Pride Month 2025 Reading List

Pride Month!  Speculative Fiction, scifi in particular, has been queer as hell for the entirety of its history (like, that's not an exaggeration, there are absolutely elements in Shelley and Verne).  After all, the genre is about imagining the world not as it is, but as it could be.  And a marginalized and oppressed people will always have a lot to say, when that's the topic

Most years, I try to mix in at least one or two classics of the genre.  But unfortunately, there's just too many great contemporary authors that I want to support.  Ahh well.  We do what we gotta do

As always, I can't personally speak for any of these books.  I've put together this list based on friends' recs, reviews, and for some of them just really interesting-sounding blurbs.  But I am excited, should be a great month!

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"Metal from Heaven" by August Clarke, 2024

Epic fantasy with author reviews like "pulpy, bloody, sexy, gleefully seditious and seditiously gleeful" (Alix Harrow) and "a thunderous, visceral, Sapphic fever dream of a book" (Rebecca Roanhorse), so that's fun

"The Book Eaters" by Sunyi Dean, 2022

Supposed to be a dark gothic fantasy about, yeah, people who gain powers by eating books?  I dunno, it sounds super interesting, reviews are great, let's see where she's going with this . . .

"Sorcery and Small Magics" by Maiga Doocy, 2024

Reading this one for a bookclub, yay!  Rivals thrown together by a plot-convenient curse, forced to work together, definitely gonna end up doin' it.  Cuz we all need a bit more love in our lives

"The Warden" by Daniel M. Ford, 2023

Ahh you know, classic fantasy tropes.  Sword and sourcery and necromancers and action and adventure and terrible sleeping evil.  Plus the always fun, "elite from the city graduates and gets sent to a posting out in the boondocks" setup as well.  With the tagline, "For fans who have always wanted their Twin Peaks to have some wizards," so like, yeah.  Of course I'm gonna read this

"Escape Velocity" Victor Manibo, 2024

Scifi detective story set on a far-future luxury resort space station!  Hell yeah (and with heavy anti-capitalist and climate disaster themes, very neat)

"The Unravelling" by Benjamin Rosenbaum, 2021

Far-future scifi comedy about a society with completely different set of gender constructions.  Very much Le Guin style "Yes, indeed the people in ["The Left Hand of Darkness"] are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are."


"The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist" by S.L. Huang, 2016 (novella)

A dark queer scifi retelling of The Little Mermaid, by an author I've enjoyed in the past?  Well obviously I'm down for that


"Afterparties:  Stories" by Anthony Veansa So, 2021 (short fiction)

This is a short fiction collection written by a queer Cambodian-American immigrant, definitely near the top of my to-read


"How Far the Light Reaches:  A Life in Ten Sea Creatures" by Sabrina Imbler, 2022 (short fiction)

I don't read a lot of nonfiction, but this collection of essays about marine creatures told through the lens of a gay, minority author sounds super intriguing

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As always, let me know if you want to read along!

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