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Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction
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262 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 28, 2008
A bit bleak and depressing. Swords of the Rainbow is a better anthology of LGBT sci-fi and fantasy than this is.
December 12, 2012
The more I think of this anthology, the less I like it. I like if not happy endings, a reasonable ending - something that begins and ends and has a little thought to it. There were a lot of thoughts here, but nothing really stood out to say why it was put together the way it was.
It had...a slapped together feel, as if no real thought or care was put into putting this book out in print. If there were any stories I truly liked, I can not recall them now. I sent this book off in swap to somewhere in England where someone wanted it.
Oh, well.
It had...a slapped together feel, as if no real thought or care was put into putting this book out in print. If there were any stories I truly liked, I can not recall them now. I sent this book off in swap to somewhere in England where someone wanted it.
Oh, well.
June 26, 2022
Last year I read what I think is the second in this series of two. I picked that one up first because the cover was less ridiculous, but this one is a little better, content-wise. Both books have solid stories but this one is more on-topic with gay themes, whereas the other was all over the place.
Published in 1984, its comprised of stories from the 60s and 70s. It surprises me that Sturgeon's The World Well Lost doesn't make an appearance in either of these. Maybe they just assumed if you were interested in queer fiction you've probably already read that seiminal work.
There's a strong contrast between the male-centered vs female-centered. The ones about lesbians tend to involve a mortal woman falling in love with or combating some magical being. They're sad but beautiful stories. The ones about gay men are bleak, pretty much across the board. All the fantasy is about women and all the SF is men, with only two exceptions.
It's an okay collection. Silverberg's Passengers and Novitski's Nuclear Fission are highlights. Malzberg's Going Down is a great example of how crappy things were for queer people in this time period, that a story which lumps homosexuality in with pedophilia and beastiality was included in a gay-focused collection. This is the second story I've read from Malzberg that turns homosexuality into a dystopian element and I'm pretty displeased.
I also didn't get the interspecies relationship so prominently displayed on this cover and I'm kinda pissed.
Published in 1984, its comprised of stories from the 60s and 70s. It surprises me that Sturgeon's The World Well Lost doesn't make an appearance in either of these. Maybe they just assumed if you were interested in queer fiction you've probably already read that seiminal work.
There's a strong contrast between the male-centered vs female-centered. The ones about lesbians tend to involve a mortal woman falling in love with or combating some magical being. They're sad but beautiful stories. The ones about gay men are bleak, pretty much across the board. All the fantasy is about women and all the SF is men, with only two exceptions.
It's an okay collection. Silverberg's Passengers and Novitski's Nuclear Fission are highlights. Malzberg's Going Down is a great example of how crappy things were for queer people in this time period, that a story which lumps homosexuality in with pedophilia and beastiality was included in a gay-focused collection. This is the second story I've read from Malzberg that turns homosexuality into a dystopian element and I'm pretty displeased.
I also didn't get the interspecies relationship so prominently displayed on this cover and I'm kinda pissed.
March 14, 2021
This is a very interesting collection of older gay science fiction and fantasy short stories from the 1970s. Overall, fascinating as a cultural relic, though some of the stories were good and others were pretty bad - and by "bad" I mean they struck me as being blatantly homophobic, and I was left scratching my head as to why Jeffrey Elliot included them in his collection. I can only think that it was because at the time this was compiled, there just wasn't that much gay sci-fi out there, but really, a few of these stories were completely wrong for the collection.
Vamp by Mike Conner is an interesting look at a future world. Society is divided rigidly into classes, and the upper class have some pretty disgusting past times - like exploding animals. The main character, Dieter, is an artist who gets a job working for a company that actually spies on the lower classes to get inspiration for their pieces. But Dieter is not content to exploit his subjects, instead he wants his peers to feel pathos towards them. Especially when he falls in love with his assigned subject, Coe.
When It Changed by Joanna Russ takes a popular theme of pulpy, B movie science fiction plots - a world of women, where all the men have died out, and then a small team of "heroic" men find them - and spins it on its head, showing us the anger and fear of a woman who has been living happily in this world with her wife and family, and has no desire for the return of men.
The Night Wind by Edgar Pangborn is an old favourite of mine, that I read years ago in Terry Carr's science fiction anthology, Universe 5. Set in a post-apocalyptic medieval-type world, homosexuality is viewed as a mutation and sin. The narrator is a fifteen year old boy named Benvenuto, who was caught making out with another boy in a cornfield, and forced to run away. He comes across the cottage of a woman, whom he was told is a witch, but is really a sweet person.
