As a genderqueer non-binary person who always felt alone and invisible, it has been incredible to see the change taking place, particularly in YA, as more and more trans and non-binary authors get to tell their stories. Had I been able to read even one of these books as a teen, I might’ve avoided many years of unhappiness. Also, I’ve always been drawn to fantasy and science fiction, perhaps due to my need and desire to escape mundane reality, but I truly love how these genres let the imagination run riot, particularly when authors imagine kinder and more accepting worlds for LGBT+ people.
I hate Ikea stores. To me, they are hellish landscapes and this book—set in a fictional store modelled after Ikea—just gets me! This novella is a hilarious romp through the multiverse, balancing swashbuckling adventure with quiet yet razor-sharp insight into the ebb and flow of romantic relationships. This story shows that navigating love can be even more complicated than navigating interdimensional wormholes!
Nino Cipri's Finna is a rambunctious, touching story that blends all the horrors the multiverse has to offer with the everyday awfulness of low-wage work. It explores queer relationships and queer feelings, capitalism and accountability, labor and love, all with a bouncing sense of humor and a commitment to the strange.
When an elderly customer at a Swedish big box furniture store ― but not that one ― slips through a portal to another dimension, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company’s bottom line. Multi-dimensional…
Dark Factory is a very strange object, as it is both a
book and an electronic device, as you can scan QR codes and click on links in
order to get extra information through bonus chapters.
A tale of electronic
music madness and extreme clubbing, Dark Factory focuses on the personalities
and motives of a few central characters dedicated to starting a total revolution
of the senses through their “art total” experiment.
This book really tickled me
in all the good places as it tackles themes that readers can find in my own
city-state novels, such as power, subversion, and the methodical destruction of
reality.
Welcome to Dark Factory! You may experience strobe effects, Y reality, DJ beats, love, sex, betrayal, triple shot espresso, broken bones, broken dreams, ecstasy, self-knowledge, and the void. Dark Factory is a dance club: three floors of DJs, drinks, and customizable reality, everything you see and hear and feel. Ari Regon is the club's wild card floor manager, Max Caspar is a stubborn DIY artist, both chasing a vision of true reality. And rogue journalist Marfa Carpenter is there to write it all down. Then a rooftop rave sets in motion a fathomless energy that may drive Ari and Max…
Why do I have a passion for getting lost in books? I guess it’s something that I’ve loved since I was a kid. Finding a world, a life, a life so incredibly different from mine. And, good writing that draws me in and makes me completely forget who I am. These are books that you don’t just read, but they envelop you. And, as a writer, it’s something that I strive to do for my readers.
I’m going to try really to not spoil this one…This is the story of two people who seem to be locked in life together, and not just locked in life, but repeating life. Sometimes they are friends. Sometimes they are lovers. There’s even a life where they are parent and child. The scenarios repeat – a bit of a Groundhog Day-ness to them. Then you quickly realize this is a cleverly disguised sci-fi, but despite all that, it’s the soul-mate-like connections that make us human.
'Beautifully explored and deeply complex' Gal Gadot
Joyful, devastating, and profound, Meet Me in Another Life is a story of love and connection in every possible form that will captivate fans of Stuart Turton, Claire North, and Audrey Niffenegger.
Thora and Santi have met before...
Under the clocktower in central Cologne, with nothing but the stars above and their futures ahead.
They will meet again...
They don't know it yet, but they'll meet again: in numerous lives they will become friends, colleagues, lovers, enemies - meeting over and over for the first time, every time; each…
Creative expression has been one of my most cherished values since childhood. I've always had a creative hobby of some kind since I was a kid. Not sure how that happened – my parents were tolerant of my interests at best. I made my day job career in the arts, fostering the creativity of community members and supporting the work of artists. Art (in the general sense of all forms of creative expression) is, to me, a defining characteristic of humanity, it makes life worth living, and the way it’s devalued under Capitalism both saddens and inspires me as a creator myself. I’m a writer of speculative fiction and I write about creative people.
Hunted by those who want to study his gravity powers, Jes makes his way to the best place for a mixed-species fugitive to blend in: the pleasure moon where everyone just wants to be lost in the party. It doesn’t take long for him to catch the attention of the crime boss who owns the resort-casino where he lands a circus job, and when the boss gets wind of the bounty on Jes’ head, he makes an offer: do anything and everything asked of him or face vivisection.
