Best science fiction books with gay main characters
2019 Queer Adult SFF Gift Guide!
– homosexual male MC (and romance!)
– sumptuous feast of a book
– srsly Kitchen Wars but like, in space
– Gay MC, queernorm world
– Stories have power!!
– Fantasy tulip mania
– Homosexual MC, m/m relationship
– all my exes are in the trees whoops
– One bed trope, but it doesn’t go as expected
– Sweetly sad, good for a drizzly night and then a looong walk in the nearby woods
– Gay MC, m/m relationship
– Pretty hot if you’re into gore
– Everybody’s awful and I cherish it
– Sexy, spooky, fucked up in the leading ways
– FAB Gender non-conforming NECROMANCER
– f/m main, but very important m/m relationship
– Bone monstrosities
– Action adventure, good for a binge read
– f/f lead romance
– steampunk time-travel shenanigans
– story about family ❤ and their ch
The Best Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy
How do you think about queer science fiction and fantasy?
There have been gay authors writing science fiction and fantasy almost since the genre started, but in recent years we’ve seen this massive flowering of queer representation in mainstream science fiction and fantasy.
We didn’t invent it in the last not many years, but it has certainly been mainstreamed. For people like me, that’s amazing because science fiction and fantasy are my home genres. This is what I grew up writing, so to witness myself and my friends represented is just unreal. I feel really fortunate to be alive and reading right now.
The first queer science fiction novel that you’ve chosen to recommend is Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory. Can you please present us to this work?
Ironically, this may be the one where queerness is most central to it, and yet, of all of these books, it’s the furthest away from romance. It’s a good place to initiate.
Some Desperate Glory is a science fiction publication that has been compared to Ender’s Game. It is about what happens after the world wasn’t saved. This book starts with the main ethics, who’s a young soldier, desperat
Once & Future by A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy
In this queer-affirming galactic future, the 42nd reincarnation of King Arthur is a pansexual brown girl named Ari. After the capitalistic Mercer Company imprisons Ari’s adopted mothers, she vows to find a way to help them evade. When she unknowingly draws Excalibur from a plant on Old Earth, she reawakens Merlin, who is now a teenager, and ignites the cycle of Arthurian legend. She needs to gather her knights together to defeat the Mercer Company. This YA space opera is a blast to read, as is book 2, Sword in the Stars.
Find it atBookshop, Target, Amazon, or your local library.
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
Jam is a Black trans girl who lives in the utopian city of Lucille, where the angels vanquished all the monsters long ago, or so Jam and her best friend Redemption are taught in academy. Then one day, a creature climbs out of a painting and tells Jam there’s a monster in her midst. She names him Pet, and the two must locate the monster before it’s too late. This engaging and heart-wrenching read shows how sometimes the monsters are the ones that appear to be the safest.
Find it atBookshop, Aim, Amazon, or your local l
– f/f, disaster bi
– looming war, woman’s suffrage, & water magic in a fantastical Egypt
– ruined aristocrat + bookshop keeper??? hmm YES
– sequel to THE BLADED FAITH, which had a sapphic main
– rag-tag, older group of revolutionaries use a mask to spurious a hero & fight against the invading empire
– except the mask is cursed… and whispering
– sapphic MC
– dusky, witchy roadtrip through medieval Europe
– with a minuscule murder, as treat
– stories within stories within stories
– sapphic MC
– instead of jail, criminals carry extra shadows to caution others of their misdeeds
– what happens when your kid is born with an extra shadow?
– tackles grief & shame in an unjust world
– lesbian MC, arrive get your neurodivergent gays
– the AI gods contain withdrawn their protection
– rebellion and revolution, but build it interst
Favorite LGBTQIA characters in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Pride)
Before We Go is a progressive blog that believes in LGBTQIA rights as well as encouraging both gay, straight, or otherwise to include them in their stories. However, more so, it’s good to recognize the characters that we love who just so happen to drop under one of these labels. So, here are the five favorite LGBTQIA characters of each reviewer here on staff.
Steve Westenra’s Picks
As a queer penner myself, I was very excited when this blog topic came up! I could fill a novel with favourites but decided to limit myself to queer characters written by queer authors and who are confirmed on or off-page to be lgbtq+ (with one exception). As a reader, I look after to prefer queer characters who aren’t perfect, and who aren’t written to conform to straight expectations or desires. Some works by straight authors are included in my honourable mentions.
- Jana Beil (Sapphic character, The Company Daughters by Samantha Rajaram)– It was a toss-up for me over whether to choose Jana or her partner Sontje for this one! Rajaram’s tragic queer historical love affair is both captivating and shatt