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Truth & Dare
The debut fiction collection from an inimitable critic, Truth & Dare is a deeply personal and fantastical ride through gender, trauma, queerness, science, history, and religion.
Cornish mermaids take to the football pitch to protest warming seas. Trans students in Manchester searching for the perfect dick accidentally warp the fabric of spacetime. England's worst pogrom comes for York's particle collider, powered by bread and gender energy. On Bournemouth beach, a storm delivers an ancestor across oceans of time to sire a drowning descendant. The devil stands a drink at London's famous gay pub, The Black Cap, while Artemis, in the guise of Joan of Arc, roams a life-or-death night in East Sussex.
Remember the Witchcraft Act of 1927, and the refugees that fled via cinema to defend the Republic of Catalunya? Of course not, it's been written out of history. This is England, (but not?) as we know it.
A queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, in a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction (or is it?) from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours. Truth or dare? Both, always.
Cornish mermaids take to the football pitch to protest warming seas. Trans students in Manchester searching for the perfect dick accidentally warp the fabric of spacetime. England's worst pogrom comes for York's particle collider, powered by bread and gender energy. On Bournemouth beach, a storm delivers an ancestor across oceans of time to sire a drowning descendant. The devil stands a drink at London's famous gay pub, The Black Cap, while Artemis, in the guise of Joan of Arc, roams a life-or-death night in East Sussex.
Remember the Witchcraft Act of 1927, and the refugees that fled via cinema to defend the Republic of Catalunya? Of course not, it's been written out of history. This is England, (but not?) as we know it.
A queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, in a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction (or is it?) from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours. Truth or dare? Both, always.
272 pages, Paperback
First published July 20, 2023
13 people are currently reading
440 people want to read
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September 25, 2024
Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024, UK & Ireland
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2024
Books saved my life. Books believed the stories I had inside me long before any responsible adult around me was able to. Long before I was able to articulate them, the pages of books gave me a place to hold my deepest fears and hopes and desires, and the messy relation between them.
Truth & Dare is a stunning debut collection of stories by So Mayer, with intellectual and emotional depth and great writing. It follows their essay A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, and is published by Cipher Press (also publishers of Tell Me I’m Worthless, Never Was and Nettleblack).
The first of the 19 stories (which average 14pp), green children, also functions as an introduction to the collection. In 16 erudite and entertaining pages it takes in, inter alia, the eponymous 12th century Green Children of Woolpit, Tilda Swinton’s debut movie, the obtuse Friendship’s Death, Ursula le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and Tala, the story-telling alien from Hertfordshire libraries who somehow managed to trigger transphobes, apparently a threat to our children's moral education:
When I say, Believe children, I don’t mean, Believe me. I mean, I have learned – or relearned – the childhood knowledge that Tala stands for: that the only way that I could have been (going to be) believed is if all children, all speakers deemed outside the bounds of dominant embodiment, are given credibility.
Books and stories can save us only if we unchain them. If we read with a rebel robot alien eye for what we’re not being told, for the secret hidden deep in the gutter where the text isn’t supposed to be. Writing Truth & Dare, I’ve tried to transpose text and subtext, to give the game away, to throw respectability to the winds. To let go of authority, of the state’s abrogated authority to shape the story. To refuse to take the fabulous out of the fable. To face out on these shelves what others want hidden.
Tala says: It’s storytime. Believe me.
The next, silicon, begins with the narrator telling us:
Ludo means: I play.
The most serious man I ever met, a man whose intellect towered over even the 157 feet of my own, was a man who believed that language is what it says it is, nothing more, nothing less, no puns intended. And his name, the name scribbled on the flyleaf of his personal library, its few books in
austere languages: Ludo.
Not I. Not me, all corners. Me, laughing. Can fenland laugh? Play? I pull myself together, here.
The narrator, if you hadn't guessed, is the University Library in Cambridge:
And the UL's narration takes in silicon fen, Wittgenstein ("Ludo") and Turing and a discussion of the generalisation of the central limit theorem to distributions with power law tails.
Changing => includes an almost perfect passage on the best post-swim restorative snack, erring only in not preferring the beef flavour:
Right out of the pool, there is the craving for food that cancels out the chlorine – throughout your childhood, pickled onion Monster Munch was the ritual offering. Now, wise to the monosodium glutamate and disodium 5’-ribonucleotide, to the nose-curl of whey permeate, you settle for a snack bar, pretending it really tastes like chocolate and not pre-masticated dates. Pretending it is food and not fancy Soylent Green.