The Woman Who Loved the Moon by Elizabeth A. Lynn is a sword & sorcery story set in a fantasy world with a hint of feudal Japan. The county of Issho is home to the Talvela family, and their three beautiful warrior-women daughters: Alin, Tei and Kai. The bards sing of them being more beautiful then the moon, and this angers the moon-goddess, who takes the form of a beautiful woman warrior named Sedi.
Going Down by Barry N. Malzberg is one of the worst stories in the collection. There is an Institute that allows a subject to experience all the sort of sexual practices he can not in real life through some sort of illusion or hypnotism. Malzberg equates homosexuality with pedophilia, incest, bestiality, rape, and murder.
Black Rose and White Rose by Rachel Pollack is an adult fairy tale. Rose White is a beautiful girl who's parents are sure she will get a rich husband and turn furious when she refuses her suitors, sending her to work as a scullery maid for a cruel merchant. When a traveling carnival comes to the village, the magician unveils a dancer named Black Rose and the two girls fall in love.
Flowering Narcissus by Thomas N. Scortia is a sort of funny sci-fi story. It really isn't gay though. A biker named Honcho agrees to an experiment where he'll sleep for a week - but when he wakes up a century has past and the human race has been wiped out by plague, leaving only sexless androids, who cloned Honcho and brought him back. They also created a woman out of Honcho's DNA for him to mate with - so, sort of weird, but not really gay.
Nuclear Fission by Paul Novitski presents an alternate future with airships, polygamous marriages and open relationships. I'm not really sure why this one made it into the collection, either, since most of the emphasis was on the main character's little boy and how hard it was for him having a mother who went away to travel, work, and love women. So, whatever.
Passengers by Robert Silverberg is, again, NOT gay. Passengers has a very interesting premise - that invisible alien entities have settled on Earth and periodically take over human beings, forcing them to do whatever they want. After a few days they vanish, and the humans resume their normal lives with little to no memory of what happened when they were "ridden" by the aliens. The protagonist is straight and spends the entire story pining for a pretty girl he was with the last time they were both "ridden" by the aliens. However, at the end of the story he is possessed by an alien that makes him gay. Which just equates queerness with horrible alien mind rape, or something. From the protagonists inner monologues throughout the story you know he's going to "wake up" from the experience absolutely repulsed and horrified.
The Prodigal Daughter by Jessica Amanda Salmonson is a good sword & sorcery story about a lesbian warrior woman, Unise, who returns as a knight to her home, Castle Green, and her father, the feared and respected Lord Arlburrow. At first Arlburrow is strictly disproving of his daughter's life, but this changes to great love and respect by the end of the tale.
Broken Tool by Theodore L. Thomas is so short it's difficult to actually get a handle on it. Basically there are two older scientists who are discussing if one student, now a young man, whom they have trained for years, is suitable to go into space. One of the old scientists is in love (secret and one-sided) with the (straight) youth.
How We Saved the Human Race by David Gerrold is a strangely told story, related in things like fake transcripts, psychological reports and newspaper clippings, about a gay scientist who creates a virus that sterilizes people. I wasn't clear if he did this with an intention to solving the problem of world overpopulation, or if he just did it to get back at the straight people who harassed him his whole life. Anyways the effect is that it ends up actually saving the human race, but the scientist himself is brutally killed by an angry mob and becomes a posthumous hero, while at the same time starting a virulent worldwide anti-gay backlash.
So . . . you can see what a mixed bag this collection is, and I wouldn't recommend it to modern readers as fun reading material. It's interesting to view it as a piece of queer media from a different time, though.
Vamp by Mike Conner is an interesting look at a future world. Society is divided rigidly into classes, and the upper class have some pretty disgusting past times - like exploding animals. The main character, Dieter, is an artist who gets a job working for a company that actually spies on the lower classes to get inspiration for their pieces. But Dieter is not content to exploit his subjects, instead he wants his peers to feel pathos towards them. Especially when he falls in love with his assigned subject, Coe.
When It Changed by Joanna Russ takes a popular theme of pulpy, B movie science fiction plots - a world of women, where all the men have died out, and then a small team of "heroic" men find them - and spins it on its head, showing us the anger and fear of a woman who has been living happily in this world with her wife and family, and has no desire for the return of men.
The Night Wind by Edgar Pangborn is an old favourite of mine, that I read years ago in Terry Carr's science fiction anthology, Universe 5. Set in a post-apocalyptic medieval-type world, homosexuality is viewed as a mutation and sin. The narrator is a fifteen year old boy named Benvenuto, who was caught making out with another boy in a cornfield, and forced to run away. He comes across the cottage of a woman, whom he was told is a witch, but is really a sweet person.
