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by Jayson Greene
Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and tormented by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex's best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death. She keeps returning to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall, trying to sift through the shards. Aviva is an "upload," a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether. But she's "emancipated," having left her human behind. Set free from her source and harboring a troubling secret, she finds temporary solace in the body of Cathy, a self-destructive ex-addict turned AI professor and upload-rights activist.
With UnWorld, Jayson Greene envisions a grim but eerily familiar near-future where all lines have blurred—between visceral and digital, human and machine, real and unreal. As Anna, Cathy, Sam, and Aviva's stories hurtle toward each other, the stakes of UnWorld reveal themselves with electrifying intensity: What happens to the soul when it is splintered by grief? Where does love reside except in memory? What does it mean to be conscious, to be human, to be alive?
Jayson Greene's debut novel UnWorld is set in a speculative near future in which people can create digital copies of their memories and consciousness. But when these "uploads" proved to be sentient and able to exist independently from their creators, it sparked debate about their rights and led to the option of emancipation, whereby an upload can leave their human "tether" and exist in a kind of digital limbo, traveling between electronic devices and temporary human hosts, observing, learning, and developing their own thoughts and feelings.
With this science fiction world as the backdrop, UnWorld opens in the wake of a tragedy: Alex, a teenage boy, has died after falling from a great height. His loved ones must come to terms with this sudden loss, while also attempting to find out whether his death was an accident or suicide. Greene drops the reader in at the deep end, with very few contextual details to help us come to grips with this strange yet plausible future—making for a slightly bewildering start that aptly reflects the disorientation and confusion felt by the grieving characters. Also, by not getting bogged down in the technical details, Greene keeps the focus on his characters and the emotional weight of their situation. (This does mean, however, that readers who enjoy unpacking the intricate aspects of science fiction technology may be left wanting.)
UnWorld is told from four alternating perspectives: Anna, Alex's mother; Samantha, Alex's friend and the only witness to his death; Aviva, an upload who has emancipated from Anna; and Cathy, a recovering addict and professor of artificial intelligence. Each has a distinct voice and provides a unique view on the events of the book. Anna's sections are insightful into the nature of maternal grief; Samantha's show the emotional toll of witnessing death firsthand; and Aviva's sections bring AI's worldview into the novel, demonstrating the autonomy and branching personality of uploads who have emancipated. "Every day I'm a little less her and a little more… Whatever it is I'm supposed to be," Aviva says.
Both Anna and Aviva wrestle with guilt following Alex's death, worrying they may have played a role in some way or missed warning signs that he was struggling with his mental health. Because uploads are essentially a manifestation of someone's memories, by cutting ties with Aviva, Anna has symbolically distanced herself from her past. "I have these memories," Aviva says:
"I carry them around with me, like precious cargo. I guard them against everything else, from the world, and yet I can feel them fraying, dispersing. And what are they? They're contraband. They're not even mine. They're fragments of someone else's consciousness that I stole."
Through Anna and Aviva's intertwined stories, Greene makes the case that one must reconcile with their past in order to work through grief, find peace, and move towards the future.
Cathy, the fourth character, is the only narrator without an immediate personal connection to Alex. After encountering Aviva, she is drawn towards the group, and her chapters provide an analytical perspective on the difference between human and AI responses to trauma. UnWorld explores the question of whether our consciousness is a separate entity held back by the limitations of our physical selves, or if we need the viscera of our bodies to truly feel and understand our emotions. After connecting with Aviva, Cathy muses:
"At that moment, I understood several things about upload consciousness in rapid succession. [Aviva's] intelligence wasn't able to filter out or compartmentalize grief. She had no neurochemical responses flooding in to numb her pain, to soften its impact. A mind was eternal, unforgiving; a brain was a soft, plump cushion. Loss needed a brain… She was so much more than a human could ever become, and so much less."