And Lyonesses features a team of footballing mermaids that rise up from the lowest pyramids of football to a match against the greatest women's team of all time, Arsenal, led by Captain Kim of course ('goalless draw, we were all sick as parrots from the parasites in the water'):
We made our fantasy first XI: our queen and hero Pinoe, who tells the press, ‘You can’t win without gay players,’ playing for pride; seagreen-haired Gaëlle Enganamouit; Marta of the flaming lips; Wendie Renard rising above every challenge; Vanina Correa keeping the Albiceleste shining; Kadeisha Buchanan, magical youngest of seven sisters; Kim Little, the legend of Mintlaw; Yuka Momiki, who wrote her thesis on the women’s game; @rasheedatt10 sharing the Super Falcons’ R&R on Insta; Lucy Bronze moving fluid as hot metal, strong as a statue. Phew. We argued their stats and their merits as we practised. We were – we are – all muscle. We are one long curving kick, used to the rough-and-tumble of the world’s worsening weather. Used to being fished for, but getting something into a net, that we had to get used to.
I am in danger of making this collection sound like a collection of memes, but it has far more intellectual and emotional depth than that, packed with etymology (one story is built around the unresolved origin of the word ‘curse’), wide-ranging cultural references and a heartfelt portrayal of the historical and lived queer experience in a cisheteronormative world.
From ghost, a story that recalls a teenage sighting of a poltergeist, with a hairbrush suspended in mid-air:
A ghost-writer is ‘a hack writer who does work for which another person takes the credit’, according to the OED . The moralising cuts both ways: the writer and the person taking credit are both judged and found wanting – ghosting each other.
Writing these jagged little shards of memory whose context and even content I sometimes have to look up online, I feel like what I need (what I am) is a ghost-writer of my own life. I need a self that wasn’t able to form, one who holds memories coherently and can collate them fluently.
I would say I’m haunted by scraps and fragments of my childhood self, but that’s inaccurate. Also (I would say and unsay) that I am trying to exorcise that self. Instead, I am holding the blaze and brush of memory, which is the formation of self, as it hovers in mid-air.
I held out the hairbrush, I think, because I couldn’t hold it. I held it out towards a future that could look after it for me, as I did with traumatic memories, locking them away in my amygdala until I was safe enough to recall them. Believing I would get to that moment.
What if I – adult me, the me writing this now – was the poltergeist? A barely contained potential energy, a self that adolescent me almost couldn’t believe was possible, so afraid that I would never manifest in adulthood that I was manifesting prematurely, as best I could, as a presence beside my younger self. Telling myself I would write this one day.
The publisher
Cipher Press is an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Our aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond.
We want to publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways. We want to publish the many different stories that make up our community, and we want to make those stories accessible to everyone.
We’re entirely queer owned and run because we want the publishing industry to be more inclusive at every level. We have over a decade’s worth of bookselling, publishing, and editorial experience under our belts. We still don’t often see the kind of books we want to see on shelves, and we’d like to change that by finding authors who excite us and by publishing books that we love.
We’re especially keen to publish those who are further marginalised within our own community: people of colour, working class, trans and gender non-conforming authors.
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2024
Books saved my life. Books believed the stories I had inside me long before any responsible adult around me was able to. Long before I was able to articulate them, the pages of books gave me a place to hold my deepest fears and hopes and desires, and the messy relation between them.
Truth & Dare is a stunning debut collection of stories by So Mayer, with intellectual and emotional depth and great writing. It follows their essay A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, and is published by Cipher Press (also publishers of Tell Me I’m Worthless, Never Was and Nettleblack).
The first of the 19 stories (which average 14pp), green children, also functions as an introduction to the collection. In 16 erudite and entertaining pages it takes in, inter alia, the eponymous 12th century Green Children of Woolpit, Tilda Swinton’s debut movie, the obtuse Friendship’s Death, Ursula le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and Tala, the story-telling alien from Hertfordshire libraries who somehow managed to trigger transphobes, apparently a threat to our children's moral education:
When I say, Believe children, I don’t mean, Believe me. I mean, I have learned – or relearned – the childhood knowledge that Tala stands for: that the only way that I could have been (going to be) believed is if all children, all speakers deemed outside the bounds of dominant embodiment, are given credibility.
