It seems like kismet for a PhD graduation, a book publication, and a 35th birthday to coincide. That’s what happened to Lee Mandelo, author, scholar, and editor of Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity. The speculative anthology had been in the works since 2021—he devised the proposal after the publication of his debut novel, Summer Sons. As the senior fiction editor at the Hugo Award-nominated magazine Strange Horizons from 2012-2015, he’s no stranger to working with the fiction of others but, as he told me, part of the project of Amplitudes was to go beyond a simple anthology of queer writing and push back on the way queer and trans fiction is often siloed within the publishing industry. Inspired by José Esteban Muñoz’s landmark work of queer theory, Cruising Utopia, Mandelo’s anthology—featuring stories from both established and new writers in the sci-fi/fantasy field—envisions queer life a week from now, a year from now, centuries from now. The stories, written by newcomers and established sci-fi/fantasy voices alike, feature polyamorous, radical, queer activist collectives, pocket futures that spew ephemera into the past, knights in conflict with militias, cyberpunk noir stories, spy dramas, and the last gay club in the galaxy.
Lee and I were both contributors at the science fiction, fantasy, and pop culture site Reactor Magazine (formerly known as Tor.com) a decade ago but never had the opportunity to interact face-to-face until this interview. Reading Amplitudes brought back the feeling of encountering his critical analysis back in the day—Lee has always had a unique ability to recognize and expose new ways of thinking about queerness and queer futurity. There’s a forward momentum in the collection, a sense that time is not only a factor in discrete stories that explore pasts and futures—post-apocalyptic dating apps and ghosts of digital avatars—but also forms a narrative arc for the collection as a whole as it imagines the many possible worlds we are rocketing toward.
During our Zoom conversation, we discussed the temporality of these queer futures, the stories that caught him by surprise, and committing to the vulnerability of sincerity over irony.
Natalie Zutter: What inspired the choice of “amplitudes” for the anthology’s title?
Lee Mandelo: We landed on Amplitudes when proposing this because, so often, people talk about queerness, gender, transness, etcetera, as a spectrum, which is imagined as 2D, point-A-to-point-B. I wanted to mess with that. When people think of amplitudes, it can be a measurement for a lot of different things but it is rarely that 2D. You’ve got things going all over the place. That image is something I wanted to hook into for how we’re thinking about gender, sexuality, and culture in these pieces.
NZ: What made you decide to work with Erewhon Books?
LM: We talked to multiple places across about a year in the proposal process, and Erewhon were the folks who came back with the most enthusiasm and the most willingness to pull back the curtain on the business. Part of that was paying contributors what I wanted and handling the project in a way that was labor-responsible for those contributors. We paid full market rate and everyone got royalties. I wanted fiction in translation and to pay both the translator and original author the full rate—which should be the norm but isn’t. Erewhon was willing to put their money where their mouth is on valuing short fiction in the industry.
NZ: Did you notice any recurring themes in the stories that you received or chose? What surprised you?
LM: We had a three-stage gathering process in which I solicited quite a bit of work. With solicitation, for every ten people you email, maybe five say, “I think I could possibly fit that in,” and maybe one can actually do it. As someone on both sides of the table, I completely understand that.
People talk about queerness, gender, transness, etcetera, as a spectrum, which is imagined as 2D. I wanted to mess with that.
We also did open submissions, as I didn’t want to only rely on the built network I have. I wanted to see work from new writers—most of the surprises came from them. For a couple of folks, this is their first professionally published piece. The way people took the idea of futurity and ran with it was surprising because for a lot of them it wasn’t about uncritical hope or positivity. A lot of the stories are politically grounded in the now. I liked seeing people take that and make something moving, or even funny. Nat X Ray’s “Trans World Takeover” is one of the comedies. It’s about the absurd ways people talk about trans teenagers and young adults. That was so fun; here’s someone I’m totally unfamiliar with coming in through the submissions pile. It adds an element of bizarro humor to this really dark situation and lets us laugh at it, while also being about interpersonal relationships.
NZ: I was trying to group the stories into subgenres, but they span so many different styles, like Aysha U. Farah’s cyberpunk detective story “Sugar, Shadows.” There are also a handful set in Appalachia, like Katharine Duckett’s “pocket futures in the present past” and Jamie McGhee’s “Copper Boys.”
