This might not fit here, but I just feel like it’s something to get off my chest.

As a fantasy reader primarily, I am no stranger to racism and homophobia when it comes to literature and the media I consume. But when it comes to interacting with these communities, I have never felt such vitriolic hatred before until I tried to get into science fiction.

I know this isn’t new or groundbreaking, but it sure is tiring and disheartening. Just asking for recommendations for books that have POC or LGBTQ+ leads causes crazy amounts of hate and anger; you would have thought I was being racist myself.

This kind of completely boggles my mind considering a staple in the genre is Star Trek, and I assumed that a story so ahead of its time and progressive would shape the stories consumed today in sci-fi.

Have you not had any negative interactions like this?

It's July! As pride month draws to an end, what better way to carry that energy forward than to curl up and explore some new queersff worlds? The number doesn't quite compare to the big wave of pride publications, but we're happy to report that there's still a lot of cool books coming out this month. Here are our top 12 picks!

1. Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle: Love is real! Chuck Tingle returns with another horror novel, this time about a grave robber and a dead rockstar come back to life. 

2. The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell: From the author of "Someone You Can Build a Nest In", comes a new book about a disabled four three-headed dragon with a different personality per head. He infiltrates the local dragon riding academy for snacks but finds himself an excitable dragon rider instead. 

3. Moss'd in Space by Rebecca Thorne: A new first in series from the author of the Tomes & Tea series! Follow MC Torian aboard an alien spaceship with sentient moss. You can find an early spoiler-free review by u/Ryukotaicho here 

4. We Were Never Here by Sophia Hannan: An exciting debut involving art thieves, ghost hunting, haunted mansions and murder. 

5. Felicity Complex by August Clarke: A dystopian cold war era satire set in a luxury nuclear bunker for billionaires, staffed by lab-grown women who may not be as compliant as intended…

6. Null Entity by Seth Haddon: The sequel to Volatile Memory, we're back for bloody revenge on the techbros running the galaxy

7. Misery's Wife by Joan Tierney: This is a queer cli-fi reimagining of a Portuguese folktale, featuring a trans woman MC. There's a jester involved, as a bonus. 

8. Ladies of the Knight by Fiona Marchbank: We saw this is a graphic novel about sapphic knights and it immediately made the list 

9. I Do Not Apologize for My Position on Men by Rae Wilde: A collection of standalone sapphic horror short stories, a quadrilogy of connected stories, and an interactive pick-a-path novelette. 

10. The Language of Knives by Haralambi Markov: An intriguing collection of queer short stories based on Slavic mythology

11. The Flayed Man by Chloe Lauter: Set in the Mojave Desert, MC is a doctor who struggles to manage her familial curse of bloodthirstiness, while also finding herself in a budding romance with a paramedic. 

12. Perverts by Mac Crane: A short story collection exploring queer bodies and desire. (Disclaimer: Not all the stories are speculative)

For the full list of July 2026 queer releases, please refer to our storygraph tag or our google sheet

Our sources were Smokedshelves’ Goodreads List, Netgalley, Locusmag and Queer Lit

Which new releases are you most excited for? Have we missed anything on our lists? Let us know in the comments 👇

July has finally dragged to an end ! Between the heatwaves, floods and fires around the world, it has really felt like we’re trapped in a cli-fi. Here’s hoping that August brings some milder weather along with the 62 (!) new queersff books lined up for release this month. 

With so many options there’s sure to be something for everyone, but here are the top 12 we’re most excited about: 

1. A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett - The highly anticipated third instalment of the Shadow of the Leviathan series. The brilliant unconventional detective Ana Dolabra and her long-suffering bi assistant Din find themselves in the empire’s meat production district with another murder mystery on their hands.

2. Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher - A very gay sequel to Swordheart. A traveling scholar discovers that the relic he is transporting contains a trapped immortal warrior. They might fall for each other 👀

3. The Divine Gardener’s Handbook: Or What To Do If Your Girlfriend Accidentally Turns Off the Sun by Eli Snow - If that title alone didn’t convince you, we would like to add that this a heated rivalry 😏 but for sapphic gardeners employed by a God. 

