Stories Worthy of Respect in a Democratic Society: The Novelization of TERF Island

A review of Simon Edge's fiction

Simon Edge began commenting on ‘gender identity’ in 2021 with The End of the World is Flat. Published in June 2023, his newest novel In the Beginning recycles the same characters with a new lead, expanding his theme with a new story, borrowing truths stranger than fiction to write uncanny speculation about the present.

Publishing has been an especially harsh environment for wrongthink lately, especially gender-related wrongthink. In order to tell stories worthy of respect in a democratic society, Edge has substituted zany beliefs that are not yet in fashion for those that are, circumventing the sensitivity readers. It is not quite as courageous or clever as Pramoedya Ananta Toer smuggling his fiction out of the Buru Island prison camp, but it will serve a similar purpose.

In both novels, Edge shows FIBs (Fashionably Irrational Beliefs) taking over everything, first by design and the second time by accident. Edge takes the term FIB from British Indian writer Ghurwinder Bhogal, who explai…