The best weird, speculative books with sapphic main characters

I was pleasantly surprised by just how weird this book is.

It is, as it was often marketed to me, “gay necromancers in space,” but it’s so much more than that. Disorientation, cerebral puzzles, and intricate worldbuilding permeate this whole book from chapter one. Tamsyn Muir is unapologetic about writing exactly what she wants, even if it’s outside a lot of readers’ comfort zones.

I found the strangeness of the societies, the challenges, and the mysteries woven into this book intriguing. It’s a murder mystery! In a high-stakes competition! With queer female main characters who have a lot of friction but are nonetheless deeply devoted to each other!

I loved how new and fresh it felt and that I couldn’t predict what would happen next.

A deeply romantic novella that spans time and space.

I really enjoyed this exploration of romance that could only be achieved by two time-traveling superhumans. The image of a love letter written in the rings of a tree has stayed with me for years.

It’s rare that I root for a couple as strongly as I did for Red and Blue throughout this story. It was magical to read about how they fell in love, the strangeness of how they altered the universe for each other, and all of the wartime tension and wild worldbuilding in between.

I view this book as an equal mix of cosmic deep-sea horror, exploration of loneliness, and marital devotion.

I really appreciate that this book follows two flawed women across multiple periods of time, on land and in the deep sea, and across the full length of their relationship. The weight of one of them disappearing beneath the ocean for months profoundly affects both of them–mentally, emotionally, and physically–in different and weird ways, but underneath everything is an enduring love.

I particularly enjoyed the slow-moving body horror in this one, plus the escalating creep of being stuck at the bottom of the ocean for months and the overarching terror of losing the one you love.

I found myself surprisingly captivated by this present-day body horror mermaid transformation tale focused on a high school swim team.

This novel follows a gradual decline from an everyday reality towards an increasingly unhinged climax, and I appreciated how slowly this sneaks up on you. Even though the book makes no secret of where it’s ultimately going, I was still pleasantly surprised about how we got there and the weirdness of the ending.

The sapphic relationship between the protagonist and her best friend is a key throughline, with an interesting dichotomy between the best friend’s long-term adoration and the protagonist’s relative detachment and bitterness.

This is an ambitious story about a sexually-transmitted otherworldly city, and Valente expertly delivers on that concept.

When this book was first published in 2009, it was rare and controversial to have bisexual main characters and multiple sapphic trysts in a speculative novel. It was, therefore, one of the first weird, sapphic books I ever read, and I was absolutely delighted to discover it.

While thoroughly weird in content, the prose is poetic and lush, and the overall strange, beautiful tone of this novel has stayed with me throughout most of my adult life.