4. The Ink Eater by Alice G. Brooks - Gothic horror story featuring a homoromantic asexual MC who lives in a sentient house and spends his days eating stories, until he is interrupted by a shapeshifter of his own creation.

5. Earthbound by Saara El-Arifi - The final book of the obeah-inspired Faebound trilogy. Heartbreaks and hard truths clash in the fae realm as siblings Yeeran and Lettle continue on their journeys.

6. In What World by Bridget Morrissey - Another sapphic rivals-to-lovers entry ? on our highlights list ? It’s more likely than you think. We follow a couple of theatre kids who get swept up into alternate realities while searching for their missing teacher.

7. Season of the Serpent by Suyi Davies Okungbowa - The final instalment of the Nameless Republic, a West-African inspired fantasy trilogy. The stakes have never been higher as the world teeters on the brink of war.

8. Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay by Lex Croucher - The sequel to Gwen & Art Are Not in Love. This time, we get the POVs of Bridget (a sapphic knight) and Gabe (a reluctant royal), who are both severely burnt out by their duties. There’s sapphic AND achillean representation, so everyone’s happy.

9. The Halls of the Dead by S.M. Hallow - An attempted resurrection goes very, very wrong in this new gothic horror from the author of How To Survive This Fairytale. There’s necromancy, witch hunts, polyamory, and even an undead husband.

10. Bite Me by Jennifer Dugan and Kit Seaton - Lesbian. Vampire. Graphic Novel. Need we say more ? Fine, the love interest is also a Vampire Slayer. Perfect for fans of the cancelled Netflix series First Kill.

11. The Blue Moon Café & 24-Hour Occult Emporium by Lexie Sharabianlou - A sapphic cozy fantasy where the worst coffee shop in town is actually a front for a magical witness protection program ☕

12. A (Dead) Thing Like Me by E.G. Young - A campy YA horror debut where Hot Dog, the teen ghost protagonist, haunts a food cart in NYC. But the haunter becomes the haunted when she is accidentally summoned to the eerie home of a grieving girl in Florida. 

For the full list of new releases, please refer to our online spreadsheet or our storygraph tag. Let us know if we missed anything and we’ll add them in !

Here are our sources: 

• Netgalley

• Smokedshelves’ Goodreads List

• Locusmag

• Barnes and Noble

• Every Book a Doorway

• Publisher’s Weekly

• Storygraph

• Indie Next List

• saphicallyreads (Instagram)

• eloise_bradbooks (Instagram)

Which books are you most looking forward to ? Have you already read the ARCs of some of these ? Let us know in the comments 👇

This is kind of a bit of a rant and may not be the space for it but I’ve been thinking out it for awhile. Why does both sci fi and fantasy have such a fear of creating gay male protagonists? Especially sci fi, like lesbian protagonists are quite common but an actual gay male protagonist in a series that isn’t a full romance is rare. While there are fewer lesbian characters in the genre the vast majority of the gay male ones are side characters who have little relevance to the plot and the ones that do have them a protagonist is because they are just romance novels. Why are gay men rarely a part of hard sci fi or epic fantasy settings? Like where is The way of kings but Caladin likes to kiss boys sometimes? Wheres The Expanse or massive space opera but it has a gay male protagonist? It just feels weird to only ever see myself as villains or side characters in the genre I love so much.

Lesbian knights!!!

Spear is a short story set in Wales. Griffith uses myriad different established legends to tell a new and unique story set in Arthurian times, telling the story of Peretur (Percival), who is a young woman raised by her mother in a cave who dreams of becoming a knight/companion for King Arthur (Arturus).

You’ve got Nimuë, the Lady of the Lake. You’ve got disability rep. You’ve got discussions about class and the corrupting nature of power. You’ve got poly relationships. You’ve got lesbian sex (extremely low spice).

For a novella, this book is absolutely amazing. I had such a good time reading this.

After the inundation of publications in the last two months, the number of releases has finally started to ebb, with “only” 60 new queerSFF books out this November. You can find the full list in our storygraph tag or our online spreadsheet. 

