The debut fiction collection from an inimitable critic, Truth & Dare is a deeply personal and fantastical ride through gender, trauma, queerness, science, history, and religion.

Cornish mermaids take to the football pitch to protest warming seas. Trans students in Manchester searching for the perfect dick accidentally warp the fabric of spacetime. England's worst pogrom comes for York's particle collider, powered by bread and gender energy. On Bournemouth beach, a storm delivers an ancestor across oceans of time to sire a drowning descendant. The devil stands a drink at London's famous gay pub, The Black Cap, while Artemis, in the guise of Joan of Arc, roams a life-or-death night in East Sussex.

Remember the Witchcraft Act of 1927, and the refugees that fled via cinema to defend the Republic of Catalunya? Of course not, it's been written out of history. This is England, (but not?) as we know it.

A queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, in a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction (or is it?) from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours. Truth or dare? Both, always.

So Mayer is a writer, indie bookseller, film curator, and pencil stan. Their most recent books are A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020), a short essay on queer art, censorship and resistance, and <jacked a kaddish> (Litmus, 2018), a poetry sequence about interwar masculinity, technology and hats, and their BFI Film Classics on Orlando is forthcoming. Their work across genres and forms has been published internationally, including in Roxane Gay's anthology Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, in several Criterion DVDs, and in Ignota Press's Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry. Plus their poetry once appeared on hoardings in Dublin. With Adam Zmith, they collaborated on Unreal Sex for Cipher, an anthology of queer SFFH, and on the BBC Sounds podcast The Film We Can't See, a tour through queer film history.

Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.  

A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.

Années 1930. L’Afrique est sous la férule des puissances impérialistes européennes et la domination blanche s’est étendue à toute la planète. C’est sans compter avec la conspiration tramée par la diabolique Dr Belsidus : son organisation, véritable machine de guerre savamment bâtie grâce aux cerveaux noirs les plus ingénieux, composée d’hommes et de femmes sur tous les continents résolus à mener une lutte sans merci et sans répit, se prépare à changer la face du monde en donnant à l’Histoire un tournant imprévu. Nous voilà embarqués au coeur de l’action avec le journaliste Carl Slater, recrue malgré lui de la redoutable Internationale noire. 

Avec ce roman-feuilleton fortement mêlé de science-fiction, George Schuyler, figure éminente de la Harlem Renaissance, explorait dès 1936 les thématiques d’une guerre de libération des peuples de couleur aux dimensions planétaires, et la constitution d’un empire africain. À travers les aventures proprement rocambolesques de ses personnages et l’utilisation de toutes les ficelles du genre, il donna naissance à une satire troublante, un objet littéraire encore non identifié qu’on renconnaîtra plus tard comme un des précurseurs de l’afrofuturisme.

George Samuel Schuyler, 1895–1977, fut un essayiste, journaliste et romancier de première importance dans le monde culturel africain-américain de l’entre-deux-guerres. Il reste connu pour la férocité de ses critiques. Il est l’auteur d’un seul roman, Black No More, traduit en France en 2016 et d’un essai romancé dénonçant la traite au Liberia, produit de son enquête de terrain dans le pays. Proche des courants socialistes jusqu’à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il prendra un virage nettement réactionnaire par la suite, tout en demeurant dans les mémoires de toute une génération d’écrivains, tels qu’Ishmael Reed ou Samuel Delany.

A speculative book reflecting on design and architecture centred LARPs (Live Action Role-Play) organised by the Trojan Horse collective. The book is an exploration of Live Action Role-Play as a design and architecture research tool. By inviting the reader to try on different characters, switch roles and reconsider their everyday practices, the book aims to approach issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.

Texts by Ana Yin Aiwen, Teo Ala-Ruona, Michael A. Fowler, Ott Kagovere, Kaisa Karvinen, Tommi Vasko.

Seventeen short stories reveal the author's sustained concern with human relationships and values in past and future worlds of fantasy, speculation, and unearthly provision.

From atop the choppy waves to the choking darkness of the abyss, the seas are full of mystery and rife with tales of inexplicable events and encounters with the unknown.  

In this anthology we see a thrilling spread of narratives: sailors are pitched against a nightmare from the depth, invisible to the naked eye; a German U-boat commander is tormented by an impossible transmission via Morse Code; a ship ensnares itself in the kelp of the Sargasso Sea and dooms a crew of mutineers, seemingly out of revenge for her lost captain.  

