PHOTO OF SOMETHING IMPRESSIVE. Or of a flower.

It’s time for a new Shousetsu Bang*Bang! Whoooooo!!! What a great thing to add to my To Read List; and a great thing that gets to go right to the top of the pile. Because nothing stands in the way of gay pr0n around here (And I don’t even know if that’s sarcastic, so you’re in good company).

This was a great set of stories! I don’t think there was even one that I felt mostly-neutral feels over. There was at least one that I wasn’t squeeing myself over, but my feels were still mostly positive with it. I even read most of the smut!

As a musing side-note, it seems like gay sci-fi is much less common than gay fantasy, yet when I do find it, it always seems to be really good. I’ve run across exceptions to that, sure, but whenever I have a hankering for good gay sci-fi, I can just stumble on some, but when I want good gay fantasy, I usually have to trudge through three or four things looking for it.

But maybe it’s observation bias, who knows?

Anyway, as you can guess, this issue was themed Out of this World, which all of the stories did very nicely, and all with a sci-fi lens, save the very last, which looked at different worlds somewhat closer to home.

Delroy Pitt’s From Outer Space, by Hiwaru Kibi: A trucker is accosted on the highway by two men in silver paint, maybe. He is taken to their spaceship for some anal probing, of course. And then there’s the armadillo…

Fubar at Achernar Station, by Hyakunichisou 13: I didn’t think it was exactly FUBAR, but I guess, since this is sci-fi, that some leeway can be granted the term by considering that its meaning may have shifted over the “years.” A precog of intermittent ability is given a mark, but the mark gets arrested by another guy, and the precog needs to decide what to do.

The Wild Black Yonder, by Iron Eater: A mechanic who stays on station, and the cybernetically-enhanced pilot who calls him “Boss.” Two parts. A few mild twists, nothing too fancy, plot-wise.

Hazy Cosmic Jive, by Renaissance Makoto J: The weirdest, most wonderful sci-fi story I have ever me. From the first squirrel, through all the invasions, past the grubs, and right out into outer space.

Queen Zahr’s Revenge, by Matsu Kasumi: Tentacle porn. In a good way. No, no, in the best way.

Collide, by loveonthefarm: Two parts. A young human gets accepted to host a Visitor from another planet. This was an absolutely beautifully written piece. It felt like I was reading an oil painting (the Renaissance sort, not the Pollock sort), and was just wonderfully scrumptious. Which made up for the fact that it felt weirdly one-sided. Like I was just so happy to be floating around in Guy A’s head, that I barely realized that we hardly knew what Guy B was thinking (even in a third-person-limited sense we were limited).

Flowers in the Jungle, by Riba: A really asshole husband, and his xenoanthropologist wife study a very unusual species. May have some mild consent considerations, but really the guy is enough of an asshole (and it’s dub-con enough) that you mostly don’t care (like he’s into it, but might be pretending not to be into it, just so he can later say he wasn’t into it…basically, he’s an asshole). Also, pussy-flowers.

Smuggling, and How to Make Interstellar Exploration Work For You, by Aosora Hikaru: This one seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place the characters specifically. A cargo captain and his partner get a smuggling job offer which will lead them to confront past demons, and possibly save a whole star-system from destruction. This was a good story, but …doesn’t quite live up to the potential of its brief summary, if you will (the conclusion was on the too easy side)

Night Begins the Day, by shukyou: A fantastic novella (two parts) about a Jewish young man and a young man who is simply Jew-ish, and how they might, maybe, make things work. A great look at how things can be out of this world, even when they are still here on Earth.