LM: I’m not that big on straight genre categories. I read across every one you could name. Part of the goal for this was to focus on the effect of a piece—what does it do, feeling-wise. That’s also how the text is arranged; one of the hardest things was picking the order, because there is a point to the order! Building those emotional arcs of “Well, are we talking about survival? Are we talking about sex? Are we talking about friendship?”
I do have love in my heart for some of the subgenres. I’m a child of the ‘90s, there was a lot of queer cyberpunk then. But “Sugar, Shadows” is also critical of how cyberpunk often treats poverty and drugs—if you have a queer anthology that doesn’t deal with substances at all, I have questions. They are so common in our spaces. Still, Farah speaks to these issues with compassion.
NZ: Should we envision the futures these different stories imagine as contradictory multiverses, or do you see them operating on a continuum?
LM: Fun question. It opens the door for me to be a nerd about the quote that opens the book, the José Muñoz of it all. Temporality is a thing I’m thinking a lot about in this text. Particularly because we’re using the term “queer futurity”—which I’m borrowing from Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia—as a way of thinking about those possible futures. We can imagine some occurring on the same timeline, and some as different paths. There’s a sense that queerness itself—the queer and trans life and culture cycle in a world that does not want it to exist—is always looking toward the horizon of possibility, of potential. Life is hard, but there is a future, and we’re trying to build it together. What all the possible futures share is an idea that no matter what’s going on, no matter where we go or how bad it gets, there will always be us. There’s no way to actually get rid of us. That’s a transnational, global question that matters to me as a scholar but also as a writer. Queerness is a worldwide cultural space, particularly in the digital age.
There’s a sense that queerness itself is always looking toward the horizon of possibility.
Something else that’s going on in the timeline of where all these stories are is that what queer life looks like is really dependent on your political and social situation. Wen-yi Lee’s “They Will Give Us a Home” speaks to living in a country that has a housing lottery system because of spatial constraints; that’s drawn from a very real experience. I think a lot of Americans will be unfamiliar with some of those experiences and can look at them and think about other ways of being. So maybe they’re all a little connected. These stories are all speaking to that shared temporality—like, all right, we’re here now, where could we go from here?
NZ: In the past, you’ve made a point of calling “queer representation” queer presence, which also references what Ocean Vuong has said on the topic. Was that on your mind while collecting and curating these stories?
LM: Yes. [laughs] For me, the difference being that representation is a flat way of thinking. We’re having a lot more conversations about that now than we were even four or five years ago. The idea of this good or perfect representation of a “type” feeds into an obsession with classification and separation, which is really common in Western, very online, queer spaces right now. A sense of presence means that a lot of different kinds of people have to be in the room and have the space to create and be in conversation with one another. Part of that is thinking about solidarity—it’s not always going to be agreement. You’re going to have sameness—what you share in spaces with queer and trans people from different places, cultural backgrounds, and experiences—but also difference. Being able to hold on to the sameness and difference at the same time requires you to have a lot of people in the room who are coming from very different places.
The guiding editorial mission of this book was to have it look like the queer world I inhabit, which is to say, it does not represent any single “type.” As an editor, you have to curate that on purpose. That was part of wanting pieces in translation. I was asking, who are we not hearing from if these works aren’t translated into the language that we’re reading?
I think about my own queer life coming from rural Appalachia in Kentucky—leaving, coming back, etcetera. The queer communities we build, that I grew up in, are not segregated in the way they are in big urban centers, which is also reflected in online queer spaces. There’s not enough of us, so everyone’s kind of hanging out in the same places and building the same spaces together, even when that doesn’t work, or when it’s fraught, or when there are very serious problems. We all still share the space and learn from each other. That was very important to me in curating, making sure everybody I could hear from had the chance to be present and shape the book in different directions.
NZ: As you were arranging the flow of the entire anthology, did you always know that Sam J. Miller’s “The Republic of Ecstatic Consent” was going to be first, or did it take you a while to find the one that would kick things off?
