Stephen Graham King (he/they) is a queer space opera writer, a black and white street photographer, a disabled cancer survivor, and an aspiring mensch. He lives and works in Toronto, and his works include Chasing Cold, as well as the five books in the Maverick Heart series.

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I write stories about a future I would love to live in, even though I’ll never live to see it. And that’s okay with me. I believe in playing the long game and working for a kinder, more inclusive, and more accessible future for people who may not walk the earth for many generations to come.

I can point to three specific moments in my life, three specific experiences that shaped the futures I wanted to write, and laid the foundations for the person and writer I became.

I was three years old when Star Trek first aired in 1966, and my earliest memory is sitting on the floor of our living room, watching with my sisters. And I imprinted on it, even though our old TV was black and white, even though so much of it must have gone over my head, I fell in love. When I was a little bit older and the reruns aired on our local station after school, I ran straight home to watch, always hoping it would be one of the episodes I hadn’t seen yet.

That vision of the future, diverse and optimistic, fascinated me, a little queer kid in a small prairie city that often did its best to crush kids like me. It made me long for all the future could be. Where people could co-exist with aliens, could explore and work for the benefit of everyone. In it, I could see a glimpse of something that might come for us all. If we were willing to work for it. I could see a future where maybe a little queer kid that the other kids didn’t understand could be welcomed.

I devoured science fiction after that. Everything I could read, everything I could watch on TV and at the movies. If it had spaceships in it, I was in. I had found my genre.

The second defining moment came in the Eighties. I was at university, thinking I was going to be an actor. And there was this incredible new wave of indie queer cinema happening. Stories by queer people, about queer people, and for queer people. My Beautiful Laundrette. Parting Glances. Desert Hearts. We were no longer the villain, the tragic figure that had to die for our perversion. We were the heroes, the main characters, the storytellers. We were reaching out to each other with our stories, showing each other that we had the right to exist. The right to speak. And to be heard. Maybe us telling those stories were a path to that future I wanted to see.  Maybe I could be one of those storytellers too.

So I started writing. I skipped writing short stories and jumped right into a novel. While it was mostly terrible, I found I could string together a story, having devoured and absorbed so many stories as I grew up. So, I wrote another novel. And then another one. And then, my life changed again.

I was almost forty when the third moment came, and unlike those that had come before, this one brought chaos rather than joy. I had moved across the country to Toronto with someone I loved, though we lost each other soon after. There I was in this place that had felt so far away and unreal when I saw it portrayed on television. I had lost my reason for coming but was already stumbling towards building a new life. So I stayed.

Then I was diagnosed with metastatic synovial sarcoma, a rare form of soft tissue cancer that, at the time, killed ninety to ninety-five percent of the people who get it.

Was my future even possible?

During the three-year course treatment, I was radiated, poisoned with chemo, and went through six major surgeries on my leg and lungs within ten years. It was hellish, but by some miraculous combination of luck and incredible medical professionals, I survived. I lost a fair amount of mobility in my left leg, but I’m here.

In those moments of anguish and fear, I turned to writing. I wrote the emotions. I wrote the sensations. I wrote what the hospitals and treatments felt like. I wrote about the astonishing kindness and skill from the medical professionals I encountered. I used words as the only weapon I had against the disease. I used words to build myself back together. To figure out what, if anything, it all meant. I wrote the story of my cancer and ended up understanding the experience and making peace with it. A future existed for me once again. One I could not have ever imagined.

Because writing that story, exploring that fight for my life, made my science fiction writing deeper, richer, more nuanced in its imagination. I was a better writer for having dived into that well of horror and grief. Even when I wasn’t writing about those things at all.

After that, in those days of renewed health, when the future once more became possible, I wrote some short stories that were published. Then I turned one of them into a novel that I found a publisher for. And when I went back to the two unpublished novels I had completed, I was able to dive into them with a new, surer hand.

I’ve now published six novels, am working on a seventh, and have completed a collection of essays. Writing and getting to share my stories with people who get them, who enjoy them, is maybe the greatest joy of my life. I am the sum of those three pillars, along with every other piece of life in between. And so are the books I write. And I write of inclusive, hopeful, complicated futures. And in my futures, queer is never the problem. Nor is disability. We have taken our place among the stars.

In the pages of my stories, we are valued. We are seen. We are not alone.

In my future, we can be heroes.