“In this brilliant and breathtakingly inventive debut, Lake captures the nuances, pain, and absurdity of obsession and idolization as we follow this refreshingly original narrator navigating the all-too-relatable process of feeling comfortable in one’s own skin and becoming a self. I couldn’t put this book down.”

—Zaina Arafat, author of You Exist Too Much

“Weird and wondrous, Lake’s eye-popping debut recalls the transgressive gender- and genre-bending of Jeanette Winterson and Samuel R. Delany but fashions something entirely original.”

Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Future Feeling will fit on your shelf right next to Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl . . . Lake has constructed a wonderful world where trans identity is celebrated and centered, where trans characters are allowed to be messy and complicated and human. It’s, quite honestly, the kind of book I’ve been waiting for for a really long time. I’m so glad it’s finally here.”

Christina Orlando, Tor

A.B.L.

The summons arrived the day after the wedding. Through honeyed dreams, I heard the knock.

Pulling on a stiff cotton robe, I shuffled to the door, stepped into the dark hallway.

There it was on the navy carpet, the magenta wax seal on a normative manila envelope.

I picked it up and pressed it to my muscular chest.

It was a literal miracle that I had gotten this far, that I, once-lowly Pen—always prying into other peoples’ lives, loosening the line around myself and diving headlong into others’ dramas, tastes, phrasings, ways of wearing a dick—was now being called to the Rhiz-Port for the next level of initiation.

I snuck back into the stuffy room with the summons and threw myself down on a sofa to prepare myself to open the envelope. My love rolled over in bed.

I wanted the Rhiz to know how I felt. Read me with your Bio-meter! See the golden power that lights me up! I wanted to shout, but the messenger was gone, and my love still slept.

1

In order to explain how I was called to the Rhiz-Port the day after the wedding of Aiden Chase and Rachel Remedios, we have to start back in my less-enlightened days on the other, more miserable coast.

A few years ago, I became a man in the city while working as a dog walker, creeping into other peoples’ houses to retrieve their pets, obsessing over their interiors, their quilts, and their adv-tech aromatherapy spritzers. I’d been a hopeful child—even after my parents were killed—but as I transitioned, injecting myself with shaky hands every week, I crossed into the Shadowlands, where inconvenient oozes get dumped and scorpions scuttle.