Despite exploring such vast social and moral topics, UnWorld never feels dry. Instead, it is an immensely readable, heartfelt, and timely look at what technology could mean for the future of human connection, and at the ways we cope with loss.
Book reviewed by Callum McLaughlin
In Jayson Greene's novel UnWorld, people can create sentient copies of their memories. The concept of creating a digital afterlife may sound strictly from the realm of science fiction, but attempts are already underway to make it a reality. It's known as "mind uploading" and is a form of transhumanism, a movement that advocates using technology to enhance and transcend humans' cognitive and bodily functions.
The essence of what makes us who we are—our thoughts, feelings, memories, and personalities—is believed to be encoded into a highly complex web of neurons and synapses in our brain. In theory, if an exact copy could be made of your neurological blueprint, it could be replicated or transferred digitally, allowing a version of your consciousness to exist beyond your body. It's a prospect that invites all sorts of ethical and philosophical questions, some of which are explored in UnWorld. If we achieved the ability to store and transfer digital copies of our minds, what would it then mean to be alive? Would our consciousness be able to cope without the means to physically interact with the world? And given the immense costs involved in developing the necessary technology, there would also likely be major problems with equity and accessibility.
But on a more practical level, there is the sheer technological complexity to consider—mind uploading is still so far from reality because of how challenging, costly, and time consuming it would be. For example, in 2020, the brain of a fruit fly was mapped out in much the same way required for mind uploading, a project that took twelve years and cost more than $40 million. For context: A fruit fly's brain has 20,000 neurons and 20 million synaptic connections, while a typical human brain has 90 million neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. Even if the process is theoretically possible for humans, it would be a colossal undertaking. Current imaging technologies, like MRI scanners, are simply not sophisticated enough to capture such intricate detail with the clarity required.
Still, various forms of technology already exist that aim to improve the way we safeguard our memories. Neuralink is perhaps the most high-profile company working specifically on brain implants. Elon Musk, the company's co-founder, has spoken about future plans to facilitate memory transference. Currently, their brain chips aim to assist those living with paralysis, by allowing them to carry out tasks using electrical signals in the brain, with some remarkable success. However, the company has been fraught with controversy, including being placed under federal investigation after reports and internal staff complaints accused them of gross violations of the Animal Welfare Act. This included the alleged deaths of more than 1,500 animals following supposedly "rushed" and "botched" experiments.
While we understand how mind uploading could work on a conceptual level, we still lack the technology and insight to make it happen for now. As science advances and we move closer to mind uploading becoming a reality, debate is sure to grow as to whether it's a breakthrough we should embrace or a dangerous path best avoided.
Five engravings of a human brain from different angles in Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio, ære exarata, a book on anatomy by Thomas Geminus, 1545
From The New York Public Library
by Dennard Dayle
Razor-sharp and hilarious, How to Dodge a Cannonball tells the story of Anders, a white teenager who volunteers to be a Union Army flag-twirler to escape his abusive mother. In desperate acts of self-preservation, he defects―twice―before joining a Black regiment at Gettysburg, claiming to be an octoroon. In his new and entirely incredulous unit, Anders becomes entangled with questionable military men and an arms dealer working for both sides. But more importantly he bonds with the other soldiers, finding friendship and a family he desperately needs. After deploying to New York City to suppress the draft riots and to Nevada to suppress Native Americans, Anders begins to see the war through the eyes of his newfound brothers.
Dayle's satire spares no one, whether he's writing about Anders's naivete and unexpected love interest, the quirks of Confederate and Union soldiers, those out to make a quick buck off the tragedy of war, or the theater of war itself (literal theater , as the novel includes a one-act play the troop obsesses over while they wait for action).
Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball is an inimitable take on which America is worth fighting for.
