A few days before I sat down to write this post, I asked a wide range of my acquaintance on the hellsite known as Twitter whether there were any novels or novellas featuring f/f relationships or starring queer women that they knew and were looking forward to in the second half of 2019 or definitely earmarked for 2020. It turns out that there are quite a few—forty-odd, in fact.
Progress is a fine thing.
Some of these novels were personally recommended to me by people who’ve previously had good form on telling if I’d like something. Some of them are sequels to novels that I deeply enjoyed, or from authors with a track record of writing things I enjoy. And some of them I know almost nothing about, besides their cover copy and the news that they’re queer. A handful I’ve already read. I’ll make it clear which is which, as I list them below.
Max Gladstone’s Empress of Forever (July 2019) is among the ones I’ve already read, and it is fantastic. Big and thinky and vastly full of space operatic madness. I’ve read The Hound of Justice by Claire O’Dell (July 2019) as well—it’s a satisfying sequel to A Study in Honor, her near-future Sherlock reimagining. And Fran Wilde’s The Fire Opal Mechanism (June 2019) is also a sequel of sorts, standing alone in the world of The Jewel and Her Lapidary, exploring love and growth, power and the tension between knowledge’s specificity and its accessibility, in a world threatened by totalitarianism. And Aliette de Bodard’s delightfully queer collection Of War, and Memories, and Starlight (September 2019) is a glittering group of stories that have a lot of queer women in them.
From friends who have been right before when they recommended me things comes word of A.K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name (February 2020) and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (September 2019), space opera Seven Devils by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May (June 2020) and fantasy The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith (September 2019), The Outside by Ada Hoffman (June 2019) and Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger (September 2019).
Buy the Book
Stormsong
Sequels or new works from authors I’ve enjoyed before is a longer list. Of course I’m deeply eager for C.L. Polk’s Stormsong (February 2020) and Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace (March 2020), sequels to Witchmark and A Memory Called Empire respectively. K.A. Doore’s The Impossible Contract (November 2019) and The Warrior Moon by K. Arsenault Rivera (September 2019); The House of Sundering Flames by Aliette de Bodard (July 2019) and Floodtide by Heather Rose Jones (November 2019). But this list also includes Girls of Storm and Shadow by Natasha Ngan (November 2019), City of Stone and Silence by Django Wexler (January 2020), The Forbidden Stars by Tim Pratt (October 2019), Alex White’s The Worst of All Possible Worlds (January 2020), Moontangled by Stephanie Burgis (February 2020), Unsung Heroine by Sarah Kuhn (July 2019), Lost Boys, the new Laundry novel by Charles Stross (late 2020), Down Among the Dead by K.B. Wagers (December 2019), and A Pale Light in the Black, also by K.B. Wagers (March 2020), which will start a new series in a different setting.
There remain fifteen titles of which I know almost nothing beyond title, cover copy, and a promise that it fits the criteria. Here they are, in (alleged: we all know the 2020 titles, at least, may yet move around) publication order:
- The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall (June 2019);
- Shatter the Sky by Rebecca Kim Wells (July 2019);
- A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker (September 2019);
- Crier’s War by Nina Varelas (October 2019);
- Tarnished Are the Stars by Rosiee Thor (October 2019);
- The Never-Tilting World by Rin Chupeco (October 2019);
- Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather (October 2019);
- Lady Hotspur by Tessa Gratton (January 2020);
- Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire (January 2020);
- Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey (February 2020);
- Queen of Coin and Whispers by Helen Corcoran (2020);
- The Dark Tide by Alicia Jasinska (2020);
- Belle Révolte by Linsey Miller (2020);
- When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey (2020);
- Witches of Ash and Ruin by E. Latimer (2020).
So tell me. What have I missed? Who else should be on this list? What are you most looking forward to?
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, where she’s been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
I got an advance copy of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, and it’s amazing! Sherlock Holmes meets The King in Yellow, just as political as you’d expect from that combination and much queerer. And thank you, I hadn’t actually known the release date!
Progress is still, as I have remarked before, distinctly towards celebrating queer women.
Still, novels featuring mlm are mostly relegated to self-publishing and never make it into brick and mortar stores, and still novels with enby protagonists remain about as rare as hens’ teeth. And still, no-one seems to ever comment on this, because OMG SO MANY QUEER NOVELS LOOK AT HOW GREAT PROGRESS IS!
Look at A Memory Called Empire! I loved it, it was a great novel very much in the tradition established by Leckie, and I’m eager for the sequel, but it featured the most insultingly half-assed attempt at enby inclusivity I’ve ever seen: a single sentence, where a person who isn’t even named is mentioned in passing as “a person of a gender Mahit didn’t recognise”. Not a single named or speaking character is non-binary, and despite her supposed obsession with Teiixcalaanli culture, Mahit never once thinks about how their handling of gender differs from her native culture. Because nor did Martine.
