Book Review: Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel

Image: The cover of the book is an illustration of a city street as seen from the top of a tall building. The buildings are stylized in cool colors with hints of yellow. A light lavender street stretches through the center with the silhouette of a person running down the middle. The sky taking up about 1/3 of the background fades from light blue to pinkish lavender with pink clouds. There is a very large light tan colored moon taking up about half of the visible sky. Across the front of the cover in 4 lines reads "EVERYONE ON THE MOON IS ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL" in large white capital letters. In the center, on top of transparent stripes of blue, pink, and lavender states, "STORIES: Juliann K. Jarboe" in yellow lettering.

I am so grateful that Julian K. Jarboe's debut collection, Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel came across my goodreads feed one day. Described on the publisher's page as being a "collection of body-horror fairy tales and mid-apocalyptic Catholic cyberpunk, memory and myth, loss and age... (in the) field of queer fabulism," the stories in this book are composed of many things from many places. I have never read anything quite like it. It is undoubtedly one of my favorite books with the category "queer fiction" slapped onto it. 

I hate to say it, but sometimes I have a lot of trouble with "LGBTQ" literature, even when it is written by queer and trans people. Sometimes the stories are all about being queer and trans, sometimes being queer or trans is not part of the story at all, and sometimes queer and trans characters are used purely as tokens, written with terrible ignorance. The problem with the last one is fairly obvious, but the first two are often accepted as great examples of LTGBQ literature. We are so starved for representation that we sometimes settle for that which is mediocre. It is not that some of the former fictions are never exceptional- quite a few are. It's just that, often, stories that approach characters and topics this way end up being one dimensional, unrealistic (and I don't mean from a scifi/fantasy perspective,) or even harmful. What makes Jarboe's story collection stand out in this realm is that they write stories surrounding the lives of many different kinds of queer and trans characters that are so well rounded that one cannot help to become completely immersed. Some of the stories are like poems and only one page long, yet they still drew me in. Jarboe writes stories that are about these characters without their LGBTQ existence being the ONLY thing about them. Yet they also don't attempt to use identities only in passing. Like actual life, it is part of who they are and part of their lives and experiences along with everything else in the world. I was able to see myself in so many of these characters including the ones that were of somewhat different demographic arrangements than I am. This is unfortunately rare.

Another thing that I really enjoyed about this book is how uniquely it spans so many different genres. Yes there is some science fiction and some LGBT fiction, but it is much more than that. It ranges from dead serious to laugh out loud funny. It includes great sadness and extraordinary satire. Their writing style is incredibly poetic and they show a great range across stories. Some stories read as if an author wrote them 100 years ago and others read with style from the future. The book is genuinely great fiction on top of having great representation. I can honestly say that I would read a full length novel based on any of these stories. The titular story- the longest in the book- is well deserving of its use in the title. Witty and satirical with hints of cyberpunk and space opera, it offers a look into another world.

I hope that this is only the beginning for Jarboe. They are truly a unique and talented voice in the wide ranging genre of fiction in general, not limited to LGBTQ or Science Fiction. This is definitely a book I see myself returning to and I can't recommend it enough.

This was also posted to my goodreads.