Books and stories can save us only if we unchain them. If we read with a rebel robot alien eye for what we’re not being told, for the secret hidden deep in the gutter where the text isn’t supposed to be. Writing Truth & Dare, I’ve tried to transpose text and subtext, to give the game away, to throw respectability to the winds. To let go of authority, of the state’s abrogated authority to shape the story. To refuse to take the fabulous out of the fable. To face out on these shelves what others want hidden.
Tala says: It’s storytime. Believe me.
The next, silicon, begins with the narrator telling us:
Ludo means: I play.
The most serious man I ever met, a man whose intellect towered over even the 157 feet of my own, was a man who believed that language is what it says it is, nothing more, nothing less, no puns intended. And his name, the name scribbled on the flyleaf of his personal library, its few books in
austere languages: Ludo.
Not I. Not me, all corners. Me, laughing. Can fenland laugh? Play? I pull myself together, here.
The narrator, if you hadn't guessed, is the University Library in Cambridge:
And the UL's narration takes in silicon fen, Wittgenstein ("Ludo") and Turing and a discussion of the generalisation of the central limit theorem to distributions with power law tails.
Changing => includes an almost perfect passage on the best post-swim restorative snack, erring only in not preferring the beef flavour:
Right out of the pool, there is the craving for food that cancels out the chlorine – throughout your childhood, pickled onion Monster Munch was the ritual offering. Now, wise to the monosodium glutamate and disodium 5’-ribonucleotide, to the nose-curl of whey permeate, you settle for a snack bar, pretending it really tastes like chocolate and not pre-masticated dates. Pretending it is food and not fancy Soylent Green.
And Lyonesses features a team of footballing mermaids that rise up from the lowest pyramids of football to a match against the greatest women's team of all time, Arsenal, led by Captain Kim of course ('goalless draw, we were all sick as parrots from the parasites in the water'):
We made our fantasy first XI: our queen and hero Pinoe, who tells the press, ‘You can’t win without gay players,’ playing for pride; seagreen-haired Gaëlle Enganamouit; Marta of the flaming lips; Wendie Renard rising above every challenge; Vanina Correa keeping the Albiceleste shining; Kadeisha Buchanan, magical youngest of seven sisters; Kim Little, the legend of Mintlaw; Yuka Momiki, who wrote her thesis on the women’s game; @rasheedatt10 sharing the Super Falcons’ R&R on Insta; Lucy Bronze moving fluid as hot metal, strong as a statue. Phew. We argued their stats and their merits as we practised. We were – we are – all muscle. We are one long curving kick, used to the rough-and-tumble of the world’s worsening weather. Used to being fished for, but getting something into a net, that we had to get used to.
I am in danger of making this collection sound like a collection of memes, but it has far more intellectual and emotional depth than that, packed with etymology (one story is built around the unresolved origin of the word ‘curse’), wide-ranging cultural references and a heartfelt portrayal of the historical and lived queer experience in a cisheteronormative world.
From ghost, a story that recalls a teenage sighting of a poltergeist, with a hairbrush suspended in mid-air:
A ghost-writer is ‘a hack writer who does work for which another person takes the credit’, according to the OED . The moralising cuts both ways: the writer and the person taking credit are both judged and found wanting – ghosting each other.
Writing these jagged little shards of memory whose context and even content I sometimes have to look up online, I feel like what I need (what I am) is a ghost-writer of my own life. I need a self that wasn’t able to form, one who holds memories coherently and can collate them fluently.
I would say I’m haunted by scraps and fragments of my childhood self, but that’s inaccurate. Also (I would say and unsay) that I am trying to exorcise that self. Instead, I am holding the blaze and brush of memory, which is the formation of self, as it hovers in mid-air.
I held out the hairbrush, I think, because I couldn’t hold it. I held it out towards a future that could look after it for me, as I did with traumatic memories, locking them away in my amygdala until I was safe enough to recall them. Believing I would get to that moment.
What if I – adult me, the me writing this now – was the poltergeist? A barely contained potential energy, a self that adolescent me almost couldn’t believe was possible, so afraid that I would never manifest in adulthood that I was manifesting prematurely, as best I could, as a presence beside my younger self. Telling myself I would write this one day.