How to Dodge a Cannonball tells the story of Anders, a poor white boy from Illinois who, like his family members before him, twirls flags during war. Naive, garrulous, and focused above all on self-preservation, he deserts from one side of the Civil War to the other and back again. When his involvement in the ill-fated Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg goes awry, he deserts the Confederacy, takes the uniform of a dead Black Union soldier, and joins an all-Black regiment, passing himself off as an "octoroon."
There, he meets Gleason, an idealistic intellectual who specializes in "speculative dramaturgy"; Thomas, Gleason's de facto second-in-command; Joaquin, a former Haitian revolutionary described by one character, not inaccurately, as a "knife pervert"; and Mole, a taciturn giant whose past as a slave still haunts him. Together, they're shunted from one lousy job to another, doing the bidding of a government that doesn't even try to hide their contempt for them and an amoral arms dealer who sells to both the Union and the Confederacy.
If this sounds like it could be the premise of a didactic satire where the only laughs are dry and mirthless, don't worry: How to Dodge a Cannonball is seriously, genuinely funny. Dennard Dayle's Twitter (now X) bio describes him as a "local prankster," and the book is suffused with a freewheeling sensibility to match. The dialogue hits the same sweet spot as a Coen brothers movie, funny and literary without getting too cute (a representative example: "At least I didn't run like a scared dog. I ran like a shrewd coyote"). And Dayle's narration is wry, ironic, and as keenly observant as the best stand-up. English matchsticks made in dangerous working conditions are described as "the kind that kept factory children from growing into factory teenagers," and the Union army "could do anything well but fight."
But How to Dodge a Cannonball never crosses the line into becoming glib. The dismissive attitude of the Union generals towards their Black soldiers is written with humorous panache, but the spite and prejudice at its root is taken seriously. At one point, Anders and Gleason give a general a crucial Confederate cipher that could turn the tide of the war—only for the general to burn it, because he doesn't believe such valuable information could possibly come from Black soldiers. And the humor drops away in occasional, powerful passages, most notably when Mole describes the mine collapse, caused by a spiteful enslaver, that led to his nickname.
It should be said that the novel does not follow the contours of history exactly. There is a bit of business involving a cult of monarchists, prevalent in New York City and with a small colony in the Nevada desert, that might throw readers for a loop. Certainly I had trouble knowing what to make of it at first. But as a hallucinatory desert interlude expands to take up the last third of the novel, it becomes clear what Dayle is doing. He's illustrating the dark, stupid heart of America, with all its pageantry and genuflection towards conservative ideals; shaking his head at those who think they can change it from within; and offering a moment of bloody catharsis before bleak reality sets in.
Book reviewed by Joe Hoeffner
Anders, the protagonist of Dennard Dayle's How to Dodge a Cannonball, describes himself as a "flag-twirler": he twirls flags for the Union, then the Confederacy, then the Union again. Throughout the novel, Anders name-drops increasingly baroque flag-twirling maneuvers, including the Sumter Two-Step, the Jackson Lift, and the Delaware Cross.
These maneuvers may not be real, but flag-twirlers—or "flag bearers" or "color bearers," as they're properly known—certainly were. And although How to Dodge a Cannonball highlights the absurdity of the enterprise and plays it for laughs, flag bearers did serve a valuable purpose during the Civil War.
One of the roles of a flag bearer was a practical one: the colors of the flag helped soldiers see where their units were located. Even modern battlefields, with state-of-the-art communication technology, are loud, chaotic places; back in the Civil War, it would be almost impossible to hear verbal commands over shouting and gunfire. By hoisting a flag, flag bearers told everyone else where a particular regiment stood, getting the message across loud and clear. And because flag bearers couldn't carry weapons and were expected to do their duty no matter what happened, they were considered exceptionally brave (making Anders' opportunistic side-switching that much more ironic).
Another aspect of flag bearing was, of course, symbolic. A flag represents a country, and so flag bearers carry that country wherever they go—and if they lose the flag, a small part of their country ends up in enemy hands. (For example, one Confederate flag ended up in the hands of a Union regiment from Minnesota, who took it back to their home state; to this day, Minnesota refuses to give it back.) As such, flag bearers were incredibly important for morale and soldiers' pride. As Anders repeats throughout the novel, "If morale fails, the enemy prevails."
