Another story has the characters’ escape hinge on space travel that will use the Earth’s kinetic core energy to fuel it, leaving the planet destroyed.

The main character has a white partner who doesn’t understand the main character’s reluctance to leave, or her distrust of the supposedly peaceful government’s settlement of a “new world.” The Earth is ravaged, and left for dead by most–Indigenous communities are some of the few people who are willing to stay. In one story, a portal is made that allows travel to an almost identical, uninhabited planet. They cover a lot of different topics, but many come back to the idea of space travel, and especially of evacuating a dying Earth. The authors are from many nations across North America, and many stories include untranslated words from different Indigenous languages.Īlthough the introduction is academic, the stories themselves are written accessibly.

I appreciated being introduced to these ideas, though, and it definitely left me thinking, including his mention of “contemporary erasures and appropriations of the term Two-Spirit by settler queer cultures who idealize, mysticize, and romanticize our hi/stories in order to generate a queer genealogy for settler sexualities.” Besides, this is an anthology by and for Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous people as a white settler reader, I know I’m not going to understand every reference. Whitehead brings his study of theory to this work, and some of the ideas went over my head. The introduction alone is thought-provoking and sometimes intimidating. In that introduction, Whitehead reflects on the intersection between Indigeneity and queerness: “How does queer Indigeneity upset or upend queerness? Are we queerer than queer?” He goes on to explain that originally, Love after the End was going to be a collection of dystopic stories, but they pivoted towards utopias: “For, as we know we have already survived the apocalypse-this, right here, right now, is a dystopian present.” It’s edited and introduced by Joshua Whitehead, the author of Jonny Appleseed and full-metal indigiqueer. Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead is a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories by Indigenous authors.

Love after the End by Joshua Whitehead