The publisher
Cipher Press is an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Our aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond.
We want to publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways. We want to publish the many different stories that make up our community, and we want to make those stories accessible to everyone.
We’re entirely queer owned and run because we want the publishing industry to be more inclusive at every level. We have over a decade’s worth of bookselling, publishing, and editorial experience under our belts. We still don’t often see the kind of books we want to see on shelves, and we’d like to change that by finding authors who excite us and by publishing books that we love.
We’re especially keen to publish those who are further marginalised within our own community: people of colour, working class, trans and gender non-conforming authors.
Read
July 14, 2023Truth & Dare is a wonderfully strange, punk, and daring collection of stories that blend memoir, science fiction, philosophy, and essay seamlessly together to create a cacophony of concept and expression.
Written by non-binary author and essayist So Mayer, Truth & Dare explores queer bodies, queer history, popular culture, historical narratives, and personal examination.
My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/non-binary-bo...
Written by non-binary author and essayist So Mayer, Truth & Dare explores queer bodies, queer history, popular culture, historical narratives, and personal examination.
My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/non-binary-bo...
May 28, 2024
Absolutely fucking brilliant. Stretched my brain and delighted my synapses in all the good ways. Like my favourite book of last year, Fables and Spells by adrienne maree brown (who gets namechecked in Truth and Dare!), the richness of the writing and its content meant I needed to read it in short sessions, one story at a time, as they were each bursting with so many things to think about and read more about. They demanded time and thought from me, which I’m really grateful for. This is a book that inspired me, helped me grow, has incredible writing and also has plenty of linguistic puns that made me laugh 😆 Queer writing at its best. Made me feel even more aligned with my non-binary nature.
September 12, 2023
Temporary autonomy, rum and sodomy. YES!
September 8, 2023
Sublime. Poetry, autobiography, fantasy, etymology all blended into language and thought that will rewire your understanding of things.
September 9, 2023
"Not only you, no longer alone. Never alone."
So Mayer's blend of memoir and fiction, science and religion, reality and the spaces between culminates in a daring and experimental collection that examines the past, present, and future of queerness in a Britain that is(n't) was(n't) and (never) could be. Perfectly capturing the messy euphoric possibility of trans nonbinaryness.
"Truth & Dare" will leave you unsure about what you've just read, but certain that it is everything you have ever felt, and more.
So Mayer's blend of memoir and fiction, science and religion, reality and the spaces between culminates in a daring and experimental collection that examines the past, present, and future of queerness in a Britain that is(n't) was(n't) and (never) could be. Perfectly capturing the messy euphoric possibility of trans nonbinaryness.
"Truth & Dare" will leave you unsure about what you've just read, but certain that it is everything you have ever felt, and more.
May 13, 2025
3.5: it's so hard for me to rate this collection of short stories. I'm not always a fan of abstract writing, but I found some of these stories to be so touching and enjoyed the indulgent language. Overall, I think the writing is beautiful and so clever. Some stories went over my head, but I enjoyed it!
May 10, 2024
Some really great parts on a sentence and paragraph level, but on a whole, I found it difficult to grasp and absorb everything.
Read
August 6, 2025Unfortunately I don't know what to make of this book. I appreciate the concept, but more than half of the text just went over my head. Too contemporary for me 😅
September 26, 2024
Longlisted for the 2025 Edgehill Prize for short story collections
Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize
In 2017 I was part of a group of readers invited to join the judging panel for the second year of the Republic of Consciousness Prize (a prize aimed at innovative literature produced by UK and Ireland small presses). Our shortlist included two authors; Eley Williams and Isabel Waidner who both went on to greater success: Williams (our winner for Attrib.) then winning with the same book Britain’s oldest literary prize – the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Waidner (whose debut “Gaudy Bauble” we were I think the first to recognise) being shortlisted for the Goldsmith Prize with her second novel and winning it with her third.
This impressive debut collection of short stories (19 stories of 10-22 page length) reminded me strongly of both writers – while having much that is distinctive about it.
With Williams it shares the same sense of careful and intelligent wordplay, a love of etymology, the interrogation of language, the ability to craft a short story and even a careful and deliberate use of unusual punctuation (like the “.” in Attrib.).