The supernatural is set alongside the grim affairs of sailors scorned in these salt-soaked tales, recovered from obscurity for the 21st century.

Table of Contents:
From the Depths - F. Britten Austin 
The Ship of Silence - Albert R. Wetjen 
From the Darkness and the Depths - Morgan Robertson 
Sargasso - Ward Muir 
Held by the Sargasso Sea - Frank H. Shaw 
The Floating Forest - Herman Scheffauer 
Tracked: A Mystery of the Sea - C. N. Barham 
The Mystery of the Water-Logged Ship - William Hope Hodgson 
The Murdered Ships - James Francis Dwyer 
The Ship that Died - John Gilbert 
Devereux's Last Smoke - Izola Forrester 
The Black Bell Buoy - Rupert Chesterton 
The High Seas - Elinor Mordaunt 
The Soul-Saver - Morgan Burke 
No Ships Pass - Lady Eleanor Smith

This book is a reprint from a scan of what appears to be the last remaining copy of Symbolic Messages in public libraries worldwide, at the university library of Manitoba College, Canada. Clinical psychologist Mario Pazzaglini first published his extensive collection of case studies in alien writing and received scripts in 1991. This book is a photocopy of the original edition. Editorial manipulations of the material are minimal and where they have been made, it was from lack of information or else for reasons of practicality and cost efficiency: There is no solid evidence of the original binding, printing technique, paper, etc. The original book seems to have been layed out in American letter format and has been scaled down to fit the proportions of European ready-to-order print formats and provide easier readability. Apart from these minor adjustments, the copy is as faithful to the original, as possible.

Sun of an Ignored Putrid Productivity is a speculative novel about the influence of artificial intelligence and accelerating technological progress on our human interactions. The dialogical script is based on personal reflections and pop-cultural, scientific and philosophical references from the beginnings of cybernetics to more recent voices. Randomly generated, constructed and quoted contents cannot be distinguished from each other. The borderline between fact and fiction becomes blurred. What is left is a flickering effect, disorientation, which reflects our perception of reality under conditions of never-ending information overflow.

An anthology of queer erotic sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.

In these ten stories, everything is sex: walls, wax, the past, your future, your neighbours, hankies, candles, circuit boards, petri dishes, scrap metal – and language itself. Conjuring experiences for which there are no words, our amazing queer authors generate new tongues from the heat of their communing with a wild variety of lifeforms.

From Diriye Osman’s spiritualised Peckham to Jem Nash’s time-travelling trans multiverse, these stories transport you to new ways of being and feeling. In a word, it’s CruiserShimmeringLipophilicNeckingerCircuitGirlboss.

Whether you get horny from aliens, ghosts, robots, utopia, possession, ritual, or the completely surreal, there’s a story here for you. But why stop at one when you can taste pleasure in each and every one?

Featuring stories from: Gracie Beswick, Swithun Cooper, Rachel Dawson, Rien Gray, Vivien Holmes, Jem Nash, Diriye Osman, Alison Rumfitt, Nicks Walker & Anna Walsh.

Published November 2021. 

After the near-extinction of humanity, a new kind of alien-human hybrid must come to terms with their identity — before their powers destroy what is left of humankind. Since a nuclear war decimated the human population, the remaining humans began to rebuild their future by interbreeding with an alien race — the Oankali — who saved them from near-certain extinction. The Oankalis' greatest skill lies in the species' ability to constantly adapt and evolve, a process that is guided by their third sex, the ooloi, who are able to read and mutate genetic code.  

Now, for the first time in the humans' relationship with the Oankali, a human mother has given birth to an ooloi child: Jodahs. Throughout his childhood, Jodahs seemed to be a male human-alien hybrid. But when he reaches adolescence, Jodahs develops the ooloi abilities to shapeshift, manipulate DNA, cure and create disease, and more. Frightened and isolated, Jodahs must either come to terms with this new identity, learn to control new powers, and unite what's left of humankind — or become the biggest threat to their survival.

With 2+2=5, George Orwell's flawed masterpiece finally receives a much-needed rectification, as Jake Chapman takes us on a bad trip into an atrocious alt-Eurasia - a nightmare utopia of 24/7 self-expression, mandatory wellbeing, yogic breathing, and promiscuous empathy. Yippie wonks in open-toed sandals have ejected the evil capitalist overlords, compassion and charity reign supreme, buckwheat salad and artisan cashew cheese are in plentiful supply, and all strive to live their best life, all the time.  