But hey, it’s another book with cis lesbians, and SO MUCH QUEER PROGRESS WOO YAY LET’S QUIETLY IGNORE EVERYONE WHO’S GETTING LEFT BEHIND!
More representation of any kind of queer people is good, but the continued silence of places like Tor regarding just how very one-sided the major publishers are in their selection of queer representation speaks volumes.
Crane, do you know the numbers on this one? Because I would have said that cis MLM is overwhelmingly the queer happening in YA SFF and SFF historically. Lackey’s Last Herald Mage trilogy. Kushner’s Swordspoint. Historically SFF has been happier to write about queer men than it has been about queer women and I’ve found it more difficult to find the latter than the former back in the 90s. I’m happy about this list and the sudden peak in WLW because in the past when discussing gay female books my friends group has certainly racked out brains and named maybe two. This certainly reflects a fen/fannish tendency towards M/M slash rather than F/F slash. I was very pleasantly surprised by the F/F relationship in Arkady Martine’s book as I hadn’t realised that going in as it wasn’t advertised as queer.
I would have said from a personal instinct rather than data that WLW has been the red headed step child of the bunch. Can’t comment on the lack of nonbinary, though I certainly enjoyed the Tensorate books written by a nonbinary author and would appreciate more of that representation in general.
You certainly have a fair point about the tendency for mlm to dominate in the fan communities, but when it comes to historical publications I’m not so certain. Off the top of my head I can only think of three big mlm series that were actually notable; Swordspoint, Last Herald Mage and Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunners.
Now, my awareness of what was contemporary during the 90s is limited, since I was quite young for most of them, but in terms of what actually made it into bookstores (in Britain at least) I sure as hell didn’t see much mlm. And now, currently, we have a hell of a lot more wlw (and mostly cis wlw at that) making it into brick and mortar outlets than we do any other kind of queer relationships.
And I know, people are going to talk about how the marketplace isn’t all about brick and mortar any more, and how great self publishing is, but the thing is that when it comes to those markets you have to actively go looking. As far as queer representation in fiction as a vehicle for queer acceptance in society is concerned, what matters is what a casual browser who isn’t specifically looking for queer content can pick up off the shelves. And at the moment, in the sci-fi/fantasy section, that’s almost always gonna be cis lesbians.
And often cis lesbians written by straight men, at that – Django Wexler and Seth Dickinson being the two most obvious examples I can think of for authors who get lots of publicity.
So, Robert Levy (a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award) has a novella coming out in October:
https://www.lethepressbooks.com/store/p585/Anaïs_Nin_at_the_Grand_Guignol.html#/
I wish Crane would check out smaller presses – like Lethe Press, which, for 18 yrs, has been releasing quality queer sf by queer authors.
I do! I have! Though sadly I don’t like much of Melissa Scott’s work except the Mathey and Lynes series (Shadow Man in particular was a truly brilliant setting sadly squandered on a dull story.)
But my issue isn’t “no-one at all is publishing queer stories that aren’t about cis lesbians”, but that books like those you’re publishing aren’t getting the same push into mainstream awareness as things like A Memory Called Empire, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Empress of Forever, The Tiger’s Watch et al, all of which get massive marketing pushes in places like this blog and which find their way into my local bookstores.
In contrast, when I wanted a copy of Point of Hopes (which I only discovered existed thanks to LiveJournal comments) I had to order it from Amazon.
Kai Ashante Wilson and Richard K. Morgan are the only male authors I can recall, of the top of my head, who have published fantasies featuring mlm. Otherwise the pickings are mighty slim.
Crane, I completely get the frustration, but in the very specific case of this blog post, it may be a case of shopping for apples in the orange market. Liz’s column is specifically focused on women in SFF, and this particular post says “queer women”. In that context, including books with non-binary characters could be seen as a form of erasure, and including books with queer male characters would be in contradiction of the column’s remit.
Someone very good to follow for promoting books with non-binary characters and themes is Bogi Takács who also has regular columns here at Tor.com.
See, I get that Liz focuses exclusively on women in SFF, and that’s her choice to make but the fact that her column is a very regular thing, which has a constant stream of new releases to spotlight — new releases which Tor consistently put in their boxout ads and run first-chapter previews for — only highlights the difference from Bogi’s much more sporadic offerings, which are very often out-of-print books from decades ago.
Not that I’m knocking their column, which is great, but it really kinda goes to my point about how secondary all non wlw queer stuff is in the modern sf/f market and discourse.
Not SFF, but SFF-adjacent, with a woman scientist in a historical. I’m hearing good things about the f/f romance in Olivia Waite’s The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics to be released June 25.
Crane, I thank you for your passion for queer books and for purchasing them from Lethe and other publishers.
