Far Out (Night Shade, July 2021). Cover by Julie Dillon

I had the privilege of interviewing Paula Guran back in September, in honoring of the upcoming release of her 50th book. We discussed a lot of her recent projects; one of the more interesting was Far Out, a huge new anthology. Here’s what Paula said about it, in part.

I have another one that just came out that’s not getting a lot of attention that I will mention. It’s called Far Out: Recent Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy… I’m very proud of that book. It is a great book, and it really has a nice look at the last ten years, and… the publisher it came out from is just kind of not supporting it. I just want to get it out there; it’s a good book, it would be great in college courses that are looking at any kind of LGBT fiction and just as a great introduction to a lot of authors that are very familiar to us, but may be new to people out there…

It’s been one that I wanted to do for a while… it was the last book I had under contract [with Night Shade]… I isolated myself on Far Out to a ten-year period…  of course there were people that I knew I wanted to go back and look for stories from in that period, like Chris Barzak for instance, who’s a gay writer… but just on that cusp of 2020 that I was ending at, there’s this sudden boom in 2020 and 2021 of just in the last year, even more [writers] that you can pick from now. It’s really exciting to see that.

Far Out is a reprint anthology with a “table of contents [that] reads like the glitterati of queer fiction,” according to Arley Sorg at Lightspeed. Here’s the complete TOC.

Introduction: Over the Rainbow and into the Far Out by Paula Guran
“Destroyed by the Waters” by Rachel Swirsky
“The Sea Troll’s Daughter” by Caitlín R. Kiernan
“And If the Body Were Not the Soul” by A. C. Wise
“Imago” by Tristan Alice Nieto
“Paranormal Romance” by Christopher Barzak
“Three Points Masculine” by An Owomoyela
“Das Steingeschöpf” by G. V. Anderson
“The Deepwater Bride” by Tamsyn Muir
“The Shape of My Name” by Nino Cipri
“Otherwise” by Nisi Shawl
“The Night Train” by Lavie Tidhar
“Ours Is the Prettiest” by Nalo Hopkinson
“Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” by Charlie Jane Anders
“Driving Jenny Home” by Seanan McGuire
“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan
“In the Eyes of Jack Saul” by Richard Bowes
“Secondhand Bodies” by Neon Yang
“Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar
“Né łe!” by Darcie Little Badger
“The Duke of Riverside” by Ellen Kushner
“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer
“The Lily and the Horn” by Catherynne M. Valente
“Calved” by Sam J. Miller
“The River’s Children” by Shweta Narayan

Far Out was published by Night Shade on July 27, 2021. It is 447 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $12.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Julie Dillion.

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