This month we’re adding more books containing diverse pronouns to the shelves. While pronouns beyond he/she are more and more frequently used, with they/them having been added to the dictionary in recent years, it can still be difficult to find a variety of pronouns in written text. With these two new books, we hope to add to your options! They contain both they/them pronouns and neopronouns, which are (generally nongendered) pronouns beyond he/she/they/it pronouns. Neopronouns are not new—for example, in English, the pronoun thon dates back to the 1800s. Diverse pronouns offer a breath of fresh air outside standard pronouns, and these books deliver.
“Capricious Issue Nine: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue”
This collection published by the New Zealand press Capricious Publication pulls together stories from an array of authors, most of them trans, nonbinary, or agender. The stories are speculative in nature, set everywhere from this planet to another world and spanning science fiction and fantasy. Stories include settings where people use 45 different pronouns to characters who explore a more genderfluid experience. Come explore a variety of visions on gender and pronouns.
From the back of the book:
“These ten stories (all of which use gender diverse pronouns) are stories of love, fear, transformation, and the journeys we must sometimes take. Stories of those whose gender changes, whose gender is undecided, whose gender does not exist, or whose gender is pivotal to their self. Stories set in our own world, in far-away galaxies, or in worlds of fairy tale and myth, and stories which introduce us to ghosts, merfolk, dragons, and aliens, to strangers, to communities, and to ourselves.”
“The Trans Space Octopus Congregation” by Bogi Takács
This collection of speculative fiction explores intersections of transness, neuroatypicality, immigration, disability, and more. Bogi’s writing is both wildly imaginative and deeply personal, and includes work where e uses eir own neopronouns. Eir stories move from the sharp take on “uplifted” animals and human colonization in “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus” to the visceral and devastating look at war and weaponizing of the neuroatypical mind in “Toward the Luminous Towers,” while freedom, movement, and kink are explored in “The Need for Overwhelming Sensation.” These stories shine with an inclusive and compassionate spark while not shying away from difficult and often unsettling subjects, creating an atmosphere of need amidst oppression, and ultimately finding power in community, expression, and strangeness.
From the back of the book:
“This new collection from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of Transcendent 2 offers plenty of thrills—and bonus tentacles—for readers of LGBTQ-focused speculative literature. The stories range from magical space opera to cheerful body horror and historical fantasy, always with a sense of hope amid adversity. The mystical and magical merge with the scientific and technological: sacred texts gain new interpretations in the light of nuclear physics, and people save a forest with computer science. Cephalopods build alliances and research their past, Jewish shapeshifters speak to extraterrestrial planetminds, and Hungarian horse archers summon ancient terrors.”
To see a list including these and other books we have that contain diverse pronouns, go here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HvgMMe67XSM6zk7KTHz_j0sLL5ae-hN99a3Jf8fxjSs/edit?usp=sharing