Alas, yes, not to many places where queer folk can learn about books. In the old days the gay bookstores used to be gatekeepers and sources for news and recommendations but they are long gone for the most part.
The answer to having more queer and more MLM representation in SFF is not to cut back on the WLW in current SFF. There shouldn’t be some invisible quota that makes queer literature fight for a seat at the table, but rather encouragement of more seats period.
And, let’s be real, the amount of WLW depiction in SFF is still relatively small compared against all SFF releases. Historically, MLM has dominated in general literature, too, so I just vehemently disagree on pitting representation against each other in this genre.
Well said, Tick!
Also, Crane, I haven’t set foot in a brick-and-mortar bookstore in the past decade, but I doubt the situation is quite as dire as you’re making it out to be. Some recent (2015 onwards) and forthcoming SFF books/series featuring queer male protagonists or m/m relationships include:
The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black (YA); In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan (YA); The Binding by Bridget Collins; The Amberlough Dossier series by Lara Elena Donnelly; Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James; The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee (YA); The Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee; The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller; The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller (YA); Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller; Captive Prince series by C. S. Pacat; Witchmark by C. L. Polk; The Watchmaker of Filigree Street series by Natasha Pulley; Simon Snow series by Rainbow Rowell (YA); Nimona by Noelle Stevenson (YA); The Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stiefvater (YA); Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater (YA); Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh; Books of the Raksura series by Martha Wells; The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson; A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson; The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang
That’s not exactly an obscure list of books. And those are just the ones I personally know about! If you crowdsourced on Twitter, I’m sure you’d discover a lot more.
And to contribute to the actual topic of the post: I’m really looking forward to the following books featuring queer female protagonists.
* Last Couple in Hell by KJ Charles, second in her Green Men trilogy, doesn’t have a release date yet, but after reading and loving her (non-SFF) historical f/f romance Proper English, I’m even more excited about the prospect of getting a historical fantasy f/f romance from her.
* Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott is a space opera retelling of the story of Alexander the Great featuring genderbent versions of Alexander and Hephaestion.
* Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee apparently contains several stories starring Cheris, including a novella about her and Jedao set after the end of the trilogy.
I have pretty much this entire list pre-ordered – and I regret nothing! – but I can’t find anything about Moontangled by Stephanie Burgis. Google is trying to insist there’s no such book at all, so I’m really confused. Can anyone point me towards more details?
Also I know the discussion is long over, but I raised eyebrows at the idea that queer women are the driving force in commercial spec-fic. There’s been a (relatively speaking) huge surge, which delights me, but it’s pretty recent. As an enby person myself, I can absolutely attest to the dearth of genderqueer characters – it’s still pretty rare to find trans characters, and if you’re looking for agender or genderfluid characters, you can pretty much forget about it – but cis queer males have without question been the dominant queer rep in spec fic (and contemporary YA) for longer than I’ve been alive. (That doesn’t mean there’s been a lot of them, just that, of all the queer rep available, most of it has been cis men). Ipomeo’s examples are just a fraction of the selection! And I do mean the selection that appears in brick-and-mortar shops, libraries, and on Amazon’s bestseller lists. If we expand the search terms to include books from smaller presses and the like (ignoring self-published stuff entirely), the numbers skyrocket even more.
Also, it is progress. It’s freakin’ slow progress, but it’s progress. Mlm becoming more widely acceptable makes it easier for authors and agents to pitch wlw works. Wlw works make it easier to get genderqueer stories published. And so on. One reason enby characters are so rare is because most people outside the queer community are still baffled by the idea of us – and therefore don’t want to read about us, so publishers can’t get those stories published, regardless of their personal views. Books have to sell. When it comes to things like queer rep, the publishing industry is hobbled by the glacial speed of the spread of education and understanding amongst readers – publishers can also help that spread by publishing the right kind of stories, of course, but the two are kind of tangled together. I can’t sell people on an amazing sci-fi adventure if they’re too hung-up about the main character’s gender identity to care about my incredible spaceships. You know?
People have to know about us and not hate us for enby rep to become normalised. Publishers can help with the process by taking the risk of publishing some of those stories – since rep obviously helps spread understanding – but ultimately if none of it sells they can’t keep that up. I mean, we’re still tearing straight white cis women apart in fiction for being Mary Sues. If the industry is still so divided in how it treats what many people think of as the default – straight white cis characters – who can be surprised that we’re still getting off the ground when it comes to queer rep?
It’s not okay, and we get to be upset about it. But I don’t think it helps to lash out at other parts of the community, or rain on their parade (at least, not too hard) when we’re celebrating other forms of rep. Yes, I’m said and angry that it’s so hard to find books with characters like me. But I’m still happy that we’re getting cis queer rep, and not least because I know that every one of those books that makes it to your brick-and-mortar shelf makes it easier for enby characters to follow.
I hope all that made some sense… It’s late and I tried.
But yeah. Moontangled?