Employed by the Ministry to rectify misfortunes issuing from a curious glitch in the system, Winston Smith finds that his creative urges are unexpectedly awoken, and he is driven to express his deepest place, voice, and hurt through the medium of poetry. But what connects Winston's furtive scribblings in My Big Book of Me to the unpleasantnesses emanating from the deep glitch? Is Julia really the perfect kooky carefree soulmate she seems to be? Can O'Brien be trusted? And when does the new season of Big Brother start?  

An all-you-can-eat quinoa buffet of wrongthink, Chapman's twisted vision is a bracing reminder that dystopia is just wishful thinking, and that the worst can always get worster.

Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of award-winning author Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea, where she is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and inspiration. On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time in English some of Kim's most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim's literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on posthuman existence being written today.

Bo-Young Kim (born 1975) won the inaugural Korean Science & Technology Creative Writing Award with her first published novella in 2004 and has gone on to win the annual South Korean SF Novel Award three times. In addition to writing, she regularly serves as a lecturer, juror and editor of sci-fi anthologies, and served as a consultant to Parasite director Bong Joon Ho's earlier sci-fi film Snowpiercer. She has novellas forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2021. She lives in Gangwon Province, South Korea, with her family.

One woman's quest to die with dignity may doom them all. 

A multi-dimensional explosion hurls the starship's few passengers across the galaxies and onto an uncharted barren tundra. With no technical skills and scant supplies, the survivors face a bleak end in an alien world. One brave woman holds the daring answer, but it is the most desperate one possible. 

Elegant and electric, We Who Are About To... brings us face to face with our basic assumptions about our will to live. While most of the stranded tourists decide to defy the odds and insist on colonizing the planet and creating life, the narrator decides to practice the art of dying. When she is threatened with compulsory reproduction, she defends herself with lethal force. Originally published in 1977, this is one of the most subtle, complex, and exciting science fiction novels ever written about the attempt to survive a hostile alien environment. It is characteristic of Russ's genius that such a readable novel is also one of her most intellectually intricate.

A nonhuman race reimagines human mythology. 

The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are different must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are different try to seize history and the day.

Manchester, UK. 2080.
It is a subculture whereby people are sexually attracted to the idea of transmitting and receiving STI’s. It started as a counter-culture against computer algorithms that determine every aspect of people’s lives, from careers to romantic interests, where they live, all over the world. The Virosexuals decided to alter their own bodies in order to subvert the algorithm. Now treated as non humans and thus ignored, Virosexuals like Amygdala are left to survive on their own…

Amygdala’s world consists of: her open relationship with Cel, her philosophical musings and drugged-up rants with her best friend Skunk/Winny, as well as her pursuit of all the completely curable (and thus fetishised) meatspace ‘zeases the club scene can offer. She tries to negotiate her body, her sexuality and her desires and find the source of the ‘Petitmort' threat…!

Amygdala’s dealer ran off on her. She’s out of estrogen, and so when Alejandro offers her a bountiful supply of ‘mones if she works for him – doing what? – she’s not super sure… What she does know: ESCHATOS 2.0 is trying to kill her. There’s a rumour buzzing on The Chat. A deadly virus, nicknamed ‘Petitmort’, is going around. It was manufactured by ESCHATOS 2.0, and maybe only those who have installed the latest update of the Treehouse Link are susceptible. Could Alejandro’s mission for Amygdala be connected to this virus sweeping the underground kink and BDSM scene?

Orion J. Facey's The Virosexuals, the author’s first novel, is a science-fantasy you won’t regret plugging into.

The Book Cover is Artwork by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Design and Typeface by Atelier Carvalho Bernau
Editing by Taylor Le Melle
Copy Editing by Natasha Lall
Production by Daniella Valz Gen, Ima-Abasi Okon and Rehana Zaman
Pages: 280
Dimensions: mm × mm
Published: 30 June 2021

De Scylla en Charybde is a poetic novel wich follows the lives of five mutants in a blurry future. The narration is a pretext to play with the sounds of words, the plasticity of a futurist poetic language.

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

In this Player’s Handbook you’ll find the rules of a Fantasy Role Playing Game: Draconis Lacrimae. It can be played by a group of 3 to 6 players.