A tintype of a flag bearer holding an embattled American flag, from California State University Northridge Digital Collections.
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA's Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.
Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston's Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.
As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.
Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.
Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.
Taylor Jenkins Reid's new novel, Atmosphere, opens with a bang—literally. It's 1984, and astronaut Joan Goodwin is acting as NASA Command's CAPCOM ("Capsule Communications," the person who relays instructions to the personnel in space) when the unthinkable happens: A satellite explodes, sending shrapnel through the hull of the space shuttle and injuring some of the crew. Time is of the essence as oxygen leaks from the vessel; Joan becomes the sole link between Ground Control and the astronauts aloft, forced to stay calm as the situation degrades.
The story then rewinds seven years to when Joan, a university professor in physics and astronomy, learns that NASA is recruiting for their astronaut program, and that for the first time, women are invited to apply. She's never considered a career in space, but she applies at her sister's insistence—and when she's rejected in the first round, she's surprised by how disappointed she is. A year later, the opportunity presents itself again, and she jumps at the chance, this time becoming one of sixteen individuals who are selected for Group 9. (The previous class, Group 8, included Sally Ride, the first American woman to go to space; see Beyond the Book.)
At first, Joan feels out of place at the Space Center, surrounded by extremely smart and capable people who are primarily white men. Throughout her career, Joan has more often been dismissed than praised, and has always been awkward around others, so she finds "a familiar peace in going unnoticed" by her NASA teammates. But as she reluctantly begins socializing with them, she develops deep bonds with her team, forming perhaps the first true friendships of her life. The others, in turn, come to appreciate not only Joan's brilliance and passion, but her calm demeanor and ability to prevent petty disagreements between other members from disrupting the mission. "Being an astronaut," she realizes, "is not just about getting up there. It is about being a member of the team that gets the crew up there."
Atmosphere's plot follows Joan's professional and personal journey over the ensuing years, until the main storyline meets up with the currently unfolding emergency. We read about Joan's training as an astronaut and her first voyage into space, and we watch her transform from an awkward introvert into a confident woman and respected leader. She also discovers how to parent her sister's daughter, Frances, in a plotline that adds interesting depth to her character. Perhaps the core of the book, though, is how Joan learns that her desires—both her career ambitions and her romantic feelings, including realizing that she's gay and in love with a fellow astronaut—are legitimate and deserve to be embraced.
Atmosphere is subtitled "A Love Story," but which aspect of the novel that subtitle is referring to can be read ambiguously. Atmosphere is a relatively conventional love story in the way Joan comes to develop feelings for and begin a relationship with the mission's aeronautical engineer, Vanessa. But Joan's love extends well beyond this single relationship: Her relationship with her niece deepens over the course of the novel, as do her relationships with her fellow astronauts. The novel packs in quite a lot of emotional content for a book ostensibly about the Space Shuttle program.
Another genuine love of Joan's is space itself. Her passion for the cosmos is a constant undercurrent throughout Atmosphere—and that passion includes a reverence for God, whom she conceives of not as the world's sole creator but as a force that's a part of every atom across space and time. "The Jewish philosopher Spinoza said that God did not necessarily make the universe, but that God is the universe," she tells Vanessa by way of explaining her faith. "The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God."
I do have a couple of quibbles about the novel. One is that Reid's dialogue sometimes comes across as artificial—more like lengthy soliloquies about the nature of the universe than conversations one might have with another person. These can be interesting and occasionally moving, but are not always convincing as real exchanges. Also, while the book does reference both sexism and homophobia at NASA, it's not to the extent that I would have expected. Joan and Vanessa's teammates, for example, seem aware of their relationship and approve of it—something that seems a little unrealistic for the era, and perhaps a missed opportunity for narrative conflict.