With Waidner it shares the same aim to upend conventional narrative hierarchies and conventions, and the same motive for that upending: that those conventions support and are supported by the traditional, patriarchal, capitalist, gender-rigid society in which they were formed. It also, like Waidner, draws on pop cultural references and use of science fiction tropes (if probably slightly less of the former and more of the latter).
The book is published by the UK small press Cipher Press: “an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Our aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond. We want to publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways.“ and it seems to fit their mission almost perfectly.
The first story “green children” works doubly as an introduction to the author’s preoccupations, writing style and approach and as a vehicle to set out their ambitions for the collection.
The text swoops almost breathlessly and seamlessly, with copious wordplay between Ursula le Guin (the author has previously edited a collection of essays on le Guin’s writing), the indie actress Tilda Swinton, Tala the faux-controversial mascot of Hertfordshire libraries, the legendary (but historical) Green Children of Woodpit, and links them into discussions of: othering (of immigrants, of the gender-fluid), the importance of literature, of bodies and books as containers (all recurring themes) before concluding with something of a manifesto:
As with almost all short story collections, not all of the stories worked for me – and I think this was particularly exacerbated here by the author’s polymath like abilities to draw on multiple academic and cultural references.
So whereas the second story “Silicon” (which draws in Cambridge’s University Library – which together with the ground on which it is built narrates the story- Silicon Fen, Alan Turing, the Central Limit Theorem) resonated completely (I did a post graduate statistics course at Cambridge); the third “diable” which I think draws on famous queer drinking and meeting spots) or say “fairy” which draws on “Dead Poets Society”, meant very little.
But even in my least favourite story “Pornographene” I could appreciate the wordplay and linkages: Boredom being the daddy of hilarity, we were somehow off on a complicated pun chain, a veritable amino acid that helixed 'the gay gene' and 'graphene and 'Manchester' as if the city had a genetic heritage and we were proteins on its gene switches.
And consistently through the collection there is no doubt at any time over the author’s impressive intellect and the way they mirror it with the sheer craft of their short story writing: the opening and closing sentences/paragraphs of each story are particularly striking in how carefully they are selected.
Some highlights:
“Changing =>” (again note the careful use of punctuation) which plays with the idea of the differences between a body underwater as a way to explore gender fluidity (and note there my own pun), brings in a range of scientific observations, and ends simply “Slipstream” (on the face of it a swimming technique but also a “left to the reader” nod to a whole literary sub-genre which inspires much of the rest of the stories – a non-boundary respecting blend of literary, science and speculative fiction)
“oestro junkie” – which explores the patriarchal bias of science by contrasting studies of oestrogen with those of testosterone stating
“lyonesses” – about a group of mermaids who form a football team in a discussion of which also riffs on climate change driven rising sea levels
“vampire” – which starts “I was a dark and stormy night”, riffs on a maternal great-grandmother who was a potential vampire (which I particularly enjoyed as my own maternal great-grandmother lived and gave birth to my grandfather in the village where the originator of “It was a dark and stormy night” lived), at one point has the sentence “Pathetic, fallacy” (and again note the punctuation completely changing the import of the sentence) and then contains some difficult passages around contemplating suicide, an excellent literary comparison of Orlando and Dracula, some mature reflections on their grandmother’s likely experiences as a young migrant as well as her apparent political-incorrectness when the narrator is young and concludes:
“verse te quiero verde” – (after Lorca I think) which opens “First, our hair turned tendril”, and contains this perfect example of the author’s mix of wordplay, politics and erudition (going in a few sentences from Geneaology to Genetic EnGineering to Genesis – to allow some wordplay of my own)
It also gives a new take on green politics and greenwashing
“corpus” - featuring a Deadname Detective Agency and a penultimate paragraph “Case, closed” about which the author has said (showing again the attention to detail and way even punctuation is used to bring resonance) “the comma made me feel the polyvalence of case: why is an investigation or project called a “case”? How does it relate to a physical container? What is being contained or carried in that ambiguity, and closed down … the punctuation disrupts the sense: the case clearly isn’t closed because the comma opens it up; “.
“zeus” – one of a number of stories heavily influenced by the author’s Jewish upbringing
“Dune Elegies” – I suspect here I missed some fantasy novel/movie references but I enjoyed the post-apocalpytical setting in Dungeness (and the nuclear power/Derek Jarman/Marconi references) and the opening references to Happisburgh where my aforementioned maternal grandfather later lived.
