Queering Sci-fi : An Interview with the Founder of Journey Press

Science fiction explores the extraordinary, the fantastical ideas that reach beyond the scope of our lived experience and universe. As readers dive into these out-of-this-world stories, that’s not to say that LGBTQ folks and all kinds of people don’t want to see themselves represented within the pages. I had the opportunity to chat with Gideon Marcus, founder of Journey Press and author of the Kitra series. We chatted about the founding of the press, making it through the pandemic, and the importance of sci-fi. 

Why did you start Journey Press, and why was that important for you to do so?

Journey Press was the natural outgrowth of Galactic Journey. Galactic Journey is where we all live in the past and live day by day, writing about science fiction, culture, the space race, politics, race relations, and marginalized people as if we lived 55 years ago. We’re basically spotlighting today and are living contextually then. 

We started that project in “1958,” which is 2013 for normal people. We very quickly discovered a couple things: One, it was harder to find marginalized characters; queer characters almost didn’t exist. Two, female characters were hard to find who were well realized, and female authors were hard to find, but they did exist. About 10 percent of all those stories we were reading were written by women, and they wrote about 25 percent of what was worth reading. We decided that these days, it’s not that hard to start a press, so why don’t we just start a press? 

That’s how we came out with Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women. It covered the years that we had covered in (Galactic) Journey thus far. That book was a huge success. It’s still going, still getting into college libraries … and we’re coming out with a sequel next year. It was honestly bigger than I expected. We’ve been releasing a bunch of old classics that had not seen the light of day in a while and works by new authors, and we discovered that we had something of a trend in what we were doing. I’m queer; my wife is queer; pretty much everyone on staff is queer in some flavor or another, and a lot of the books we were publishing had queer themes. The Kitra Saga stars a queer protagonist of color, and it’s pretty much going to come out that everyone in the crew is queer in some way or another, and that’s just an aspirational future. 

So we republished I Want the Stars, which originally came out in 1964, by Tom Purdom. I Want the Stars was a revelation. It was the first book I had ever read that portrayed a homosexual couple without judgment, without negativity. And I was like, “Wow, 1964!”

Yeah, that’s a lot earlier than I would have assumed, the first one that portrayed queer relationships in a positive way. 

So, last year, we decided “screw it” and came out with a gay press, because that’s essentially what we are. We’re more gay than anything else, but we want to appeal to everyone because we just write really great science fiction and publish really great stuff.

So, how was it running Journey Press during the height of the pandemic? For lack of a better word, how was that Journey?

It was challenging but rewarding. It started with the launch of Kitra. It did surprisingly well, and I think it did well because it’s a book about five young adults trapped on a spaceship far from home, and I think everyone could identify with that isolated feeling. We didn’t plan it that way, but it was nice that it was resonant, and it was the feel-good book that people needed at the right time. 

It was challenging, particularly because we chose a bookstore-heavy strategy, which is unusual for small presses these days. Ninety percent of our sales are through bookstores. We chose that because one of my favorite things is meeting booksellers. I love talking to people who are interested and like getting other people turned on to it. So, when all the bookstores were closed during lockdown, it was an interesting time, but we held through it, and we did pretty well. Now we can do bookstore shows again, and we’re going to the ABA Winter Conference in Cincinnati in February. So, it was hard, but it was kind of nice working in hard mode, because now easy mode feels that much easier. 

What was your favorite part about writing Sirena, the follow-up to Kitra?

One of the main characters of Kitra is Pinky, and Pinky is an alien. On the surface, he’s just a pun-cracking, fart-joke-liking, dad-humor kind of character. But there was a suggestion that there was more underneath. I’d always planned to write more about Pinky because Kitra’s going to be 10 books long. So, my favorite part about writing Sirena was getting to have some interesting critical scenes exploring Pinky. 

The other thing I liked is, obviously the book is called Sirena, not Kitra, and Kitra is still the star, but Sirena is the new character I introduced for it. Sirena is near and dear to my heart. One is that Sirena is of Mexican extraction, and I grew up on the border, so they say write what you know. And the other is she’s in the futuristic equivalent of a wheelchair, and it’s just a part of her character for a lot of reasons. A lot of people said that they appreciated having a character with accessibility issues because that’s something that often gets glossed over. Her having accessibility issues ends up being some of the pivotal parts of the book and part of the reason why she does so well, so that was exciting.

Lots of people discovered the joy of science fiction in this past year particularly. What advice would you have for any aspiring sci-fi writers who will read this interview?

A lot of people give the advice to chase the trend; find out what’s popular now, and do that thing. I can say, don’t do that thing for a number of reasons. One, booksellers are getting sick of the same old stuff. When I called booksellers and said, “Hey, you’ll like Kitra because it’s not a grim, dark, dystopian YA” they all laughed and gave me a sigh of relief. Ultimately, writing is about doing the thing that you enjoy the most; it’s about getting your passion on paper because that’s what’s infectious. So, whatever type of science-fiction you want to write … do that. 

What does science fiction mean to you personally? How has sci-fi impacted your life?

Science fiction is my favorite genre because it can encompass any other genre. Science fiction provides the cautionary tale that determines what kind of futures we want to avoid. Science fiction gives us the aspirational futures that show us what we want to achieve. One of my favorite things about science fiction is, you can see the world that you want to perceive in it. One of the things I love in I Want the Stars and The Kitra Saga is they posit these futures. They’re not perfect; they’re not flawless, but they have a lot of things that they take for granted that you aren’t taking for granted like lack of racism or lack of gender discrimination. And that’s hard to write in something contemporary. 

Is there anything else you would like to mention?

(Science fiction is) a genre that is underserved, that we are trying to carve out the niche is the intersection of science fiction and fantasy and romance. In terms of gay science fiction with an emphasis on the romance … that’s not easy to find. We released The Eighth Key, which is a fantasy with a beautifully realized world, but it is also a steamy gay romance. In December, we are releasing a book called At First Contact … a trilogy of novella-length stories, all of which have a speculative theme, but they’re also romances. We want gay couples to be normalized for romance, but we also really like science fiction, so let’s put them together. 

You can find our books pretty much anywhere, and you can find us online at journeypress.com.    

Photo courtesy of Gideon Marcus