''SF has a rich history of imagining future societies that treat sexual and gender roles in nontraditional ways -- works by Delany, Russ, Varley, Gerrold, and others come to mind. More abstractly, SF (more so than fantasy) often deals with themes of estrangement -- one thinks of any number of stories about lonely telepaths in a hostile world. Such treatments of isolation and potential liberation would seem easily adaptable to stories that deal with being gay. Then there are any number of alternate-humanity stories involving variant sexualities that comment, indirectly, on the experience of being gay in a straight world, or that more generally suggest how human society might grow beyond the imperatives of biological reproduction. Such works range from Le Guin’s canonical The Left Hand of Darkness to Greg Egan's recent “Oceanic”. Alas, these themes are virtually absent from the present book.''