The time travelling gays of the Bible

For authors such as Elle Gunderson Taylor and Orson Scott Card, using the Bible to create a fictionalised retelling of stories from the religious text is nothing new. However, for his fiction debut, Siya Khumalo ponders biblical figures through a futuristic lens. While this could have been expected from Card — who often writes sci-fi — Khumalo takes it to another level in The Queer Book of Revelation.

The story follows John, who is a cog in The Federation — a regime that polices human emotion through the firm fist of artificial intelligence. It centres on him and his forbidden romance with Joshua (who is a rebel against the system). Their encounter is the result of John attempting to infiltrate the aptly named Feelers, a colony of humans opposed to The Federation’s mission.

The book is a speculative time trip, leaning into the genre’s alt history themes by reimagining events that occurred in the Bible. With similarities to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Khumalo pumps it full of daring philosophies and views on social ills. This is where the book shines the best. He looks through a satirical lens at the possibility of virtual real estate — not too far-fetched, seeing as people are emptying their wallets for NFTs and digital designer clothes — and a heteronormative society, and uses certain biblical texts to reflect on today’s society. 

This can be seen in the wiping out of Sodom and Gomorrah, where the corporate decision to destroy queer history reflects how homophobia was used to ensure the efficacy of colonisation. While many might cling to The Prince of Egypt as their favourite retelling of Moses’ adventures in northern Africa, Khumalo plays with a mashed-up timeline, where the classic story is interpolated with modern day South Africa to highlight populist politics and how media can be swayed by schemers such as the pharaoh Ramses II.

Whether it’s the never-ending cycle discussed in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed or the pitfalls of technovation, Khumalo delivers a myriad of observations about a society that keeps hitting the wall while attempting to progress — a point that becomes poignant with the book’s tech giants, who eerily mirror the ascent of Elon Musk. The tech of the future is exhilarating to observe. . To make clear a lot of information and context, Khumalo leans on dialogue, which shines in scenes between John and his intrusive AI, Veronica. This is also evident in the brilliantly written back-and-forth between Joshua and John, with the latter using nursery rhymes and the phonetic alphabet to distract The Federation, and Veronica, from transcribing their steamy conversation.

The book also stirs interesting ideas around virtual experiences and the commercialisation of people’s fantasies, taking vapid musings from Scott Westerfeld's brilliant 2005 dystopian Uglies novel series and trying to expand on them. While John is sold as the main character, it’s the ragtag group known as the Burning Sodomites who take up most of the time spent reading the adventures in the story. Tasked with recruiting John to prevent a catastrophe in the future, they work for a time-based security and insurance company, ensuring timelines aren’t tampered with or narrowed. 

Their department is so named because it comprises queer characters lead by a lesbian, Sophia. The Burning Sodomites call the universe’s first artificial planet home, and have never visited Earth. Their curiosity about our history opens them up to maladies and observations that challenge the group’s beliefs throughout their perilous missions. While the story attempts to be everything, everywhere all at once, the blurb sells itself short in pretending it’s based on John’s experiences. This is where problems start to trickle in. One is kept wondering and waiting for the lovelorn storyline between the central characters, but instead the book zigzags into fantastical concepts. John and Joshua (yup, the names are based on the Bible characters) became inconsequential and their storyline becomes less interesting. 

In exploring characters unbound by time, we view it through the limited gaze of cisgender queers, never looking at different gender identities or complex experiences in terms of sexuality. With John being a potential audience surrogate, we lose out on experiencing the main timeline, and the book instead opens up the problem of never-ending explications. As a result, it plagues the dialogue. While it’s fun to see how Khumalo creates long-winded and often humorous epistemological conversations between characters, there are instances where the book is bloated, with characters offloading sociopolitical sentiment about today’s ills. 

Without committing to any of its futuristic worlds, the characters communicate ideas in a manner that feels out of touch with the time periods they visit. And while trend cycles birth renaissances, it’s easy to get thrown off by the litany of 21st century pop cultural references, which feel misplaced in centuries where the concept of entertainment would have morphed. 

While it might be a trippy never-ending story, The Queer Book of Revelation is a great canvas for Khumalo to showcase what can be done with the sci-fi genre. Religion has been his wheelhouse — as per his biography, You Have To Be Gay To Know God — and the novel is at its best when plunging head first into prose. A highlight being the venturesome sex scene between Leah and Jacob in a reimagined telling of the moment “God” opened her womb. With a decline in readers of sci-fi, it would be exciting to see Khumalo unearth more interesting concepts in the genre — especially when the satirical nature of these books requires a writer with a firm finger on society’s pulse.