I also think that this beautifully written book may suffer from the expectations set by its marketers. While the scenes set aboard the shuttle are intense and propulsive, they're few and far between; most of the story is character-driven and rather quiet. Readers expecting a thriller will likely find the book slow-moving, particularly in its early chapters. But Joan Goodwin is an unforgettable, complex character, and it's following her journey of self-discovery that keeps the pages turning.
Book reviewed by Kim Kovacs
Joan Goodwin, the protagonist of Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel Atmosphere, applies to NASA to be one of America's first female astronauts and is accepted to the program as part of Group 9. Group 8 (both in the book and in reality) included Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel into space.
Sally Kristen Ride was born in 1951 in Encino, California. She graduated from Stanford University in 1973 with bachelor's degrees in both physics and English literature, and later earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in physics.
Ride's life changed in 1977, when she learned through an ad that NASA was recruiting women for their astronaut program. She applied and become one of only six women selected to join the class of trainees—the first to include women and people of color. In 1979 she became the first woman to serve as CAPCOM, the person responsible for relaying instructions to the space shuttle. Four years later, she was named a mission specialist for the program's seventh mission (STS-7) as part of the five-person crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Although she was a highly skilled physicist, the press focused on the fact that Ride was a woman, and at pre-launch press conferences she was asked questions like what makeup she was taking aboard the flight, if she cried under stress, or if she was worried about the endeavor's impact on her fertility. The pressure to perform flawlessly was intense. As one character in Atmosphere put it, "If anything goes wrong…If Sally so much as sneezes at the wrong time, everyone will blame it on the fact that she's a woman."
Ride became the first American woman in space, and the youngest American astronaut, on June 18, 1983. Fortunately, every part of the mission went well. During the six-day flight, Ride operated the shuttle's mechanical arm, conducted experiments, and launched two communications satellites. She returned to space a year later, again on the Challenger, becoming the first woman to travel aboard a shuttle twice and part of a crew that (also for the first time) included two women.
After the Challenger, manned by a different crew, exploded during launch on January 28, 1986, Ride was assigned to the presidential commission investigating the accident. Later, she led a strategic planning task force that formulated a strategy for taking humanity to Mars, which was known as the Ride Report. She left NASA in August 1987 and later became a physics professor at UC San Diego, where she served as the director of the California Space Institute. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both asked her to serve as Director of NASA, but she turned down the position both times.
Ride, who was gay, was intensely private about her personal life, and for good reason: only heterosexual relationships were acceptable to NASA at the time that she worked there. (In the early 1990s, NASA even tried to make homosexuality a "psychiatrically disqualifying condition" for astronauts.) Although she married fellow astronaut Steven Hawley in 1982, they divorced five years later, and she had started a romantic relationship with her childhood friend Tam O'Shaughnessy even before the couple separated. Ride and O'Shaughnessy remained partners for the rest of Ride's life, although their relationship wasn't made public until Ride's death from pancreatic cancer in 2012.
Ride was presented with many honors and awards during her lifetime and posthumously, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2013 (which was accepted on her behalf by O'Shaughnessy). She was placed on a first-class postage stamp in 2018, and her likeness was also put on a quarter in 2022 as part of the American Women series. She's even been made into a Barbie doll. Her story is told in the National Geographic documentary Sally, winner of the 2025 Alfred P. Sloan award at the Sundance Film Festival.
The first class of female astronauts at NASA, chosen in 1978, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
by Caro De Robertis
So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world, how they pursued their passions, and how they continue to be at the vanguard of social change. This singular project collects the testimonies of over a dozen elders, each a glimmering thread in a luminous tapestry, preserving their words for future generations—who can more fully exist in the world today because of these very voices.