First, you will create the Characters, then you will create the World and, lastly, you will Role-Play to escape from the inside of The Dragon. The characters come from different background universes and they all meet in The Dragon’s guts after being swallowed/injected/tele-transported/etc. by their own dragons. In Draconis Lacrimæ there are no dungeons and dragons, the dungeon is the Dragon. The adventurers must join forces in order to “escape” from it, whatever escape might mean. 

This game is an invitation for the readers to play themselves otherwise and encounter otherness as an accomplice. In addressing certain construction paradigms of the self, the book invites the reader/player to welcome the alterity we have in us, in order to revisit fundamental archetypes of fiction. It aims at creating interstices that can open up to another view of the self and its social configurations.

Autobiography is used as a ground from which to start playing, as the material that one has at hand to transform, craft, dissolve, rebuild, paint, glitch, etc. Auto-fiction serves here as a tool to resist predefined categorizations of identity, as a technique of transformation and orientation in a world saturated with categories.

Hopefully, along the way, our fictional and real selves will start bleeding onto each other, the infinite threads of our possible selves hanging around us connected to our play partners, known and unknown.

“The Dragon is the figure that extends the couple, that expands the kin, that narrates the community. The Dragon is the shared collective fiction that appears within the mosh.”

The publication consists of two parts:

"Draconis Lacrimae. The Player’s Handbook” (A5, 160 pages), divided in three chapters: Character Building, World Building and Role-Playing.

“Draconis Lacrimae. After action report” (A5, 8 pages). A booklet that accompanies the book. An after action report contains the stories created during a game. This booklet is a draft of the fiction and characters created while playing Draconis Lacrimae.

Borrowing Positions: Role-Playing Design & Architecture is a speculative book which reflects on the design- and architecture-centred LARPs (Live Action Role-Plays) organized by the Trojan Horse collective. The book is an exploration of Live Action Role-Play as a design and architecture research tool. By inviting the reader to try on different characters, switch roles and reconsider their everyday practices, the book explores issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care responsibilities and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.

The book consists of three parts: an overview of previous LARPs and their theoretical background; reflections (essays, visual essays and interviews) on LARP-related issues; and a practical (DIY) section – a step-by-step guide on how to organize your own design LARP.

Contributors to the book vary from architecture and design practitioners to performance artists working with role-play and fiction. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in inderdisciplinary practices in design and architecture.

Nominated for the Man Booker International, Eka Kurniawan brings his short stories into English for the first time.

Eka Kurniawan’s freewheeling imagination explores the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, the hapless life of a perpetual student, victims of an anticommunist genocide, the travails of an elephant, even the vengeful fantasies of a stone. Dark, sexual, scatological, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.

Like nothing else, Kurniawan’s stories bury themselves in the mind. His characters and insights are at once hauntingly familiar, peculiar, and twisted.

Confidences / Baseline plays with the vampire novel like a dollhouse. Charac­ters who variously believe in the power of theatre and performance become entangled with grief, desire, and the un­known. What does a rehearsal come to mean when a vampire lives forever?

Baseline is the first in a series of books that fetishise nightclubs for their inaccessibility. Deluded realities antici­pate the transformative sensuality of penetration. In his second novel, artist Ivan Cheng maintains his fixation on structures for audiences between public and private.

Designed by Sabo Day
Book cover by Özgür Kar
Back cover photography by Nikola Lamburov
TLTRPreß, Berlin 2021
ISBN: 978-3-9819640-5-9
176 pages, 117 x 164mm, edition of 40,2kg

About Ivan Cheng:
The performances of Ivan Cheng are incomplete, failing, desperate, and riddled with absence. They use his variously trained performing body, incanting texts that foreground subjectivity in monologues and dialogues. Identities of other interlocutors become embedded through rehearsal, dialogue, and entrustment. Without deluded presupposition of being for everyone, Cheng’s practice is invested in questions around publics and accessibility.

In 2020, he reconstituted past performance texts into a murder mystery about a street busker, and continues his foray into written genre with Confidences / Baseline. Past presentations of his texts have occurred at Volksbühne (Berlin), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam), Belvedere21 (Vienna), MuHKA (Antwerp), Nacionalinė dailės galerija (Vilnius), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Carriageworks (Sydney), Federation Square (Melbourne). He holds an MFA in Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut), having previously studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.

With a new foreword from award-winning author N. K. Jemison.