If the book has a negative target it is what it calls “Eurowestern cisheteropatriarchal colonial capitalism” – which I think describes me pretty perfectly – but nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Very highly recommended.
Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize
I dream of an impossible story. A story that is an object but not at all objective. A story that you need to crack, but - if you're paying attention - you already have its key, which is just being. Open.
In 2017 I was part of a group of readers invited to join the judging panel for the second year of the Republic of Consciousness Prize (a prize aimed at innovative literature produced by UK and Ireland small presses). Our shortlist included two authors; Eley Williams and Isabel Waidner who both went on to greater success: Williams (our winner for Attrib.) then winning with the same book Britain’s oldest literary prize – the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Waidner (whose debut “Gaudy Bauble” we were I think the first to recognise) being shortlisted for the Goldsmith Prize with her second novel and winning it with her third.
This impressive debut collection of short stories (19 stories of 10-22 page length) reminded me strongly of both writers – while having much that is distinctive about it.
With Williams it shares the same sense of careful and intelligent wordplay, a love of etymology, the interrogation of language, the ability to craft a short story and even a careful and deliberate use of unusual punctuation (like the “.” in Attrib.).
With Waidner it shares the same aim to upend conventional narrative hierarchies and conventions, and the same motive for that upending: that those conventions support and are supported by the traditional, patriarchal, capitalist, gender-rigid society in which they were formed. It also, like Waidner, draws on pop cultural references and use of science fiction tropes (if probably slightly less of the former and more of the latter).
The book is published by the UK small press Cipher Press: “an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Our aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond. We want to publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways.“ and it seems to fit their mission almost perfectly.
The first story “green children” works doubly as an introduction to the author’s preoccupations, writing style and approach and as a vehicle to set out their ambitions for the collection.
The text swoops almost breathlessly and seamlessly, with copious wordplay between Ursula le Guin (the author has previously edited a collection of essays on le Guin’s writing), the indie actress Tilda Swinton, Tala the faux-controversial mascot of Hertfordshire libraries, the legendary (but historical) Green Children of Woodpit, and links them into discussions of: othering (of immigrants, of the gender-fluid), the importance of literature, of bodies and books as containers (all recurring themes) before concluding with something of a manifesto:
Books and stories can save us only if we unchain them. If we read with a rebel robot alien eye for what we're not being told, for the secret hidden deep in the gutter where the text isn't supposed to be. Writing Truth & Dare, l've tried to transpose text and subtext, to give the game away, to throw respectability to the winds. To let go of authority, of the state's abrogated authority to shape the story. To refuse to take the fabulous out of the fable. To face out on these shelves what others want hidden.
As with almost all short story collections, not all of the stories worked for me – and I think this was particularly exacerbated here by the author’s polymath like abilities to draw on multiple academic and cultural references.
So whereas the second story “Silicon” (which draws in Cambridge’s University Library – which together with the ground on which it is built narrates the story- Silicon Fen, Alan Turing, the Central Limit Theorem) resonated completely (I did a post graduate statistics course at Cambridge); the third “diable” which I think draws on famous queer drinking and meeting spots) or say “fairy” which draws on “Dead Poets Society”, meant very little.
But even in my least favourite story “Pornographene” I could appreciate the wordplay and linkages: Boredom being the daddy of hilarity, we were somehow off on a complicated pun chain, a veritable amino acid that helixed 'the gay gene' and 'graphene and 'Manchester' as if the city had a genetic heritage and we were proteins on its gene switches.
And consistently through the collection there is no doubt at any time over the author’s impressive intellect and the way they mirror it with the sheer craft of their short story writing: the opening and closing sentences/paragraphs of each story are particularly striking in how carefully they are selected.
Some highlights:
“Changing =>” (again note the careful use of punctuation) which plays with the idea of the differences between a body underwater as a way to explore gender fluidity (and note there my own pun), brings in a range of scientific observations, and ends simply “Slipstream” (on the face of it a swimming technique but also a “left to the reader” nod to a whole literary sub-genre which inspires much of the rest of the stories – a non-boundary respecting blend of literary, science and speculative fiction)
“oestro junkie” – which explores the patriarchal bias of science by contrasting studies of oestrogen with those of testosterone stating
“Reconnecting to history and theory of science from feminist, queer, trans, critical race, and disability perspectives makes me realise we are all scientists, but neither in a purist sense of lab coats, goggles, and arguments for depoliticised objectivity nor in a sense that evacuates the many, multiple, transhistorical practices of science … Let's say that the rigorous observation of phenomena at all scales should be available to all, as should the attempt not only to understand them but to narrate them comprehensibly in relation to the observer, often with experiments to affect said phenomena through equally rigorously observed and fully narrated interventions. It would mean thinking differently about what we call 'child's play' and what we call magic or primitive belief systems - but also about what we call science, a lot of which is neither rigorous nor comprehen-sible, and whose interventions are often motivated by politics, economics, and prejudice.”
