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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by sex, and for which there is no cure Mark’s only hope seems to be a medical trial that requires the transfusion of genetically identical white blood cells, until his friend Matthew, who recently lost his lover to the ‘Plague’, begins writing letters to Mark revealing another potential cure Shortly after the disease erupted some seven years previously, a group of gay men made contact with aliens, living on a planet called Splendora, who are ‘long, lean, delicate, in the sense of a swimmer’s body’ ‘Darling,’ Matthew writes, ‘they are gay’ The aliens’ advanced technology will enable a group of gay men to escape to Splendora, be cured of their illness, and live safely on a planet populated only by gay men – and gay aliens Mark dismisses Matthew’s letters as the fantasies of a dying ‘queen out of control’; his family eventually acknowledge his illness, and a brother donates the blood needed for his trial Yet the novel ends with Mark and his lover Bill gazing at the sky, ‘waiting as if for the ship to Splendora’ – attracted, in spite of themselves, to Matthew’s fantasy of a gay planet It was a fantasy that seemed to promise everything, but there was one detail Matthew couldn’t explain about how this community could survive: ‘Reproduction is something of a mystery’   *   For centuries, writers, artists, and speculative thinkers have used science fiction to imagine the possible futures we might have That’s one reason the genre has long been a storehouse of fantasies about reproduction Imagining a different future requires imagining a different way of getting there, and the way we get there, the way any group makes it to any future, is by reproducing over time Science fiction’s reproductive fantasies have rarely been utopian in any simple sense, since one group’s utopia can all too easily slide into another’s dystopia But because of the genre’s commitment to world building — its requirement to have, if not always directly reveal, a logical

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Interview

December 2011

Interview with David Graeber

Ellen Evans & Jon Moses

Interview

December 2011

Six months ago, while preparing to interview David Graeber, I decided to conduct some brief internet research on the...

poetry

September 2013

Poems

Osip Mandelstam

TR. Robert Chandler

TR. Boris Dralyuk

poetry

September 2013

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw to a Polish Jewish family; his father was a leather merchant, his mother...

feature

Issue No. 1

Ninety-Nine, One Hundred

Tess Little

feature

Issue No. 1

Sitting at a British Library desk in July 2006, a reader carefully consulted the fraying pages of A Relation...

 

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