Award-winning novelist De Robertis creates a collective coming-of-age story based on hundreds of hours of interviews, offering rare snapshots of ordinary life: kids growing up, navigating family issues and finding community, coming out and changing how they identify over the years, building movements and weathering the AIDS crisis, and sharing wisdom for future generations. Often narrating experiences that took place before they had the array of language that exists today to self-identify and to describe life beyond the gender binary, this generation lived through remarkable changes in American culture, shaped American culture, and yet rarely takes center stage in the history books. Their stories feel particularly urgent in the current political moment, but also remind readers that their experiences are not new. Young trans and nonbinary people of color today belong to a long lineage.
The anecdotes in these pages are riveting, joyful, heartbreaking—so full of life and personality and wisdom, and artfully woven together into one immersive narrative. In De Robertis's words, So Many Stars shares "behind-the-scenes tales of what it meant—and still means—to create an authentic life, against the odds."
Caro de Robertis' So Many Stars shares the personal stories of 20 trans and nonbinary people of color over age 50 who, through their activism, art, and courage, have helped pave the way for the LGBTQ+ community as we know it today. The book is divided into four sections. The first, "Emergence," focuses on childhood, family, and coming of age. This section highlights the interviewees' wide range of backgrounds and hometowns, from Cuba to Oklahoma to New York and elsewhere. It begins with the narrators sharing their earliest memories of their gender, such as Yoseñio Lewis, who knew he was a boy, "from Day One, the moment of consciousness," and the excitement and curiosity felt by Nicky Calma (see Beyond the Book) at a chance meeting with a trans musician when she was eight years old. The section further explores how the narrators' gender affected their relationships with their birth families, and their first forays into the LGBTQ+ community.
The second section, "Forging Lives," is about finding one's place and building a satisfying life. Several of the interviewees are immigrants, who recall moving to the United States and the challenges they faced in doing so, both as people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Though more tolerant attitudes in the US were often a factor in the decision to immigrate, the benefits were very much relative—it took ten years for Nelson D'Alerta Pérez to get a green card after she made the mistake of admitting she was homosexual in an interview. This section also delves into sexuality, emotional intimacy, and the process of transitioning.
The third section, "Being the Change," covers activism and the effects of AIDS on the LGBTQ+ community, as well as self-expression and storytelling through art in general and drag specifically. The chapter on the AIDS crisis is unsurprisingly difficult to read, but still contains moments of warmth, and the chapters discussing art and drag are very community-focused. The interviewees discuss not only what their art means to them in terms of self-expression, but how it honors those who came before and connects them to those they share it with. As Donna Personna says of the play she co-wrote and produced about a now famous moment of trans resistance to police brutality: "I wasn't there, at the historic Compton's Cafeteria riot, but I knew these women's stories…this story was buried and hidden for almost fifty years. What if it had never emerged? It impassions me now. This story is not going to die. Every word I wrote, and we wrote, in the play, is the truth."
The fourth and final section, "Horizons," focuses on the present and future, rather than the past. It covers the interviewees' experiences with aging and the ways in which their understanding of gender has changed, their advice for the younger generations, and their hopes for the future. So much discussion in and around the LGBTQ+ community is focused on the experiences of young people, so it is wonderful to see the joy and wisdom the narrators have found in old age.
Issues pertaining to how gender interacts with race are woven throughout the book, as the interviewees share both the happiness they have found in their communities, such as Landa Lakes' excitement at cofounding the first two-spirit Pow Wows, and the pain of enduring racism from both society at large and within the LGBTQ+ community. KB Boyce and Fresh "Lev" White both discuss how stereotypes about Black men have affected their transitions. As White puts it: "Once I was being seen as masculine, I remember having a white trans male friend say to me, 'Isn't the privilege amazing?' My immediate response was, 'If you mean I'm even more likely to get pulled over and shot, I'm not feeling it.'"