As usual, we’ve fished out a handful of gems to highlight, so here are our top 12 picks: 

• This Knight Topples Empires by Ry Herman - From the author of This Princess Kills Monsters, this fairytale retelling features a non-binary main character who seeks to escape their family and foil a plot against the throne. This of course has nothing to do with the princess they might have a crush on. 

• Selkies & Skeptics by Elias Cold - If you’ve read The Duke Steals Hearts & Other Body Parts you might like this new release from the same author. Desperate to escape her life of isolation, a girl lies her way into a faerie research society, led by a charismatic trans boy. She soon finds that she’s not the only member with secrets to hide. 

• The Last Star In The Void by Melissa Caruso - The third and final book of the Echo Archives series is finally here ! This time Kembral is tasked with solving…her own murder ?! All while reality threatens to unravel around her. Easy Peasy.

• The Animals We Became by Finn Longman - A retelling of the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd, where a creature seeks to be free of the magician that created them. The author (who also wrote The Wolf and His King) has described it as a “very trans book”. 

• Monoceros by Bitter Karella - You’ll recognize this author if you participated in this month’s book club, or from last month’s highlights. In her latest novella, a struggling man gets turned into a unicorn, and it might be the answer to all his problems. 

• Girls Walking with Wolves by Jenna Baner - A Little Red Riding Hood retelling, where the main character is a blind aroace girl who walks through the woods daily to visit her ailing grandmother. The huntsman’s a creep in this one, but she finds herself a true friend in the last witch of the woods instead.

• Dead New World by Lin Darrow - It’s 3025, and even the dead cannot escape capitalism. With the help of holographic software, death has been “cured”, and the dead live on as “flicker ghosts” who offer small services. When flicker ghosts start going missing, it’s up to a trio of cohabiting specters to figure out who’s behind it. 

• Lonesome and Festering by Eric Raglin - This is a collection of horror and weirdlit short stories, featuring stories about fighting for love, surviving dystopia, and becoming your worst self under capitalism and fascism. 

• Strange Talk by Lynda Clark - Have your home appliances ever whispered, chatted or flirted with you ? Well then you’ll have something in common with Strange Talk’s main character. Her favourite, the Door, has gone silent though, and her nephew shows up for an unexpected visit in the middle of it all. Great for fans of the game Date Everything. 

• Murmuration by T.J. Klune - After his departure from Dreamspinner Press, T.J. Klune’s Murmuration is now being published by Tor books. It’s an eerie story about a local bookseller gradually realizing something is not quite right with his perfect little town. Where are the parents and children ? Why haven’t any of the people who left returned ? Who are those strange people in the photographs at the diner ? He’ll need to figure this out to protect the man he loves. 

• An Edge Sharp Enough by Jesse Q. Sutanto - The first book of a new dark fantasy series following an assassin, a scholar, a con man, and a guard in a race to rediscover powerful lost magic and save their world. 

• Woodfeast by Meg Ripley - In this sequel to Necrology, tensions continue to rise between the non-magical Freemen and the community of outlawed magical practitioners known as “The Dirty”. Nine year old Rabbit must team up with an odd set of allies to ensure the survival of her culture. 

Here are our sources: 

• Netgalley

• Barnes and Noble

• Locusmag

• Smokedshelves’ Goodreads List

• Kila Writes Queer SF Masterlist

• Every Book a Doorway

• Storygraph

• Amazon (Books Coming Soon)

• Kobo 

Let us know if we’ve missed something and we’ll add it in. 

Which books are you most looking forward to ? Have you already read the ARCs of some of these ? Let us know in the comments 👇

Murderbot was frequently recommended when I posted in another group looking for asexual characters in SFF.

It seems like we’ll be well-equipped to welcome spooky season this month since there are a whopping 113 queersff books being released. You can find the full list in our storygraph tag or our online spreadsheet. 

Not a horror fan ? Not to worry, a large portion of the list still consists of fantasy titles. It’s also a great month for queer scifi, with highly anticipated releases from popular scifi authors like Becky Chambers, Annalee Newitz and Yoon Ha Lee

Here are our top 12 new release highlights: 

1. As You Wake, Break the Shell by Becky Chambers - Five years since the end of the Wayfarers series, Becky Chambers is bringing us back to space with a sapphic story about a botanist, a pilot, and the pilot’s alien transport that she’s telepathically connected to. 

