Some days, the weather is just perfect and all you need is something plain fun to read. Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology is very fun to read. There are no bad stories and, depending on what you like, there are a lot of good stories and a few that just gut punch you in the right buttons and are otherwise great.

The anthology starts off strong, with a wonderfully whimsical story by Alison Tam, “Margo Lai’s Guide to Dueling Unprepared,” and continues on with a wide array of fantasy and science fiction (which, at this point, are largely identical, only, one involves spaceships, generally speaking,) and queer characters of all kinds.

For me the gut punch of greatdom came in the form of Freya Marske’s “Elinor Jones vs the Ruritanian Multiverse,” for entirely mushy story of little Erica and her little wife reasons. Back in middle school we had a tricky tray auction and I had excitedly gotten a tray of three books, one of which was The Prisoner of Zenda. The punchline was that the person who had created the tray was my now wife. “Awwww.” (The other two were A Swiftly Titling Planet, still my favorite of the trilogy, and one of the Elric books, which have now been thoroughly, permanently and hilariously ruined for me by Bimbos of the Death Sun.)

The world borrowing and building in so many of these stories are a real testament to the skills here of the authors. Cara Patterson’s “Little Birds,” and Yoon Ha Lee’s “The City Unbreachable” feel like stories we have already been told so many times and know so well. Aliette de Bodard’s “The Scholar of the Bamboo Flute” borrows a world we’re all so, so familiar with here on Okazu, and still breathes a whole new life into it.

For my money, the two best stories are “Positively Medieval” by Kaitlyn Zivanovich, which seamlessly melds fantasy and cyberpunk in a wholly unique and disarmingly adorable way and “The Parnassian Courante” by Claire Bartlett which was…perfect. Paros no Ken, step aside, this is the correct ending to that scenario.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

With a diverse cast of characters and writers, Silk & Steel was fantastic read.