With no other options, Jes fulfills the requests: espionage, torture, demolition. But when the boss sets the circus up to take the fall for his about-to-get-busted narcotics operation, Jes and his friends decide to bring the mobster down. And if Jes can also avoid going back to being the prize subject of a scientist who can’t wait to dissect him? Even better.
Hunted by those who want to study his gravity powers, Jes makes his way to the best place for a mixed-species fugitive to blend in: the pleasure moon where everyone just wants to be lost in the party. It doesn't take long for him to catch the attention of the crime boss who owns the resort-casino where he lands a circus job, and when the boss gets wind of the bounty on Jes' head, he makes an offer: do anything and everything asked of him or face vivisection.
With no other options, Jes fulfills the requests: espionage, torture, demolition. But…
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which Time Magazine listed as one of the hundred best fantasy novels of all time. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night, Victories Greater than Death, and Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. She organizes the long-running spoken word series Writers With Drinks, helps to organize tours of local bookstores, and also co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, Slate, and the Boston Review.
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.
Dark, irreverent, and truly innovative, the speculative stories in Homesick meditate on the theme of home and our estrangement from it, and what happens when the familiar suddenly shifts into the uncanny. In stories that foreground queer relationships and transgender or nonbinary characters, Cipri delivers the origin story for a superhero team comprised of murdered girls; a housecleaner discovering an impossible ocean in her least-favorite clients' house; a man haunted by keys that appear suddenly in his throat; and a team of scientists and activists discovering the remains of a long-extinct species…
My
Goodreads review of this book just says, “Yes yes yes yes yes this is the good
stuff,” if you want a sign of my emotional reaction to Our Wives Under the
Sea.
This
is a gorgeous, compact, spooky, haunting novel about a marriage falling apart,
and it came into my life at exactly the right time. Miri’s wife, Leah, is an
undersea explorer who vanishes for months under the water without a trace.
Finally, she returns—but has all of Leah come back?
I
would call this half dark fantasy horror, half contemporary queer literary
fiction. Or Mitski meets The Haunting of Hill House. It checked all my
boxes, and I whipped through it in two sittings. In other words, “the good
stuff.”
Named as book to look out for in 2022 by Guardian, i-D, Autostraddle, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, Stylist and DAZED.
Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home.
To have the woman she loves back should mean a return…
I took an introduction to philosophy class in college and the professor showed us how to think about thinking. Can you know something if it’s actually untrue? Can people in a universe with an omniscient god who knows what they’re going to do have free will? Are there universal principles of justice, or is justice based on circumstances? The class changed my taste in reading. I’d read science fiction and fantasy since I was a child, but after this class, I looked for fiction that made my brain hurt but also told a wonderful story. I try hard to meet this standard in my own fiction.
I actually got to read this book before it was published because Jessica Freely was in my writer's group.
I fell in love with the characters and was thrilled whenever we got a new chapter. The plot twists and turns, and the finale is nail-biting suspense with mind-altering twists along the way.
It’s a book I wish I had written. Jessica passed away last year, but this novel is a powerful legacy.
It sucks being the son of a super villain. At home, Harry spends half of his time getting medical treatments and the other half tied up in his father's underwater lair. It was different when his mother was alive, but she disappeared when Harry was six. He can't seem to stay out of trouble at school, and his new roommate, Antonin, thinks he's a spaz, but somehow Harry has to find a way to stop his father's evil plans. Antonin Karganilla wants to become a comic book artist, but other than that, being gay is the most normal thing about…
In grade school, I was taught that my ancestors in Borikén (Puerto Rico) were eradicated by the Spanish, just a few decades after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas. I have since become an Anthropologist of technology, where I study how the infrastructure failures and disasters like hurricanes are reactivating a dormant Taíno identity on my ancestral archipelago. My speculative fiction is inspired by this research and my fractured family history as a descendant of the Taíno, enslaved Africans, and their colonizers from Spain. In my stories, I challenge the narrative of my own extinction, imagining alternative pasts and futures where the Taíno are flourishing and Boricuas are free from American colonial rule (Taínofuturism).
Among the more insidious and tragic consequences of colonialism and its assimilationist policies is the eradication of indigenous conventions around gender and sexuality. In many indigenous communities, gender and sexuality do not operate in as binary as a fashion as they do in European societies.
Highlighting these historical and contemporary possibilities for what we might call queer identities (or “two-spirit” in some communities), is Joshua Whithead’s breathtaking “Indigiqueer” anthology, Love After the End. Contributors amend the provocation, the future is indigenous, to consider how the future is also queer or indigiqueer.