2. Find Me Where It Ends by Cassandra Khaw - Cassandra Khaw (The Salt Grows Heavy, Nothing but Blackened Teeth) returns with another horror novella just in time for Halloween. In this one, a young woman wakes up to find the black hound of Death at her front door, but welcomes it instead of being afraid. 

3. A Wall Is Also a Road by Annalee Newitz - What happens when an alien slime mold pays an academic visit to Earth and ends up in Pompeii ? Find out in this new book from the author of Automatic Noodle and The Terraformers.

4. Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun - If you’ve watched and enjoyed I Saw the TV Glow or Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the director Jane Schoenbrun is making their literary debut with an epic horror-scifi that spans decades and realities, and involves a mysterious realm behind the TV static that people seem to be disappearing into. 

5. Carrying by Samantha Josephs - In this horror debut, the main character Martha is a perfect wife, with a doting husband and stepdaughter. Her only secret ? She’s a trans woman and they have no idea. Complications arise when she impossibly falls pregnant and her body starts to change. 

6. Spoke by Kat Leyh - A post-apocalyptic graphic novel following the journey of a non-verbal bicycle courier in a world where all power sources were mysteriously neutralized. 

7. Quaint Folk by Bitter Karella - This is a new folk horror novel in which a stay-at-home mom is determined to make a fresh start at the remote island her family has moved to, but she soon discovers that this small town life is not as charming as she thought, and dark secrets await. Bitter Karella is also the author of Moonflow, which is this month’s book club pick !

8. What a Nightmare by Rebekah Faubion - Haven has learned to carefully set aside her true feelings, but all hell breaks loose when her literal nightmares become a reality. Should she try to curb this new power too, or embrace it ? 

9. The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow - A collection of historical fantasy short stories from the author of The Everlasting. All of them share a theme of defiance, with characters struggling against their unfair circumstances. 

10. As We Fall Through Time by Claire North - A genderfluid time traveller tries to make alterations to avert the fate of his lover. Another time traveller is sent down a similar path when she encounters her corpse in a museum. Time is a fragile thing though, and everything they’ve built threatens to come crashing down.

11. She Isn’t Herself Tonight by Hailey Piper - This is Hailey Piper’s second 2026 release, with the first releasing just last month and also featured on our highlights. Rabbit, the protagonist, has been abducted by aliens twice before, once when she was ten and again when she was twenty. Soon to turn thirty, strange happenings and transformations begin to plague her as she awaits her third abduction. 

12. Milkteeth by Caitlin Starling - October highlights wouldn’t be complete without a lesbian vampire entry, and as a bonus, it’s from the author of The Luminous Dead and The Starving Saints. Beatrice is a vampire responsible for raising other newly-turned vampires, but she must suddenly team up with a human OB-GYN to figure out why her body seems to be transforming into something even worse. (American readers will have to wait a bit longer for it to drop on November 10th)

Here are our sources: 

• Netgalley

• Barnes and Noble

• Locusmag

• Smokedshelves’ Goodreads List

• Kila Writes Queer SF Masterlist

• Every Book a Doorway

• Storygraph

• Amazon (Books Coming Soon)

• Kobo 

Let us know if we’ve missed something and we’ll add it in. 

Which books are you most looking forward to ? Have you already read the ARCs of some of these ? Let us know in the comments 👇

Cheryl Morgan (who runs the amazing queer SFF small press Wizard’s Tower books) did a piece on trans winners of SFF awards (and trans SFF writers more generally) for the upcoming Seattle WorldCon! It’s well worth a read. 💙🏳️‍🌈

Sorry if it’s not very understandable, I just can’t really put words to what I want to ask, but basically fantasy/ historical fiction queer with these sort of characters and a beautiful love story with the vibes of these pictures. I apology also for not tagging the authors, I found these images on Pinterest, if anyone knows please comment! Thank you!

