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Pearson, Wendy Gay, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon, eds. Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction. 2008. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. 285 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-84631-135-2 / 978-1-84631-501-5. $35.95.
First published in 2008 and newly available in paperback, Wendy Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon's anthology is comprised often scholarly essays on sexuality in sf (two, by Wendy Pearson and Rob Latham, previously published), a dialogue between Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge, and an interview with NaIo Hopkinson. The collection, part of Liverpool University Press's Science Fiction Texts and Studies series, continues to be the only critical book explicitly devoted to the convergences and intersections of sf and queer theory. The subtitle, Sexualities in Science Fiction, could easily describe a set of essays that would lay out the range of sexual possibilities that have so far appeared in sf stories, along the lines of an update on Eric Garber and Lynn Paleo's 1980 bibliographic catalogue Uranian Worlds. Pearson, Hollinger, and Gordon's introduction, however, makes it clear that the collection's goal is far more ambitious. From the epigraphic suggestion by J. B. S. Haldane that "the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose" onward, Queer Universes insists that both queer theory and sf share certain attitudes and commitments (1). Both open their readers' minds to the idea that worlds, people, bodies, and desires can be - and are - different than the norms mundane, straight realisms discipline us to expect. The essays in the collection show how sf scholarship can take up the challenge that this implies, and incite broader and deeper engagements with what it might mean to look at the universe from both queer and science -fictional perspectives.
The "queer" of queer theory offers a far more expansive set of possibilities than just the inclusion of LGBT subjects into formerly straight narratives, although the importance of such inclusion is never ignored (and is particularly addressed in the contribution by Griffith and Eskridge). Pearson, Hollinger, and Gordon explain queer critique as the undermining of exclusionary sexual norms, a radical political project that joins "feminist, postcolonial, postmodern, and critical race theories" to "make visible the naturalized epistemologies of sexuality, gender and race" that underline constructions of what it means...