“lyonesses” – about a group of mermaids who form a football team in a discussion of which also riffs on climate change driven rising sea levels
“vampire” – which starts “I was a dark and stormy night”, riffs on a maternal great-grandmother who was a potential vampire (which I particularly enjoyed as my own maternal great-grandmother lived and gave birth to my grandfather in the village where the originator of “It was a dark and stormy night” lived), at one point has the sentence “Pathetic, fallacy” (and again note the punctuation completely changing the import of the sentence) and then contains some difficult passages around contemplating suicide, an excellent literary comparison of Orlando and Dracula, some mature reflections on their grandmother’s likely experiences as a young migrant as well as her apparent political-incorrectness when the narrator is young and concludes:
“My great-grandmother was not a vampire when I knew her, just as, when she knew me, she knew me as a girl. Vice versa is, and was, also always true – she was a vampire and I was not a girl – because. Look, I’m telling this story.”
“verse te quiero verde” – (after Lorca I think) which opens “First, our hair turned tendril”, and contains this perfect example of the author’s mix of wordplay, politics and erudition (going in a few sentences from Geneaology to Genetic EnGineering to Genesis – to allow some wordplay of my own)
We should get recording. For you. For your, er, family tree, to pass it down. No, no, we don't need cuttings, we wouldn't, although of course it is extraordinary, it would benefit science. The planet. We could collaborate, we have the agreement right here, a DNA analysis? CRISPR are keen, yes, sounds like biting an apple doesn't it, ha, tree of knowledge, too close to home, right, yes, don't want to repeat that mistake.
It also gives a new take on green politics and greenwashing
“We are not here to endorse your green and pleasant brand. We are green, and present, but that does not – we are not turning chlorophyll into light in order to – cushion the stone of history. We know you pride yourself on your sadboy accelerationism, your proviliged despair at how you made history and got left behind in it. Why be Moses when you could be mosses? The only future is a shared one. Let us break you down, turn your grey frowns upside down. Wash green back into being”
“corpus” - featuring a Deadname Detective Agency and a penultimate paragraph “Case, closed” about which the author has said (showing again the attention to detail and way even punctuation is used to bring resonance) “the comma made me feel the polyvalence of case: why is an investigation or project called a “case”? How does it relate to a physical container? What is being contained or carried in that ambiguity, and closed down … the punctuation disrupts the sense: the case clearly isn’t closed because the comma opens it up; “.
“zeus” – one of a number of stories heavily influenced by the author’s Jewish upbringing
“Dune Elegies” – I suspect here I missed some fantasy novel/movie references but I enjoyed the post-apocalpytical setting in Dungeness (and the nuclear power/Derek Jarman/Marconi references) and the opening references to Happisburgh where my aforementioned maternal grandfather later lived.
If the book has a negative target it is what it calls “Eurowestern cisheteropatriarchal colonial capitalism” – which I think describes me pretty perfectly – but nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Very highly recommended.
November 1, 2024
I read this for a book club and I wish I hadn't.
An coherent mess of indescribable vignettes that are quite rightly described blandly as fiction, due to a lack of anything else that could possibly describe it. Not short story, not essay, 19 loosely written sprawls of thought that intend trivia as cleverness. At points I almost considered the writing coherent, before another swerve into references to things that were listed meaninglessly of context.
My favourite part was the irony in a quotation from a Greek poet about history being ripped out of context (unfortunately I have been unable to find the quote again given the fact that the content of each chapter is largely random). The writer misuses history out of context repeatedly simply for the joy of wordplay, which unfortunately is all there is, given the absence of coherence.