LGBT+ danmei and baihe creators are being legally prosecuted in China as we speak due to anti-queer crackdowns, being psychologically tormented in detainment and given up to 10 years prison-time for the "crime" of writing queer stories, most of them being historical fantasy and other spec fic themed.

While it's tough to know what to do from across the ocean, something we CAN do in solidarity is this: Seven Seas Entertainment is the leading publisher & translator of danmei in the States and has been conspicuously silent. This silence sets a dangerous precedent of abandoning the most vulnerable communities when they most need support and transparency, all while still profiting off the popularity of their work. This Change petition was made in partnership with queer Chinese writers to hold Seven Seas accountable to their community. Please share around!

https://www.change.org/p/creators-are-being-imprisoned-where-is-seven-seas-entertainment

I asked you all for recommendations of queernorm sci-fi for a list I was writing, so I thought I should share the list here! These 10 queernorm sci-fi books star queer main characters and are set in universes where transphobia and homophobia don't exist.

Hi r/QueerSFF! I'm dave ring, publisher and editor at Neon Hemlock. We're a small press that primarily publishes speculative fiction novellas, along with zines and chapbooks and anthologies and Baffling Magazine (tagline: "speculative flash fiction with a queer bent"). A bit stolen from our website: Publishers Weekly once called us “the apex of queer speculative fiction publishing” and we’re still beaming. Book Riot did a lovely profile of us in 2022.

(It's mostly just dave behind the scenes on the Neon Hemlock side of the house, although he is prone to a royal we when speaking on behalf of the press).

I'm joined today by ten or so authors I think, who will hopefully chime in below to identify themselves. We'd be delighted to chat about about our work, our obsessions, our fav SFF, or anything us you want to know about.

Some things right now I'm working on:

• Finishing up edits on the anthology Shatter the Sun: Queer Tales of Untold Adventure, a book of sweaty sword and sorcery

• Ramping up a crowdfund of space opera and fashion, What Elegant Stars: Queer Tales of Impossible Fashion, over on Kickstarter

• Getting two novellas ready to go out the door soon: Cyberscion by Thomas Bulen Jacobs and The Mystery of the Bitten Peach by Cecilia Tan

• Ideating on a zine of trans fairy tales, commissioned by a patron in an earlier crowdfund

• Trying to get someone to lend me their castle for a writing retreat (I am thus far unsuccessful)

We are also hype as hell that y'all are reading Wendy Wagner's The Secret Skin right now for book club.

Thanks for having us! AMA!

I have recently finished Robin Hobbs' Elderling books - there are 9, and I'm absolutely floored.

If you are yearning for an exceptionally carefully and skillfully well written fantasy series to get lost into, I wholeheartedly recommend Robin Hobb. She doesn't come up in queer reading lists because they don't feature queer romance per se, but they are very queer minded. There is queer angst and confusion. There is a lot of, especially later, exploration of gender with a main character that is gender fluid in a very interesting way. There are main themes of personhood and interconnection. There is deep lore and the world feels expansive. There's a lot of trash out there, but I felt in very good hands with the depth of quality throughout the series.

Cozy fantasy enjoyers rejoice, pumpkin spice season is upon us ! It’s a big month for queer retellings, with upcoming reimagined versions of Frankenstein (Adam, Mine. by K. Ancrum), The Invisible Man (A Most Abhorrent Vessel by Marat Earendel), Bluebeard (A Thousand Monstrous Forms by Saratoga Schaefer), and two Shakespeare plays: Hamlet (Thoughts Be Bloody by Auden Patrick) and Twelfth Night (Hearts on the Table by Susan Metallo). 

We wrongly assumed that there wouldn’t be much lined up for September since everyone is saving their queer horror releases for October, but there are 88 new releases this month ! 

Here are twelve that particularly caught our eye: 

1. She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove - If you enjoyed Monsters and Mainframes (our recent book club pick), the author Barbara Truelove is returning with an equally exciting horror novel about a ghost possessing one of those unsettling antique dolls in order to exact revenge on the man who killed her.

2. Espíritu by Aiden Thomas - Six years after its release, Cemetery Boys is finally getting a sequel ! Julian is having dark visions that Yadriel cannot explain. Teaming up with Ángel, a new non-binary brujx, they must seek the root of these disturbances. 

3. Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske - A new fantasy murder mystery from the author of the Last Binding series. Group projects are bad enough, but in this magical medschool, five students must work together to pass the big exam that will dictate the rest of their lives. Things get complicated when their classmate is found dead on the same day. 

4. Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion by T. Kingfisher - Gaymers will love this Baldur’s gate 3 prequel focusing on Astarion’s backstory, as he plots to escape his vampire master’s control. Even better, it’s written by T. Kingfisher, who queersff readers will recognize as the author of the Sworn Soldier novella series, among other great fantasy titles. 

5. The Need by Megan Mostyn-Brown - Through multiple POVs, this follows two families that are afflicted with a rare genetic condition that forces them to cannibalize to survive. Their lifestyles are drastically different: one is constantly on the run, while the other lives in luxury. But dark secrets are boiling beneath the surface; perhaps they have more in common than they think?

6. A Thousand Monstrous Forms by Saratoga Schaefer - This is a sapphic retelling of the French folktale Bluebeard. After an impulsive wedding, a ceramic artist moves into the mysterious mansion of her rich art dealer wife. Naturally, it is haunted and contains an alluring forbidden basement. Curiosity may kill the cat.

7. This is How the World Ends by Disco Barrington - Set in a dystopian UK, torn by war, isolation and floods, this epistolary novella pieces together how things fall apart as the world ends. It features trans and sapphic rep, and is brimming with queer rage. 

8. Feed the Tree by Wendy Dalrymple - In the late 19th century, a bisexual woman seeking respite from her miserable life strikes a deal with a swamp witch, and will have to do unspeakable things to get what she wants. 

9. This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want by Hailey Piper - Somewhere in the 90s, three kids watched an obscure film at the cinema and all but one disappeared. Thirty years later, when the film comes back to haunt the sole survivor in the form of another murder, she teams up with her former cinephile classmate to get to the bottom of it. 

10. We, the Drowning by Lindz McLeod - A cli-fi dystopia where a disaster-ravaged earth is divided between two factions: The Parched (a desert commune clinging to survival) and the Flooded (a drowning cult). When war threatens to break out, Cole, a young trans man from the Parched, must go looking for solutions, with the help of a rescued Flooded girl, and a pink fairy armadillo. 

11. We turn Gruesome at Night by Eric LaRocca - The second instalment of the Burnt Sparrow Trilogy by Eric LaRocca, who is most well-known for his divisive horror novella Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. The story picks up ten years after the first book’s massacre, and Rupert must now delve into a secret organization that’s taking over the town.

12. The Shapeshifter’s Guide to Gym Class by Kai Cheng Thom - A charming middle-grade debut about a young shapeshifter girl navigating school life, while simultaneously dealing with her surprising new giant moth wings (?!) and the growing societal prejudice against shapeshifting folks. 

For the full list of new releases, please refer to our online spreadsheet or our Storygraph tag. Let us know if we missed anything and we’ll add them in !

Here are our sources: 

• Netgalley

• Smokedshelves’ Goodreads List

• Kila Writes Queer SF Masterlist

• Locusmag

• Barnes and Noble

• Every Book a Doorway

• Storygraph

• Indie Next List

• Sapphically Reads (Instagram)

• Shayna’s Library (Instagram)

Which books are you most looking forward to ? Have you already read the ARCs of some of these ? Let us know in the comments 👇

Happy International Transgender Day of Visibility everyone! This thread is here to be a celebration of all things trans in speculative fiction. Share your favorite author, trans representation in sff, or anything else relevant. Trans writers and creators, this thread is exempt from our self promo rules, so you're most welcome to share anything and everything here!

If you're looking for some great trans stories, here's a roundup of some of the threads highlighted on our wiki:

• Underrated / indie trans stories

• Trans characters in cyberpunk

• Adult fiction with trans characters

• SFF with 40s+ trans main characters

• Fantasy with a trans lesbian character

• Books with a trans masc main character

• Books with trans femme representation

• Fantasy with a non-binary main character

• SFF books with a non-binary romance

I’ve seen it twice and I hated it both times.

