Fans pick 100 books like Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night

This might be cheating a little, as the ‘dragon’ in this book is actually a giant robot-like mecha that is piloted by human soldiers, but I couldn’t leave this list without a mention of Iron Widow.

This is a fierce feminist fantasy re-imagining of China’s only female sovereign, Wu Zetian, and it absolutely pulls no punches. A furiously paced story of vengeance and redemption, this book was a thrill from start to finish.

After I quit my law firm and was trying to decide what (if anything) I wanted to write, I read Kushiel’s Dart. This book convinced me that whatever stories I wanted to tell, no matter how extreme, I could tell them within science fiction/fantasy. And it really puts the “alternate” in alternate history.

During the Roman Empire, angels came to earth and mated with mortals in the area of modern France, again producing a race like the biblical Nephilim, only sexier, and with one commandment: “Love as thou wilt.” In this Europe that never knew a dark age, the angels’ descendants pursue love, power, and intrigue, and at the center of their plots is Phèdre, a courtesan spy fighting to save her land from betrayal.

Shocking and wonderful stuff! 

This novel is the start of a mesmerizing series about being in love with two of your very dear childhood friends, or possibly five of your childhood friends, and feeling inexplicably compelled to return to the eerie ancient manor home where the six of you first spent the summer together. Rare books, dreams, pagan rituals, and a whole lot of sex—what’s not to love? This book really captures the dark, wintery, haunted, strangely out-of-time atmosphere of the house, and it’s extremely (t)horny, putting all of Sierra Simone’s incredible skill on display. This is the kind of complex, emotional writing I aspire to.

This story about a broke, aimless young man who inherits a haunted house in Louisiana from his great-aunt and falls in love with the house’s ghost instantly captivated me. Noel, the young man, is a witty point-of-view character, and Ruby, the indomitable ghost, is sexy and endearing and has every reason to be enraged. The house and its history—a plantation house where Ruby’s formerly enslaved grandfather carved all the beautiful woodwork and was never credited for his artistic labor—are characters in their own right, and I was thrilled when Noel and Ruby’s happily ever after included an occasional threesome from local historian Nina. The writing is wonderful and makes every character come alive—especially the ghost.

Don’t be fooled by the initial MF pairing of this book, A Lady of Rooksgrove Manor is very queer and very spicy.

Kathryn Moon does a fantastic job creating a realistic example of a polyamorous relationship in a genre where most authors tend to just like creating conflict. Each partner to the main character has unique, well-negotiated relationships not only with the main character but also with each other.

These relationships range from sexual to queer, platonic, and scratches the itch that every queer person has to build a commune out in the wilderness with all their closest friends that they may or may not make out with sometimes.

Transgender anarchist author Margaret Killjoy’s collection of short speculative fiction stories, We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow, is a stark contrast to the dazzling high-tech fantasies and cinematic adventures of my first three recommendations. Most of these stories are set in disturbingly plausible and not-at-all-distant futures, and veer into the territories of dark fantasy, gritty dystopianism, and atomspheric horror. No interplanetary space opera here; Killjoy’s protagonists are earthbound, anarchistic outcasts and misfits struggling to survive on the edges of society or in society’s ruins, in worlds gone unfathomably strange. And Killjoy writes it all beautifully, with a clarity of description that often left me stunned by its simple poetic power. This one’s for you if you like your speculative fiction close to the bone.

The Ethical Slut is an evocatively titled primer on polyamory as a relationship model.

It is intentionally written as an introductory resource that is very enthusiastic about the possibilities it presents, which is useful in a space that often feels it must make constant apologies for existing or is full of higher-level works about niche sub-topics.

It addresses key topics such as consent, communication, concerns about raising a family, and more. Older editions suffer from ill-considered language around transgender people that feels dated at best, but more recent editions have been updated to reflect changing demographics and be more considerate to this and other minorities. 

Jordy Rosenberg does something clever and innovative with the historical fiction genre and reimagines the historical figure of Jack Sheppard as a transgender man. This is a bit of a two-for-one as there’s also the metatextual story, told through footnotes, of a contemporary trans academic who comes across the ‘confessions’ of Jack. It’s playful, knowing, and slippery. It made me think a lot about the nature of history and what we project onto the people of the past. It pairs beautifully with the Bad Gays podcast. 

I’ve never been to the marsh and fenlands of East England, but the descriptions of them in this book have made me really want to visit them!

This book of speculative short fiction includes some of the best queer representation I've seen in ages. "A Silly Love Story" includes a gender-fluid character named Merion, and "Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff" includes a trans grad student named Min. Cipri manages to combine the surreal and illogical with a pervasive sense of warmth and humanity, which is a nearly impossible feat, and they make it look easy. Each story will leave you wondering what happens next, but the characters will also live on in your imagination long after you've turned the page.

This is hands down one of my favorite science fiction books ever, and it is very atypical for science fiction. No big space battles, no hungry aliens. Just three people trying to figure out their lives and how they work together, all while humanity prepares to launch our first expeditions beyond the solar system. Of Kindred and Stardust features a diverse cast (in terms of ethnicity and gender), a polyamorous romance, and a polytheistic protagonist who keeps an altar for the Goddess and ancestors in his room and who looks forward to attending his family’s solstice celebration. This is what the future might actually look like, with polytheism (and polyamory) fully accepted into society.