Queer SFF for the Genre-Shy

This is a gorgeous contemporary love story about fandoms, archives, storytelling, academia, and queer and trans culture — with one magical twist: the main character is a vampire. Sol has been lying low and staying alive by living in his basement office, but when he meets the widow of a famous lesbian TV writer, he slowly begins to venture out into the world again. There’s so much going on in this novel; it’s a unique perspective on vampires and what it means to be alive, dead, in-between.

This book is not gentle on the brain. It is extremely weird and extremely speculative. It starts with a volcano that begins growing in Central Park one day in 2016, and only gets weirder from there. People are swallowed by giant bugs, discover alternate versions of themselves, get transported back in time thousands of years — and that’s just the beginning. But somehow amidst all this absurdity, Stintzi captures something very true and specific about what it feels like to be a human on this bewildering planet.

I love this collection of stories of the prose alone, which is stunning. Chang wields words like almost no other writer I can think of: every sentence is hefty, exact, musical. The stories, too, are incredible: they’re about queer Asian American women, mostly Taiwanese immigrants and their children, in all sorts of situations. There are a lot of ghosts, a lot of transformation, a lot of myth that bends into reality. Magic permeates every story and yet they all feel sharply real. It’s a book about the mysteries of world.

This is not a genre book at all, but it does play with time and magic in some truly startling ways. Kip is an Afro-Caribbean written who locks himself in his Brooklyn basement to finish his historical novel about the Black Egyptian lover of E.M. Forster. Things soon get weird, and their stories begin to merge — emotionally, spiritually, physically. It’s easily my favorite book of the year, and one of the most innovative and moving novels I’ve ever read.

After reading this and The Chosen and The Beautiful, I’m convinced that Vo is the master of the lightly-magical historical. In her dark and beguiling reimagining of 1930s Hollywood, the motion picture industry is controlled by the fae — and they have their own agenda. Luli Wei is a Chinese American actress trying to make a name for herself in a racist industry that views women like her as disposable. Vo’s prose is dreamy, and the several sapphic romances in this novel are beautifully done.

This historical novel doesn’t read like a fantasy — even though it’s about dragons. It reads like a lush alternate history, a poignant queer coming-of-age story, and a family drama. One day in 1955, half a million women transform into dragons and fly away into the sky. Alex is only a child when it happens, but it profoundly affects her life — her beloved aunt dragons, while her mother remains behind. Her story unfolds as a fictional autobiography, woven through with ephemera about the history of dragoning. It’s a gorgeous book about rage, power, belonging, and silence.

This is yet another quietly magical dragon book! Eli is a biracial American medical student who arrives in Beijing to study the strange disease that killed his grandmother and to learn more about the place she called home. There he meets Kai, a college student who spends his free time rescuing and rehabilitating wild dragons — a population that’s steadily waning. The two slowly fall in love while trying to figure out why so many dragons are dying.

This is a sci-fi novel, set on a different planet in a future in which humanity has finally figured out how to live in harmony with the earth. It’s the story of the unlikely friendship between a traveling tea monk who’s searching for purpose and a robot who ventures out of the wilderness to check in with humans to see what they need. But nothing about it feels like sci-fi. It’s about work and craft and ritual, finding meaning and brewing tea, friendship and adventure. It’s one of the softest books I’ve ever read.

This beautiful book is full of rage and sorrow and softness and heartbreak. It’s set in a future Detroit, ravaged by a mysterious illness. Residents of the city, mostly Black, are suddenly struck in the middle of their ordinary lives, and become unresponsive, stilled in place until they eventually die. Dune’s mother is the first person to contract the illness, and in the months after she dies, Dune rides around the city on her bike, collecting the stories of the dead and dying. It’s a fierce and moving ode to the sacredness of grieving, and what happens, when, as a society, we don’t make space to process loss.

This thoughtful book charts the way massive technological changes affect the lives of one family. In a near future U.S., Pilots, brain implants designed to increase focus and productivity, have become the norm. Val and Julie only want what’s best for their two kids, so when their older son begs for one, they get him a Pilot. But it soon becomes apparent that Pilots aren’t so simple and harmless, and as the years go by, Val, Julie, and their kids struggle to adjust to their new reality.