The Woman Who Loved the Moon by Elizabeth A. Lynn is a sword & sorcery story set in a fantasy world with a hint of feudal Japan. The county of Issho is home to the Talvela family, and their three beautiful warrior-women daughters: Alin, Tei and Kai. The bards sing of them being more beautiful then the moon, and this angers the moon-goddess, who takes the form of a beautiful woman warrior named Sedi.
Going Down by Barry N. Malzberg is one of the worst stories in the collection. There is an Institute that allows a subject to experience all the sort of sexual practices he can not in real life through some sort of illusion or hypnotism. Malzberg equates homosexuality with pedophilia, incest, bestiality, rape, and murder.
Black Rose and White Rose by Rachel Pollack is an adult fairy tale. Rose White is a beautiful girl who's parents are sure she will get a rich husband and turn furious when she refuses her suitors, sending her to work as a scullery maid for a cruel merchant. When a traveling carnival comes to the village, the magician unveils a dancer named Black Rose and the two girls fall in love.
Flowering Narcissus by Thomas N. Scortia is a sort of funny sci-fi story. It really isn't gay though. A biker named Honcho agrees to an experiment where he'll sleep for a week - but when he wakes up a century has past and the human race has been wiped out by plague, leaving only sexless androids, who cloned Honcho and brought him back. They also created a woman out of Honcho's DNA for him to mate with - so, sort of weird, but not really gay.
Nuclear Fission by Paul Novitski presents an alternate future with airships, polygamous marriages and open relationships. I'm not really sure why this one made it into the collection, either, since most of the emphasis was on the main character's little boy and how hard it was for him having a mother who went away to travel, work, and love women. So, whatever.
Passengers by Robert Silverberg is, again, NOT gay. Passengers has a very interesting premise - that invisible alien entities have settled on Earth and periodically take over human beings, forcing them to do whatever they want. After a few days they vanish, and the humans resume their normal lives with little to no memory of what happened when they were "ridden" by the aliens. The protagonist is straight and spends the entire story pining for a pretty girl he was with the last time they were both "ridden" by the aliens. However, at the end of the story he is possessed by an alien that makes him gay. Which just equates queerness with horrible alien mind rape, or something. From the protagonists inner monologues throughout the story you know he's going to "wake up" from the experience absolutely repulsed and horrified.
The Prodigal Daughter by Jessica Amanda Salmonson is a good sword & sorcery story about a lesbian warrior woman, Unise, who returns as a knight to her home, Castle Green, and her father, the feared and respected Lord Arlburrow. At first Arlburrow is strictly disproving of his daughter's life, but this changes to great love and respect by the end of the tale.
Broken Tool by Theodore L. Thomas is so short it's difficult to actually get a handle on it. Basically there are two older scientists who are discussing if one student, now a young man, whom they have trained for years, is suitable to go into space. One of the old scientists is in love (secret and one-sided) with the (straight) youth.
How We Saved the Human Race by David Gerrold is a strangely told story, related in things like fake transcripts, psychological reports and newspaper clippings, about a gay scientist who creates a virus that sterilizes people. I wasn't clear if he did this with an intention to solving the problem of world overpopulation, or if he just did it to get back at the straight people who harassed him his whole life. Anyways the effect is that it ends up actually saving the human race, but the scientist himself is brutally killed by an angry mob and becomes a posthumous hero, while at the same time starting a virulent worldwide anti-gay backlash.
So . . . you can see what a mixed bag this collection is, and I wouldn't recommend it to modern readers as fun reading material. It's interesting to view it as a piece of queer media from a different time, though.
May 22, 2023
This is a super weird read in 2023. Published in 1984 and collecting stories that were mostly written in the 70s, you end up with a big mix of stories that could have been written in the 00s, stories that are clearly dated but enjoyable anyway, and stories that...would definitely get someone canceled today including some that are just outright homophobic.
My favorite was probably The Night Wind by Edgar Pangborn, which is a straightforward story told with a lot of depth of feeling. Other highlights: Mike Conner's Vamp, really unsettling and creepy; Elizabeth Lynn's The Woman Who Loved the Moon; Joanna Russ's When It Changed, which was pretty simple but with engaging writing; and David Gerrold's How We Saved The Human Race, which...I can't decide if I actually liked it but it was at least interesting. Everything else I thought was either bad or just not for me.