A guy is a human in a magical police department. He has trauma from the magical creatures (which btw can easily be racial/minority allegories often due to how they’re treated in society however they are notably NOT people of color).

Human cop is assigned magical creature partner.

Human cop makes CONSTANT micro aggression to non-human partner, but he has these views due to trauma as if that somehow excuses the magic racism.

The non-human partner somehow falls for human guy???? Despite the constant insults and jabs????

It has been a white author both times btw. That feels relevant

I'm trying to read more epic fantasy as of late but every single one of them is so straight that I just lose interest before getting to the 100th page.

I'm new to epic fantasy so idk if I want the story to be more character focused or world building focused, but I need it to be queer romance or no romance I'm fine with whatever.

Thank you <3

Happy Pride everyone, I hope it is a great one! We've got a lot of books for summer! It's an especially good month for gothic horror and books about pirates. What's got you excited? With a blurb from Suzan Palumbo, I'll definitely be checking out Grief Eater! I'll probably grab Muñeca too. I'm also interested in Dreams in Which I'm Almost Human, a memoir about disability and identity through the lens of speculative fiction and storytelling. It's not strictly speculative, but I'm looking forward to Femmephilia by Sophie Lewis, essays of femme femininity exploring trans mermaids and yearning in mythology.

This is also my last new release dispatch here. It's time for me move on from modding this community, and I'm wishing you all the best. The new release lists will now be a free monthly newsletter instead, so you can get new books straight to your inbox. It has comments enabled so I hope you'll stay in touch. The (freshly updated) queer-owned bookstore list will be maintained over there as well. Lastly, I'm working on a searchable database of queer speculative books with detailed representation tagging, so stay tuned. I'm aiming to finish this summer, and it will live on the same site.

Disclaimer: Representation is my best guess via ARC reviews, blurbs, and Goodreads. Sources and Goodreads tags might be inaccurate. If something is blank I couldn't find more specific info, so probably safe to assume queerness is not central to the story.

Sources:

• Autostraddle

• Lavender Books

• Locus Mag

• LGBTQ Reads

• Queer Lit

• Proud Geek

• Them

• Every Book a Doorway

• Netgalley, Tor, Orbit, Goodreads

• Book Riot If you are a Book Riot member they have a spreadsheet of over 400 queer releases coming in 2026.

I’ve just finished both “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers and the “A Memory Called Empire” duology by Arkady Martine. And loved them both, despite their being very different books. That said, I’m now looking for more. I’m not particularly picky, but I do have some clear priorities: I want books with heavy political themes—especially ones dealing with Marxism, feminism, anti-imperialism, and queer liberation. If the story doesn’t engage with at least a couple of those seriously, I’ll probably lose interest fast.

I appreciate any recommendations that come my way! Thanks in advance!

This is a heads-up for those who, like myself, might have been in the habit of recommending works by Freydís Moon.

Freydís Moon has been recently revealed to be the pseudonym of a white author formerly called out on racism and racefaking, Taylor Barton. They are not Latinx or a person of color, and this is not the first time they have been caught pretending to be Latinx. Here is the link to a Twitter thread by one of their colleagues and a (now former) member of their private Discord server, Elle Porter, who found some truly damning evidence.

Please don't let this affect the way you engage with other authors who use pseudonyms (especially QPOC!!!), or the authors who used to have professional relationships with "Moon". They have purposefully gotten close to and exploited so many queer authors of color in order to lend more credibility to their scam.

I didn't see this posted here yet and thought readers would be interested in her I never had heard of Rachel Pollack until the Doom Patrol tv show and going down a wiki rabbit hole.

I've been posting in here about my book ever since I got my first feature on io9 and this sub has been very kind to me. I wanted to scream at everyone that my gay little cyberpunk mystery is up for one of the most coveted prizes in queer literature, an honor previously won by personal favorites of mine Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and Trouble And Her Friends by Melissa Scott (a huge inspiration on Bang Bang). Thank you so much to everyone who has read and loved and caped for Bang Bang Bodhisattva over the past year. The winner will be announced in June. Thank you!!!