A non-binary teenager may be from a small town but they remember at least a dozen past lives; a young trans woman auditions as an anime voice actor while the world is ending; in a future of constant change and transformation, one person is hesitant to undergo the next metamorphosis; a trans man comes back home to discover his parents have added to the household an android that has his deadface installed. Award-winning editor Bogi Takács has assembled a stellar line-up of stories that explore the frontiers of gender--using the imaginative tools of speculative fiction.

The stories in this year's selection are sometimes grim, sometimes cheerful, sometimes quirky--but always full of emotion. Editor Takács has assembled a wide range of non-cis experiences: from an intergalactic art heist to the everyday life of a trans woman through the lens of horror movies; non-binary parenting in the far future, to a unique method of traveling back to the past. Steampunk, ghosts, even deities, all can be found in these stories that show how transness can relate to and subvert so many themes at the heart of speculative fiction. The introduction also includes a section on year-to-year changes in transgender SFF, and assembled longer-form trans highlights.

As with the first volume of Transcendent, Lethe Press has worked with a wonderful editor to select the best work of genderqueer stories of the fantastical, stranger, horrific, and weird published the prior year. Featuring stories by Merc Rustad, Jeanne Thornton, Brit Mandelo, and others, this anthology offers time-honored tropes of the genre--from genetic manipulation to zombies, portal fantasy to haunts--but told from a perspective that breaks the rigidity of gender and sexuality. A winner for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction

Algorithmic Shapeshifting is the first poetry collection of Bogi Takács, winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, and finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards. The collection includes poems from the past decade and previously unpublished work. The scope of pieces extends from the present and past of Jewish life in Hungary and the United States to the far-future, outer-space reaches of the speculative—always with a sense of curiosity and wonder. “Bogi Takács is a poet of visceral exuberance and Talmudic invention. Moving as dazzlingly between genres as languages, e makes the reader eir kaleidoscope where ancient traditions, unenvisioned technologies, and children's toys tumble with ordinary, transcendent precision, imagining new ways of being and observing others signally extant. These poems draw blood and spark synapses, make dauntingly familiar and tenderly strange. You should let them change you.” Sonya Taaffe, author of Forget the Sleepless Shores “Bogi Takács's poetry is gleefully and unabashedly itself, pulling the reader through surreal worlds of visceral magic, body modification, political wit, and interpersonal devotion. Whether looking back into Talmudic history, forward into a science fictional psychic war, or sinking into the earth and growing flowers from its own eye sockets, "Algorithmic Shapeshifting" presents a voice that is consistently fresh, startling, and sincere.” Ada Hoffmann, author of The Outside