We here at the Afterverse have always wondered what a queer empowered sci-fi anthology would look like. We also wondered what would happen if those stories took place in the bear and chub communities, if they featured characters that could be our friends, partners, boyfriends, and lovers and if they featured larger bodies, fat bodies, chubby, hairy bodies! We are often left wondering what queer genre fiction — from fantasy to romance to even slice of life, would look like if we found the lead characters desirable and/or reflective of the myriad bodies that make up gay men’s community. And since very, very few forms of media give us those images in real ways, we decided to carve out a space for our own.

This submission call is for cyberpunk, Afrofuturist, solar punk, space opera, hard and soft sci-fi, futuristic speculative fiction, raypunk, dystopian, sci-fi noir, post-apocalypse and utopian stories — you know, science fiction! — that feature and empower large gay/bi/queer men. We are tentatively calling it “Cybearpunk”; we want sci-fi with big burly fat dudes saving the day, solving quantum problems, fighting aliens, riding mechanical unicorns, flipping around like bad-ass space ninjas!