This is the kind of book where someone thought it would be clever to make references to things as a replacement for things like structure, argument, or dare I say it, plot. It is fine and dandy listing people you think were important in a setting you have not bothered to name, nor contexts that you have not bothered to highlight. It is an endless stream of trivia that one assumes that, for some, is entertainment. If you want to say aha, because you got a reference to something esoteric, congratulations, this book is for you. Otherwise it might form a reference list of things that you might want to read up on later, if you can find a better source.
An coherent mess of indescribable vignettes that are quite rightly described blandly as fiction, due to a lack of anything else that could possibly describe it. Not short story, not essay, 19 loosely written sprawls of thought that intend trivia as cleverness. At points I almost considered the writing coherent, before another swerve into references to things that were listed meaninglessly of context.
My favourite part was the irony in a quotation from a Greek poet about history being ripped out of context (unfortunately I have been unable to find the quote again given the fact that the content of each chapter is largely random). The writer misuses history out of context repeatedly simply for the joy of wordplay, which unfortunately is all there is, given the absence of coherence.
This is the kind of book where someone thought it would be clever to make references to things as a replacement for things like structure, argument, or dare I say it, plot. It is fine and dandy listing people you think were important in a setting you have not bothered to name, nor contexts that you have not bothered to highlight. It is an endless stream of trivia that one assumes that, for some, is entertainment. If you want to say aha, because you got a reference to something esoteric, congratulations, this book is for you. Otherwise it might form a reference list of things that you might want to read up on later, if you can find a better source.
September 1, 2024
I was sadly disappointed with this book. Totally enchanted by the description I was ready to immerse myself, but I found it so difficult to read. Mayer is clearly extremely well read, but this left a lot of the stories almost inaccessible. I consider myself to have a good scientific, cultural and historical knowledge but these stories were so heavily draped with outside context that a lot of what was being written felt completely inaccessible. I dragged my way through this, and did enjoy it some of it, but my overall feeling was that it was gatekept for only true intellectuals. Unless readers are willing to have Google open on their laptops while reading, I fear others may have the same experience from a collection that promises so much.
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September 14, 2024Beautiful piece of cross-genre literature, undeniably connected to the context of nation, of myth, of theory, of science, and yet not tethered to these ideas nor to the ideas of narrative and/or short fiction.
Slightly disappointed in how it follows and is shaped by the modes of experimentation outlined in postmodernists like Burroughs and Acker but feels more than distinct enough in its contemporary cultural identity to reach beyond these few clichés.
Immersive and rhythmic on a sentence level - full of music and confession. Adored it.
Slightly disappointed in how it follows and is shaped by the modes of experimentation outlined in postmodernists like Burroughs and Acker but feels more than distinct enough in its contemporary cultural identity to reach beyond these few clichés.
Immersive and rhythmic on a sentence level - full of music and confession. Adored it.
June 12, 2024
i have so many things to say about this book… firstly i have better poetry written in MY NOTES APP than whatever this is. there were literally only 2 stories that i liked the rest were just stupid flows of words and emotion that were incomprehensible most of the time. maybe cos im not gay or whatevaaaaa but seriously these were actually all the same story about genders and whatever it was so lazy. sorry guys but i am more homophobic now 😜<3
September 16, 2025
This is an absolute treat that needs to be savored over a longer period of time and then re-read in bits and pieces forever. The language is incredibly poetic and dense; some sentences take days to ponder, and still, their layered meanings remain obscure. I was expecting cool stories that speak to trans/queer/genderfuckery experiences, but it's so much more. This text is not easily consumable and doesn't make itself readily available to those that don't intend to treat it with deliberate care.
February 20, 2024
This book was brilliant but at times could be a little bit on the clinical side for me. I think it encouraged me to dwell on or consider the context I’m in but also I think the authors sense of distance or a diagnostic style of narrative voice from the subject matter confused me a little bit. Not bad just didn’t read very easily for me.
December 29, 2024
Read this for a book club and it was so hard to get through I read the whole book the premise was really good, and snippets of the book were amazing and seemed so good but some of the short stories was okay but honestly not memorable and was honestly a drag to get through it took over a month to read and this was forcing myself to read it. My advice is don't
November 1, 2023
overall i enjoyed it, the writing style took a while for me to adjust to as it feels like poetry in prose form, which at points made things quite confusing because of the punctuation. i think i would have enjoyed it more if i had read each story separately instead of reading it as a book.
January 12, 2024
Best story collection of 2023
December 23, 2024
A self-indulgent excuse of a book.
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