It's odd, and probably mostly a sign of own blinkered perspective, but I never really think of Lee's work in terms of queerness. I don't mean that I don't see that it's there - I can't see any way to read parts of Flat Earth and not pick up on that - but for me as a reader it always felt less compelling than her prose, occasionally brilliant plot twists, and overall aesthetic, particularly the stories that stray well outside the bounds of the human. Like I said, this is probably just my own limited self reading her work in a limited, not enormously interested in gender way. That said, I still appreciate that she remains one of the only authors I've read who can render the make body as erotic, though this probably has a lot to do with my not terribly wide reading.

Though I do want to grab a copy of the lesbian erotica she wrote as/in conversation with her nom de plume Esther Garber, simply because having a dialog with your own pen name is a marvelously intriguing piece of metatextual fiction, and I love it when Lee goes fully metatextual.


Finished the first volume of Blood of Roses (its one book, Immanion Press just split their reprint into two volumes). There is a ton going on here, mostly touching on religious themes that I can't begin to comment on here, and also because a lot of it is still extremely oblique. The first section (the book is divided into sections based on viewpoint character) becomes almost completely incomprehensible as anything but a series of apparently random and inexplicable things happening, until the end of the next section which sort of explains them. Though since those explanations are things like that side character being the daughter of the spirit-clone of a previously dead but now re-living woman who was herself an empty vessel created as an Eve figure by an immortal vampire moth, they only make sense in a fairly loose way. This seems to be a pattern continuing into the second volume, that the story is sort of narratively backwards, things happen for reasons that ate explained later but occurred earlier. You, the reader, are adrift in a strange dreams dreamscape world, where anything is possible for their own inscrutable reasons.

I'm also reading an anthology called New Eves, which is a 1990s collection of sci-fi short stories by women, organized by decade. This is a lot of fun, both because it's a nice way to experience some very early amd now hard to find female authors from the 20s 30s and 40s, but also as a look at how the genre has evolved over time. I found the early pulp stories a real ripping good time in the maximally enthusiastic way of good pulp sci-fi. I'm up to the seventies now, and I find the stories are starting to lag a bit. They aren't as fun as the pulps, being more politically focused have aged worse than pure adventure, and most of them feel like a set-up for a novella or full novel that just magically ends at like 12 pages because it's a short story. Still a worthwhile read, and the nice thing about short story anthologies is that even the lousy entries are short enough they aren't generally unpleasant enough to spoil the pudding.