Meanwhile, Elsewhere is one of the first speculative fiction anthologies written by trans writers. It won the 2018 Barbara Gittings Literature Award, a Stonewall Book Award.
During the 2010s Cat Fitzpatrick was an editor with Topside Press, an influential trans press that began in 2012. She envisioned creating a speculative fiction anthology with Topside because she wanted to revive a long tradition of trans speculative fiction authorship. She was inspired by the writing of Rachel Pollack, who the anthology would eventually be dedicated to. She also wanted Topside to produce successful political writing, in the way that Ursula K. Le Guin and others in the second-wave feminist movement had used speculative fiction. Finally, Fitzpatrick thought the genre would appeal to many trans readers, and she wanted to help reclaim its feminist traditions from trans-exclusionary currents, as in the writing of Joanna Russ.
Fitzpatrick had previously met fellow editor Casey Plett in the early 2010s at a writer's conference: both felt they grew as writers during that decade, which Plett labels the "trans lit renaissance". Fitzpatrick asked Plett to co-edit her anthology because Plett was skilled at character development. Its title became Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers.
For the anthology, they chose to include 25 original works by authors who were often well known for queer literature but sometimes new to the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Plett recounted that she and Fitzpatrick received over 300 story submissions for Meanwhile, Elsewhere. The editors hoped to include many works by writers of color as a contrast to Topside Press's previous anthology, The Collection, which mostly included white authors. Jeanne Thornton, one of the contributing writers to Meanwhile, Elsewhere, also helped provide editing guidance.
Reviews by Strange Horizons and Publishers Weekly said that some stories had plot devices that were clunky for the genre, but that others had refreshing new ideas for science fiction and fantasy. Evelyn Deshane, reviewing for Plenitude, linked the strength of the work's creativity and novelty to the fact that it centered on real trans characters, not treating them as symbols of fantasy for cis readers as in most previous speculative fiction, as Plett explained in a 2015 Walrus piece. Megan Milks, in her Strange Horizons review, praised the large variety of stories that brought quintessentially trans subjects and experiences to speculative fiction, showing "a field of vibrant possibilities" for the future.
Legacy
The collection was one of the first to prioritize science fiction and fantasy written by trans authors. Previously, Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan's Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure may have been the first speculative fiction trans story written by trans authors, and Brit Mandelo's Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction covered a collection of queer desire in speculative fiction but did not center trans experience in the same way.
By 2021, Charlie Jane Anders cited Meanwhile, Elsewhere, as part of a thriving movement of trans and nonbinary speculative fiction. The Transcendent series also focused on trans speculative fiction, and some authors, like Nino Cipri and Bogi Takács, released their own collections of short stories in the genre.
