Contains: world without homophobia

July 14, 2019 8:06 AM

Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Recommendations, a database of queer science fiction and fantasy books. Search by genre, content, identity, and many other categories.
posted by zamboni (18 comments total)

First idle search, found something I have to read!
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:13 AM on July 14, 2019

There's something on the order of seventy books, with more being added. The curator has a listing of underrepresented categories on Twitter, so if anyone has suggestions, let them know.
posted by zamboni at 8:22 AM on July 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is wonderful - a good collection development tool for the librarian MeFis!
posted by lyssabee at 8:54 AM on July 14, 2019

Oh... oh, I love this, I browsed for a second and literally giggled with optimism about some of the premises, thank you so much for posting it!
posted by elsilnora at 9:45 AM on July 14, 2019

Rather surprised not to see Chrome by George Nader listed. Or I'm using the search wrong.
posted by Splunge at 11:57 AM on July 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've just read J. S. Fields' book Ardulum: first don (which I really enjoyed) and on their website they have a reading list full of intersectional lesbian speculative fiction, it is an excel spreadsheet with plenty of filter options.
posted by Fence at 12:22 PM on July 14, 2019 [3 favorites]

I don't have a twitter account, thankfully, but this website would probably be well served by visiting the long-established Aromantic and Asexual Characters Database and maybe limiting the "Genre" column to fantasy and science fiction.
posted by one for the books at 12:43 PM on July 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is fantastic, bookmarking to investigate (and probably suggest a bunch of stuff) later.

And there's a page count option! Page counts are fantastic!
posted by dinty_moore at 1:20 PM on July 14, 2019

RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS
posted by kyrademon at 1:58 PM on July 14, 2019

Oh thank you for posting. This is superb
posted by Faintdreams at 2:18 PM on July 14, 2019

I'm actually amazed, there were 31 books on the list I hadn't heard of. I've pretty thoroughly scoured every list I could find for queer SFF, so this was a nice surprise! Out of those 31, there were only 7 I didn't think I was interested in (mostly thrillers or hard sci-fi). My to-read list has grown even fatter. Very pleased.

That said, unless I hit a button somewhere and hid a bunch, it's missing:
- Meddling Kids and This Body's Not Big Enough For Both of Us by Edgar Cantero
- Passing Strange, by Ellen Klages
- The Witch Sea, by Sarah Diemer
- The Beast That Never Was, by Caren Werlinger
- The Wode series, by J. Tullos Hennig
- Carry On, by Rainbow Rowell (THIS seems like a huge oversight)
- The Last Herald-Mage series, by Mercedes-Lackey (also seems like a big oversight, unless its omission is due to not recommending it, which, yeah, there are reasons not to recommend it)
- The Errant Prince, by Sasha L. Miller
- Bone Dance, by Emma Bull
- The Darkest Part of the Forest, by Holly Black
- Iron & Velvet, by Alexis Hall

Best of those are Meddling Kids, The Wode series, Carry On, Bone Dance, and The Darkest Part of the Forest. Iron & Velvet is also highly enjoyable, but certifiable trash (in the best way).
posted by brook horse at 3:04 PM on July 14, 2019

Oh I see that these are only books the creator has personally read, which makes sense. I was confused as to how a New York Times bestseller and one of the most classic gay fantasy series got missed, but if the creator hasn't read them it wouldn't show up on the list. Time to make some recommendations!
posted by brook horse at 3:07 PM on July 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

Here's another list of ~500 SFF books with queer characters, with not quite as rich a dataset but lots of breakdowns by subgenre. (Yellow highlights indicate books that need confirmation.)
posted by quaking fajita at 6:08 PM on July 14, 2019 [4 favorites]

While we're at it, I'm going to toss in a couple other recent related articles.

Where Are All the Queer Men in Sci-Fi? (Barnes & Noble)
Through Doorways: Portal Fantasies as a Means of Queer Escape and Queer Hope (Tor.com) (Disclaimer: friend link)
posted by quaking fajita at 6:15 PM on July 14, 2019

Thank you, new books bought.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:29 PM on July 14, 2019

Oh, that's a fantastic resource. Thanks for posting!
posted by cortex at 9:46 AM on July 15, 2019

I was a bit disappointed to see absolutely no mention of disabled characters. I informed the curator as such.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 2:04 PM on July 15, 2019

DrAstroZoom, there is a box you can check under “Intersecting Identities” for “physically disabled”, if that helps.
posted by Bunny Boneyology at 6:24 PM on July 15, 2019