Taking Up Space: Journeys in Queer Sci-Fi
To celebrate Pride Month this year we are focusing on classic and new cult science fiction novels. Inclusivity is often at the heart of the sci-fi canon, and we have collected ten works that have inspired countless readers, including some personal favourites of your local librarians.
Excession
Iain M Banks
Weaving ever-relevant themes like our approach to technology, gender and power, and rich with intertextual references, this Iain M Banks novel is a classic that science fiction fans will be thrilled to explore or rediscover...
Alex Wise vs the End of the World
Terry J Benton-Walker
A 12 year old vs the end of the world. The first adventure of an exhilarating trilogy, this funny and heartfelt middle grade book is a perfect introduction to the tradition of high-quality inclusive speculative fiction.
Prophet
Helen MacDonald & Sin Blaché
An all-American diner mysteriously appears in the middle of a field. Praised as a noir, a slow burn queer romance and a techno-thriller, this zippy sci-fi novel is set in a universe dangerously close to ours.
Rain
Joe Hill, Zoe Thorogood & David M Booher
It’s raining nails in Boulder, Colorado. Rain makes vivid this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge spreads across the country and around the world, threatening everything young lovers Honeysuckle and Yolanda hold dear.
Monk and Robot
Becky Chambers
Written by queernormative fiction legend Becky Chambers and uniting two Hugo Award winning novellas in one volume, this is the hopeful and philosophical story of a robot on a quest to answer the question: “What do you need?”
This Is How You Lose the Time War
Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar
This epistolary novel sees Red and Blue, two agents from enemy empires, travelling through parallel timelines in what seems to be an impossible quest for unity, freedom and peace.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula Le Guin
One lone human emissary is sent to Winter, an alien planet where its inhabitants spend most of the time without a gender. This pioneering science-fiction novel has been keeping readers glued to the page since 1969.
The Death I Gave Him
Em X Liu
Hamlet, but make it sci-fi, queer and a locked-room thriller. The Death I Gave Him is a smart and lyrical take on Shakespeare’s classic with a breathless chase for a killer, the Sisyphus Formula, and the true meaning of legacy.
Gideon the Ninth
Tamsyn Muir
This instant cult hit is the first novel of the Locked Tomb Series. It fuses elements of gothic horror worthy of Lovecraft with slang and contemporary humour in an irreverent science-fiction modern classic whose main character quickly became a queer paladin.
The Beatrix Gates
Rachel Pollack
A gender bending landmark fusing science fiction, memoir and magical realism and a bottomless knowledge of symbols in a quest for transformation and spirituality seen through the author’s eyes as a transgender woman.