Fierce Family by Bart R. Leib

Fierce Family Reviews

• 
  Shira Glassman

  The fact that I'm not constantly bombarded by enthusiastic recommendations for this book, when it has so much in common with my novels in celebrating the strong bonds of queer families in a SFF setting, just proves the truth of what I've been saying lately about the fragmentation of the indie publishing world -- even within queer SFF! Because damn, Fierce Family is gorgeous. This book is a TREAT. If you like my books specifically because of the "queer family fluff" aspect, you should go and pick up this book before even finishing this review. I don't think I've ever typed that before.
  
  There are fifteen stories, providing a wide variety of moods, settings, and even genres--some are hard sci-fi, some mild real-world paranormal, some even portal fantasy. There are ice dragons on a winter planet, dystopian struggles in a world fucked up by global warming, and a man who can see the future so he already knows who his future husband is when he meets him--and then fails to make a good impression. There's a South Asian diaspora woman on a space colony breaking military rules to save her son's husband from giant bug aliens. Why do you not own this book.
  
  The title is a quote from "The Collared Signal", about people who live on a spaceship with a farm inside getting attacked by space pirates--except that both ships--the farmers and the pirates--are big poly families with same-sex relationships and kids and everything. That's right: a polynormative, bi-normative space pirate story with literally zero indication that their families are unusual for having extra branches and fruit.
  
  One of my other favorites was "The Home Study", where a lesbian couple wants to adopt a baby to add to the children they already have -- one borne, one taken in when she needed them -- and don't realize the adoption agency they applied to is the fairyland one, which requires exactly the kind of quest you'd expect. (This book has plenty of f/f, so it’s definitely not the kind of place where cis m/m takes over like in some others. Also, there is no on-screen sex in the book.)
  
  This is the kind of book where same-sex couples and nonbinary characters get to be themselves in families that also include loving parents, or children, or extra members of the couple unit (my spouse wants to know why the neologism is 'throuple' and not 'threeple'?), so it's not just a celebration of queer romance but also queer platonicism and found family and people's interactions with their same-sex parents and EEEE, I JUST.
• 
  Anthony

  FIERCE FAMILY more than lives up to the back-cover advertising. Most of these stories are exhilarating, and most of them do present families standing strong in the face of external threats rather than internal tensions. One of two of the stories (in particular I'm thinking of Sarah Pinkser's "Monsters, Beneath the Bed and Otherwise" and Jay Wilburn's "Bachelor") have a bit more intra-family tension than the others, but for the most part the anthology delivers on its promised theme.
  
  None of the families presented in Fierce Family are the traditional nuclear type of father/mother/one-child-of-each-gender; they represent diversity in all of its wonderful forms. Some of the families are closer to that traditional dynamic (two same-gendered parents, two CIS-gendered kids) and some move farther away from it, but all are a reflection of the world we are in. The stories include characters, both parents and children, who are straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans*, and gender-fluid. Just about every combination of genders, sexualities and family units is explored. And the wonderful thing is: the building of these families is not the focus of the stories. This all serves as back-drop to the main events of the story, as much background world-building as the descriptions of interplanetary governments or fantasy world magic.
  
  There's as much diversity in the types of stories as in the families depicted, a solid mix of science fiction and fantasy and one story (Wilburn's) that could conceivably fall into the horror genre. One or two of the stories didn't work for me, but the majority did. Among my favorites were Shay Darrach's "Come Away to the Water," in which the ocean and family tradition exert inexorable pulls on a young girl; Sarah Pinkser's "Monsters, Beneath the Bed and Otherwise," a nuanced story about technology and bullying in a recognizable near-future; J.L. Forest's "The Collared Signal," which can only be described as sweeping and cinematic; Charlotte Ashley's "Aisthesis," which asks the question of what you would do to protect your children, and Effie Seiberg's "Dinkley's Ice Cream," a wistfully nostalgic tale that kicks off the anthology. Seiberg's and Pinkser's stories start and end the anthology strongly and provide excellent counterpoints to each other.
  
  (You can read my thoughts on each individual story at my "A Story A Day" community on Livejournal.)
• 
  ambyr

  Credit where credit is due: this anthology does exactly what it says on the tin. Every story incorporates a close-knit LGBT family, and all except one involve speculative fiction elements.
  
  Unfortunately, while I enjoyed the theme, the writing in a number of the stories felt amateurish. Perhaps a better editor would have helped.
  
  Highlights for me:
  
  Effie Seiberg's "Dinkley's Ice Cream," which was more litfic than specfic but had good atmosphere and turn of phrase.
  
  Layla Lawlor's "Stormrider," which included some of the most intriguing speculative fiction elements.
  
  B.R. Sanders' "Blue Flowers," one of the few high fantasy entries, which was sweet and a little melancholy.
  
  Stephanie Lai's "Form B: For Circumstances Not Covered in Previous Sections," a believably gritty post-slow-apocalypse tale.
  
  Low point: Mina MacLeod's "Mission: Extraction," in which a high-ranking active duty military officer abandons her post in the middle of a war and goes off to rescue her son using stolen military equipment, but everyone agrees it's okay because family. I like stories of families sticking together; I like stories of families who manage to stick together without being breathtakingly irresponsible even better.
• 
  B.R. Sanders

  Fierce Family is anthology compiled and published by Crossed Genres. The fifteen stories collected here are thematically joined by a focus on queer families as represented in speculative fiction. As someone living and growing a queer family who deeply loves speculative fiction, there was a good chance that I would like at least some of the stories here. That said, I’m also notoriously picky when it comes to short fiction anthologies, and especially multi-author short fiction anthologies. I am the type where one weak story can ruin the whole book for me.
  
  This is a very well-executed anthology. The voices here are markedly different from story to story, but not jarringly so. The editor, Bart. R. Leib, seems to have paid close attention to the placement and order of the stories such that there are none of the disconcerting whiplash changes in tone or style you sometimes see in multi-author anthologies. I would have liked to see a closer hand at copyediting; there were a number of very minor grammatical or spelling mistakes that took me out of the stories from time to time.
  
  I was pleasantly surprised by the depth and breadth of the stories themselves. The anthology contains a little of everything, and (so long as you’re not homophobic, obviously) there’s something in here for spec fic fans of every stripe: it’s got high fantasy, it’s got comic fantasy, it’s got space pirates and space warriors and contemporary sweet ghosts. There are stories here that are far-flung and far-future set in spaces our world does not resemble at all, and there are stories that could be happening to someone right now. Whatever floats your boat, this collection has something for it populated by a queer family.
  
  I was also impressed by the diversity of the characters within the stories. It’s an wonderfully intersectional collection—most of the protagonists are people of color. The families range from single parent and child to wide open poly families with few biological ties. In some stories, the families are headed by queer parents; in some stories it’s the children who are queer. In some stories, it’s queertastically both.
  
  For me, the standout stories were “Stormrider”, by Layla Lawlor, which features ice dragons. “Growth” by A. C. Buchanan hit me right in the heartstrings with a beautifully rendered bigender teen protagonist. “Form B: For Circumstances Not Covered In Previous Sections” by Stephanie Lai is perhaps the sweetest dystopian story I’ve ever read. “The Collared Signal” by J. L. Forrest has space pirates! And “Two Hearts” by Marissa James is a wonderful lesbian love story.
• 
  Amy Mills

  Bit of a mixed bag. The first two stories were probably the strongest. After that, they were mostly fairly meh. I didn't dislike them, but there weren't any real standouts. Also, there were a few that could have used more editing.
  
  
• 
  Sinistmer

  Some of the stories stand out, but wasn't as satisfied with the collection as a whole as I thought I would be.