My main critique is that the structure of the book makes it challenging to trace each narrator's individual story. At the end there is a section called "About the Narrators"; I would recommend readers start here rather than simply opening the book to the first page. With 20 different speakers and interviews cut together with varying lengths of text only prefaced with the name of the subject, keeping track of who is who takes a lot of flipping back and forth between the biographies and the chapters. In fact, aside from the introduction, de Robertis allows the interviewees' words to stand entirely on their own. In some ways this is a powerful choice, but I feel the stories might have been more effectively communicated through a documentary or audio recording as opposed to text, as these media allow one to more easily identify the speaker. The introduction, by contrast, includes a brief but vivid account of de Robertis' first meeting with Adela Vázquez—I would have appreciated similar descriptions of the other narrators.
Given the current political backlash against gains in LGBTQ+ rights, with trans rights being targeted in particular, this book is timely and essential. It demonstrates that trans and nonbinary people of color have a long history of fighting for the right to exist and live authentically as themselves. Some stories collected here are joyful, some heartbreaking, and everything in between. Shining through all of them is the warmth, resiliency, and hard-earned wisdom of 20 remarkable people. In taking in the words of these elders, readers will gain not only an appreciation for what those before them overcame, but hope for their own futures.
Book reviewed by Katharine Blatchford
In Caro de Robertis' work of transcribed oral history, So Many Stars, one of the interviewees is Nicky Calma. She shares the story of how, along with others at the Filipino Task Force on AIDS, she created the drag persona of Tita Aida in order to educate the people in her community about HIV/AIDS.
Born in 1967 to a Catholic family in the Philippines, Calma immigrated to the United States and settled in San Francisco at the age of 22. Once there, she found support among transgender women, mostly African American, whom she met on the street, as well as with her fellow Filipino immigrants, eventually leading her to join the Asian AIDS Project and work with the Filipino Task Force on AIDS.
The character they created together drew from multiple sources of inspiration. Her name is based on how Filipinos were already discussing HIV/AIDS—it translates to "Aunty AIDS," and was a common slang term for the disease in that community. Aspects of the character's personality were inspired by Doña Buding, a comic, nouveau riche character played by Filipina comedian Nanette Inventor. Tita Aida's first performance was in 1990. She fought the disease's stigma and educated audiences about prevention through the Rubber Club, guerilla theater productions often hosted at the N'Touch nightclub. These productions were structured like advice shows in which Tita Aida responded to fictional letters asking for help on topics related to HIV/AIDS. One famous demonstration involved showing how silicon-based lubricant can reduce the effectiveness of condoms by using it to pop a balloon. In addition to teaching about prevention, she reached out to those who had contracted AIDS. At the time, stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS could lead to patients becoming extremely isolated. Tita Aida visited them to provide comfort and support.
She also performed at AsiaSF, a groundbreaking cabaret and restaurant that opened in 1998. The venue became known for the celebrated performances of the "Ladies of AsiaSF," a group of transgender entertainers, Nicky Calma among them. The restaurant closed its doors in 2024, citing difficulties adapting to the post-Covid nightlife scene.
In the years since Tita Aida's debut, Calma has continued her activist work both on and off stage. Her work during the AIDS crisis has led to a decades-long career at the San Francisco Community Health Center, destigmatizing and promoting awareness of HIV in the city's LGBTQ+ and Asian and Pacific Islander communities. She is Director of Community Programs and HIV Services and a member of the city's Trans Advisory committee.
In 2024, Calma was named Hermana Mayor at the San Francisco Pistahan Parade and Festival, the largest Filipino cultural festival on the West Coast. The Hermana Mayor serves as parade leader and the designation is intended to honor a respected member of the Filipino community. She was the first trans woman to receive this recognition.
Though great progress has been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, there is still work to be done. As Calma says in So Many Stars, "Stigma is still the strongest enemy here."
Nicky Calma aka Tita Aida receiving an award at a Trans Day of Visibility celebration in 2016, photo by Pax Ahimsa Gethen CC BY-SA 4.0
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