LM: Yeah, I think Sam’s story being first and Meg Elison’s “Bang Bang” being the last one were set from the beginning; like, all right, here’s your theme, and here’s where we go from there. Both are very sincere stories—that’s something that came through in some of my initial reactions reading them. I was uncomfortable with the sincerity. You have to sit in the sincerity of desire, of community. Sometimes that can feel a little cringe, like when we love things, but it’s part of being alive. Especially in a fascist moment, I think sincerity is really important. Throwing back to Ocean Vuong again, he just did an interview where he talks about people’s negative responses to his new book. To really feel something—to commit to feeling it publicly, largely, and openly—is something people have a lot of difficulty with. Sometimes they lash out against it. I wanted to foreground that in the opening piece and the concluding one. There is a level of commitment to sincerity and feeling and emotion that we’ve got to have in resistance. You can’t South Park-irony your way out of things; that’s what got us here.
What all the possible futures share is that no matter what’s going on, no matter where we go or how bad it gets, there will always be us.
It’s easy to manipulate people’s emotional responses through irony or through saying “nothing really means anything.” A lot of people who have studied authoritarianism in its many guises, its many faces all over the globe, have noted that it tends to have a desire for truth to not be truth. For whatever you say, whatever anyone says, to be equally insincere and equally untrue. It detaches us from a shared social reality, from literal proof, and feelings of compassion, investment, and relationality. Sincerity and desire and pleasure are important, because they are what fascism wants to snuff out and control.
NZ: What’s next for you?
LM: There is an article that’s drawn from the first chapter of my dissertation (“Desiring Men Online: Trans Queer Masculinity and Digital Sexual Culture”) looking at what it means to be a queer man who is trans—particularly how the Internet creates a sexual culture and a space that we can be in, in a way that can be really good and separate from physical bodies. The first chapter of that is called “Toward a Transfag Phenomenology: the Orientation(s) of Desire and the Afterlives of Lou Sullivan.” It’s looking at how—not Sullivan himself, but the idea of Sullivan, the iconography of him, has circulated online in these trans queer spaces and in publications since his edited journals came out a few years ago. I spent two weeks reading his entire archive at the GLBT Historical Society—I’m starting to tear up again just thinking about it—looking at what got left out of the edited journals. He had seven bankers’ boxes full of writing; he wrote his whole life and kept everything. I was looking at those bad trans feelings that are important and that we don’t get to talk about as much because we’re faced with constant transphobia and we don’t want to give any ammunition. But then, what does that cut us off from? My article is coming out this fall from Post45.
On the future horizon, another novel will be the next project, but that’s a while from here. Finishing a dissertation really knocks it out of you. [laughs]
NZ: What advice would you offer someone looking to compile a similar queer/trans/futuristic anthology?
LM: I want there to be more. I want more people to be in conversation with us. We need more books. Now more than ever.
Think about where all of the perspectives that you’re gathering are coming from, and what is missing. Also, collaborate with other people; I worked with Diana Pho and Viengsamai Fetters at Erewhon throughout the process, and they really helped. I talked with friends about choosing between a couple of these stories. What do we have to leave out—because there’s always something left out—but what can we not afford to leave out?
Read very, very widely. Some folks here are from different genre spaces. I read a lot of literary fiction, and there’s a lot of crossover with luminaries like Ta-wei Chi who wrote “Circular Universe,” translated by Ariel Chu. Working with them was beautiful.
There is a level of commitment to sincerity that we’ve got to have in resistance. You can’t South Park-irony your way out of things; that’s what got us here.
You also have to really reach for it if you want to work with people when you’re like “aw, they would never.” Not necessarily! [Laughs] If you have a cool idea, go for it. You never know what people want to participate in, or who can connect you with someone else. Don’t self-reject. Think broadly and then check yourself. Whatever your perspective is, check it against friends with different perspectives in the field and ask, “What do you see that I haven’t included?” Sunny Moraine’s “The They Whom We Remember” came in later but fit really neatly. It thinks about bodies, nonbinary embodiment, sexuality, and transness in ways that I don’t—that’s not my experience. I read it on submission and was like, “Well, shit, this is really important, and I think a lot of people are going to feel this way.” But I had a blind spot; I hadn’t been looking for that perspective because it’s a different trans experience from mine. For me, that was a good model of, what do you not even know you’re not looking for? Look for that.
