks, the awards, the reparations???????

Why are the panels still so anti-black, male-identified and trans/misogynist, all straight, cisgender, upwardly mobile, financially stable, “well educated” with little or no debt, able of mind and body with medical care that serves not subverts them, protected and sheltered from the real dystopias they like to read so much observant fiction about????????

(we know why)

Why are the features and the round-ups and FUTURE OFs still so white and upper class and self-congratulatory?????

(we know why)

When we say science fiction, we mean real shit. We mean science that serves us, fiction that concerns us. Narrative. Network. Power. Manifest. 

Some of you who make work and create out there, I don’t think you consider what you do as sci-fi the way we at Metropolarity might think of it. It’s not surprising. There are too many genres and gatekeepers wanting to box you up and make your multidimensional realities flat and perceptible to the white supremacist colonizer senses (the grammar, the word choice…). That’s the legacy, right? Make everything accountable so it can be controlled, and then decide what’s It and what’s Not. 

So many times we have been disappointed by the things which claim to represent any one of us. The oversights are so glaring… Why call it THEanything when really it just means those institutionally supported white MFA graduates? Yes yes, it’s about ACCESS & OPPORTUNITY & CAPACITY but… Since reading Jamie Berrout’s Incomplete Short Stories and Essays, and her critique of Topside Press’s The Collection being overwhelmingly white…. Since seeing that a QueerScifi twitter account & website now exists and appears very cis & white and has never once mentioned or retweeted us, even though I do believe Metropolarity was the overwhelming result of #queerscifi searches before their existence… Since I am so personally enraged by unchecked white complicity in DIY & institutionally supported artistic spaces all around me, in a majority black city… Since that fucking Stonewall movie… It just has to be said here, right under this call for submissions for a trans sci-fi anthology with a publisher we have a pleasant but impersonal relationship with (and let me be honest, one I have been considering submitting to), that if it is largely comprised of white writers retelling the same colonialist narratives I will be deeply, dreadfully disappointed. 

It will be necessary to personally seek and reach out to trans/women writers of color and make space for their participation.

Submissions are due December 1st. 

signed,

Eighteen / @cyborgmemoirs​ from MP HQ