My favorite was probably The Night Wind by Edgar Pangborn, which is a straightforward story told with a lot of depth of feeling. Other highlights: Mike Conner's Vamp, really unsettling and creepy; Elizabeth Lynn's The Woman Who Loved the Moon; Joanna Russ's When It Changed, which was pretty simple but with engaging writing; and David Gerrold's How We Saved The Human Race, which...I can't decide if I actually liked it but it was at least interesting. Everything else I thought was either bad or just not for me.
December 28, 2018
This book is definitely a product of its time. Published in the mid-1980s, which makes reading the stories set in the then-future particularly interesting. A number of the stories are more fantasy than sci-fi; that was a little surprising. A couple of the stories were really engaging, but the tone of the book overall is rather pessimistic.
This book fulfills the Read Harder 2018 task #20: "Read a book with a cover you hate". That cover is something, all right.
This book fulfills the Read Harder 2018 task #20: "Read a book with a cover you hate". That cover is something, all right.
March 1, 2020
This collection was very hit or miss, with more misses than hits. Nearly all the stories were utter misery, which probably shouldn't be a surprise considering when it was put together. Bizarrely however there were a couple of stories with no gay or lesbian characters, so I have no idea why they were included.
Vamp by Mike Conner
A relatively strong opening, very weird and creepy.
When It Changed by Joanna Russ
An interesting premise, but the author gives the character views they shouldn't have based on their experiences. She let too much of her reality seep in.
The Night Wind by Edgar Pangborn
One of the stronger stories here, sad but hopeful, not really very sci-fi though, more like non-specific historical fiction.
The Woman Who Loved The Moon by Elizabeth A. Lynn
A nice fairy tale type story, I wasn't really a fan of the writing style.
Going Down by Barry N. Malzberg
I wasn't really sure what this one was trying to say, that men's kinks are so horrific that it leads them to utter apathy?
Black Rose and White Rose by Rachel Pollack
Wasn't a fan of the writing style in this one. Very fairy tale like again.
Flowering Narcissus by Thomas N. Scortia
There was nothing gay or lesbian here, it was all heterosexual self-incest.
Nuclear Fission by Paul Novitski
This was Misandry: The Story, which was probably the point based on the little intro we got at the start. An interesting premise for a story, and the only trans character in the collection.
Passengers by Robert Silverburg
Really liked the premise of this one. However the only thing "gay" about it is right at the end and um... it's not good.
The Prodigal Daughter by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
I liked the premise of this more than the execution. More fantasy than sci-fi and the writing was not to my tastes.
Broken Tool by Theodore L. Thomas
Again, nothing gay or lesbian here. The part that I think was suppose to be gay was an older instructor getting overly attached to his younger student because the student reminded him of his dead son...
How We Saved The Human Race by David Gerrold
And we end on a high note! Probably the best story in this collection. Would you expect less from the man who gave us Tribbles?
Vamp by Mike Conner
A relatively strong opening, very weird and creepy.
When It Changed by Joanna Russ
An interesting premise, but the author gives the character views they shouldn't have based on their experiences. She let too much of her reality seep in.
The Night Wind by Edgar Pangborn
One of the stronger stories here, sad but hopeful, not really very sci-fi though, more like non-specific historical fiction.
The Woman Who Loved The Moon by Elizabeth A. Lynn
A nice fairy tale type story, I wasn't really a fan of the writing style.
Going Down by Barry N. Malzberg
I wasn't really sure what this one was trying to say, that men's kinks are so horrific that it leads them to utter apathy?
Black Rose and White Rose by Rachel Pollack
Wasn't a fan of the writing style in this one. Very fairy tale like again.
Flowering Narcissus by Thomas N. Scortia
There was nothing gay or lesbian here, it was all heterosexual self-incest.
Nuclear Fission by Paul Novitski
This was Misandry: The Story, which was probably the point based on the little intro we got at the start. An interesting premise for a story, and the only trans character in the collection.
Passengers by Robert Silverburg
Really liked the premise of this one. However the only thing "gay" about it is right at the end and um... it's not good.
The Prodigal Daughter by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
I liked the premise of this more than the execution. More fantasy than sci-fi and the writing was not to my tastes.
Broken Tool by Theodore L. Thomas
Again, nothing gay or lesbian here. The part that I think was suppose to be gay was an older instructor getting overly attached to his younger student because the student reminded him of his dead son...
How We Saved The Human Race by David Gerrold
And we end on a high note! Probably the best story in this collection. Would you expect less from the man who gave us Tribbles?
September 3, 2022
So many of these stories are so unacceptably dumb and also bad and also No
June 5, 2016
Very enjoyable reading! M/M stories, F/F stories. I liked them all!
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