In soliciting the twenty-one all-original stories that compose Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, editors Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel gave contributors a straightforward directive: write a science fiction short story that incorporates the theme of the gay person as "other" or "alien". This instruction was liberally interpreted, producing several spectacular successes and a few forgettable flops.
Happily, the science fiction is pretty good too. It ranges from passably okay to outstanding, with more hits than misses.
The stories themselves range widely in their content and style, running the gamut from the purely conventional to the highly inventive, even experimental. Some of them rely a little more heavily on science fiction clichés than I prefer, but the recycling of ideas is less noticeable in light of the fact that we may be seeing them for the first time through the eyes of gay protagonists.
Several stories stand out above the others as both excellent science fiction and excellent gay-themed stories. L. Timmel Duchamp ventures into something akin to magical realism in "Dance at the Edge", whose teenage main character struggles to cope with the double alienation of her lesbianism and her strange ability to perceive the "edges" of reality. In Ellen Klages' "Time Gypsy", a science historian leaps back to 1956 on a mission to meet her personal hero, only to find out a few things about physicist Dr. Sara Baxter Clarke that definitely weren't in the history books. Richard A. Bamberg, in "Love's Last Farewell", takes the perspective of the last gay man on Earth as he explores how destructive it could be if a "cure" for homosexuality were found before homosexuality achieves widespread social and political acceptance. In "Brooks too Broad for Leaping", Charles Sheffield imagines an all-gay military whose soldiers find civilian life to be ultimately unbearable. Shariann Lewitt wonders what it means for an artificial intelligence to be a lesbian in "A Real Girl". Finally, Don Bassingthwaite's "Who Plays With Sin" plunges us deeply into a cyberpunk distopia where privacy and anonymity are next to non-existent and being gay brings an automatic penalty of several years in an anarchic prison camp.
Simply put, Bending the Landscape is too good and too rare to pass up. It's got a solid core of stories that offer both good science fiction and frank, forthright depictions of queer characters. A combination like that doesn't come along often, and this one is already out of print. Seek it out now, or you'll kick yourself later.