In A Dark Future, These ‘Upright Women’ Bring Hope

In Sarah Gailey’s last novel, Magic for Liars , the author entirely upended the threadbare fantasy tropes of chosen ones and wizardry schools. But their new work, Upright Women Wanted , doesn’t deal in fantasy at all. Instead of tackling magic this time around, Gailey has populated their novella with forces we know all too well in the real world: homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, patriarchy, fascism, perpetual war, and the fraught, post-truth minefield we find ourselves navigating today. But it’s the book’s setting that allows Gailey to explore these ideas in a fresh way — it takes place in an indeterminate future where the United States has devolved into a society that resembles the Old West. Esther Augustus is a young woman who has just witnessed the unimaginable: the public execution of her clandestine lover, Beatriz, for “deviance” and “the possession of unapproved materials.” In this far-flung but all-too-believable tomorrow, information is strictly controlled by the government;