Weaving between the traditional and the contemporary, the past and the future, the ancestral and the posthuman, these tales of queer joy, love, and thriving remind us of what was lost and what is still possible as we strive toward mass decolonization.
This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories.
Here, readers will discover bio-engineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, motherships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through…
I grew up in Texas where sex-ed curriculums ranged from spotty and misinformed to totally nonexistent. Therefore, as a teenager, I learned about sex from the novels I read—at that time, I was devouring Meg Cabot and John Green books—and I remember wishing for more tangible information. (This was before Urban Dictionary and Tumblr, unfortunately.) Fast forward a decade, and I’m the one writing YA novels. I no longer live in Texas, but my passion for crafting sex-positive, uplifting, and accessible books for teenagers remains central to my life as a writer and reader.
This science fiction novel from Eliot Schrefer has it all: a thrilling adventure in space, a disembodied robot withholding information, and a pair of adorably opposite boys falling in love. This dramatic story about survival, love, and love as a means of survival is on the upper end of YA, but it’s one youdon’t want to miss! Be prepared to laugh, cry, swoon, and throw your book across the room in shock because this one will stick with you long after the final page.
They Both Die at the End meets The Loneliest Girl in the Universe in this mind-bending sci-fi mystery and tender love story about two boys aboard a spaceship sent on a rescue mission, from two-time National Book Award finalist Eliot Schrefer. Stonewall Honor Award winner!
Two boys, alone in space. Sworn enemies sent on the same rescue mission.
Ambrose wakes up on the Coordinated Endeavor with no memory of a launch. There's more that doesn't add up: evidence indicates strangers have been on board, the ship's operating system is voiced by his mother, and his handsome, brooding shipmate has barricaded…
I am a compulsive reader and writer of speculative fiction, in love with the genre’s capacity to extrapolate our present social, economic and technological into horrifying/astonishing futures. That being said, I need strong writing and compelling characters to pull me into a world and make it feel lived in and real. It’s this kind of emotional realism that I seek out as a reader and try to create as an author.
Curveball is less compelled by plot than by setting and character. Sorese’s future is gorgeously imagined in melting black, white, and gray with electric orange highlights. Every element–from the clothing to the tech to the furniture–is thoughtfully designed and elegantly rendered. Moreover, Curveball has some of the best acting I have ever seen in *any* graphic novel. A triumph!
Curveball is a science fiction graphic novel telling the story of a waiter named Avery coping with the ending of a difficult relationship. Having spent years attempting to build something substantial with an indecisive sailor named Christophe, Avery stubbornly holds on despite the mounting evidence against him. The idea of the relationship has eclipsed its reality and in Avery's already troubled life, the allure of something dependable is a powerful force.
Curveball focuses on the duality of hope and delusion. How ignorance is integral to surviving our day to day lives but can be incredibly destructive if allowed to blossom…
I am obsessed with books about people fighting for social justice—particularly around racism and the climate crisis (which are definitely interconnected). I have two main approaches: people with longstanding commitments to making change who take increasingly bold steps to fight for justice, and the accidental activists, who had no intention of taking on injustice, but found themselves in unexpected circumstances and rose to the occasion. I write stories about people—mostly women of color—who are part of teams and movements who fight to make the world right, and win. I think of myself as trying to create roadmaps for us to win in the fight against racism and the climate crisis in the real world.
When an unprecedented hurricane devastates the city of Houston, Noah Mishner finds shelter in the Dallas Mavericks’ basketball arena. Though he finds community among other queer refugees, Noah fears his trans and Jewish identities put him at risk with certain “capital-T” Texans. His fears take form when he starts seeing visions of his great-grandfather Abe, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy. As the climate crisis intensifies and conditions in the shelter deteriorate, Abe’s ghost grows more powerful. Ultimately, Noah must decide whether he can trust his ancestor — and what he’s willing to sacrifice in order to survive.
I love the way that this novella offers a deeply intersectional view of the climate crisis, and how critical it is to find solidarity among vulnerable populations whose vulnerability increases during disasters.
When an unprecedented hurricane devastates the city of Houston, Noah Mishner finds shelter in the Dallas Mavericks' basketball arena. Though he finds community among other queer refugees, Noah fears his trans and Jewish identities put him at risk with certain "capital-T" Texans. His fears take form when he starts seeing visions of his great-grandfather Abe, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy. As the climate crisis intensifies and conditions in the shelter deteriorate, Abe's ghost grows more powerful. Ultimately, Noah must decide whether he can trust his ancestor - and whether he's willing to sacrifice his identity and community in…
