So Mayer: Into the queer quantum universe

On a new, extraordinary short story collection, ‘Truth & Dare’

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

Talking to So Mayer about their debut short story collection — and about science and history and technology and theology etc — is like talking to a library. Not one of those forbidding ones of the ancient world, where scholarship was hoarded away from the barbarian hordes. Nor those scriptoria with chained-down books referenced in the collection’s opening piece ‘green children’. Instead one of those well-stocked public libraries from a more civically enlightened age which seem to cover all curricula while at the same time harbouring rare and out-of-print texts, ambered life experience, microcosms of learning, paracosms — the kind of library you feel like you could use to reboot civilisation.

As far-ranging as So’s short story collection is their career in the arts. On top of being the author of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, a book-length essay on queer films, bodies and fascism for Peninsula Press, and co-editor of Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver Press), Unreal Sex (Cipher Press), and Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor (Wayne State University), they are a bookseller, film curator and podcaster, working with…