A novel written in cyberspace, Nearly Roadkill is an Infobahn erotic thriller without any boundaries – virtual, sexual, legal, or otherwise. What-appears-to-be Boy meets what-appears-to-be Girl. But their world is the Net, where any persona – and any gender – can be created. They pose as a host of different personalities, switching identities and genders as quickly as they create passwords. Named Scratch and Winc, these two genderless beings cybersurf into the various worlds on the Net as they fight government intervention on this final frontier.
Representation Includes
- Non-binary transfeminine protagonist (Winc)
- Sapphic cis woman experimenting with gender presentation (Scratch)
- Both use ze/hir pronouns
Content Warnings
Many explicit cybersex scenes; other content warnings needed.Awards
- Longlisted for Otherwise Award
Reviews
Where to Find
Details
- First published 1996
- Original title: Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure
- ISBN13: 9781852424183
“Love and Comets” and Other Stories is a collection of stories, poems, and journal/memoir that I published on my website in 2016.
The title story, “Love and Comets”, is a space adventure and slice of life story. Maria Flores has been sent on a mission to save the Earth from several comets heading for it. In the time leading up to her leaving, she meets Hailey Wen and they begin a relationship.
The other thirty-nine stories are a mix of scifi, fantasy, contemporary, and surreal.
Representation Includes
- Flash fiction collection; focuses on stories about trans women, lesbians, and trans lesbians
- Many protagonists are sapphic Latina trans women
- Title novelette “Love and Comets” features romantic relationship between Latina trans woman and East Asian (cis?) woman
Content Warnings
Medical procedure, car crash and death of loved one in “What’s the Last Thing You Remember?”; transphobia expressed and rejected in some of the “Contemporary” and “Memoir/Personal” pieces.Reviews
Where to Find
Details
- Published July 10th, 2017
Raven, a trans girl from south London, wakes on a piece of ice floating on a frozen ocean. Adap, who has lived his whole life in a dying village just off the coast, finds her and brings her home. When she is told she must travel to the Golie Mountains, at the center of the world, Adap volunteers to take her. Together they navigate around a resurgent soviet-esque state that is at war with an ancient culture of gender-wild shamans. As they travel, she realizes that there is no one in this magical world who is not black, like her, and that every place they go seems uncannily familiar.
Representation Includes
- Black trans girl protagonist
Content Warnings
dysphoria, bullying related to being trans, forced biology revealReviews
Where to Find
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What would the future look like if we weren’t so hung up on putting people into boxes and instead empowered each other to reach for the stars? Take a ride with us as we explore a future where trans and nonbinary people are the heroes.
In worlds where bicycle rides bring luck, a minotaur needs a bicycle, and werewolves stalk the post-apocalyptic landscape, nobody has time to question gender. Whatever your identity you’ll enjoy these stories that are both thought-provoking and fun adventures.
Featuring brand-new stories from Hugo, Nebula, and Lambda Literary Award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders, Ava Kelly, Juliet Kemp, Rafi Kleiman, Tucker Lieberman, Nathan Alling Long, Ether Nepenthes, and Nebula-nominated M. Darusha Wehm. Also featuring debut stories from Diana Lane and Marcus Woodman.
Representation Includes
- Transgender and non-binary protagonists
Content Warnings
Help grow this entry by commenting below or emailing queersffbooks@theillustratedpage.net.Awards
- Nominated for the Lambda Award.
Reviews
- D.N. Bryn’s review
- More reviews from queer reviewers needed.
Where to Find
Details
- Full title: Trans-Galactic Bike Ride: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories of Transgender and Nonbinary Adventurers
- Edited by Lydia Rogue
- Published December 8th 2020 by Microcosm Publishing
- ISBN-13: 978-1621065081
Second chances take many forms…
Violetta Benedetti knows how to hide things. She spent years concealing herself behind the persona her father expected of her. Now she hides in the dark corners of Vermagna’s underworld, lying low to keep her father from using her magic in his unending quest for power.
But her biggest secret is her love for her best friend, who only knew her as Mercurio Benedetti, not the woman she is today. Now he’s dead, and she’ll never be able to tell him the truth.
Tibario Gianbellicci was dead. And then…he wasn’t. Reborn as an immortal, he has powers he never imagined. Powers his crime boss mother wants to tap into to destroy their longtime rivals: House Benedetti.
But Tibario is hiding something, too: his best friend is a Benedetti—and the love of his life. With a second chance at life, he’ll have to risk revealing his heart.
Representation Includes
- Trans woman protagonist
- Bisexual characters
Content Warnings
From author website: Sexual abuse trauma, mentions of sexual assault, transmisogyny, fantasy violence, murder, references to suicide, mind controlReviews
Where to Find
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Haunted pasts, haunted houses, trans bodies haunted now and in the future by the controlling reach of society—the fiction of Gillian Ybabez breaks with reality and takes us into high-tech futures and fantasy worlds, brings us in touch with extraterrestrials, but it is always grounded by a profound emotional core.
Each strange tale evokes a series of questions which tear open our hearts. In the title story “Homeward Bound,” for instance, it might be: what if we can’t find home again, what if we remembered it wrong all along and that home never existed, what are we without a past to build the remainder of our lives upon, what remains possible now? While the final story, “Forget Me,” hints at perhaps not a resolution but a return: that even without a past, setting aside all that we’ve done and all that’s been done to us, that it is possible to start again.
The worlds Ybabez describes, like our own, are largely worlds that cry out to be utterly torn apart: heavily industrialized, based on exploitation, profoundly violent and alienating. But it’s heartening to see Ybabez point out the cracks in the walls holding up these worlds just as in ours. In the presence of these caring ghosts, hidden trees, and lesbians that gloriously live and live again we find the empathy and love that might save us all.
Representation Includes
- Flash fiction collection; has stories about trans women and lesbians
Content Warnings
Transmisogynistic comments (called out and apologized for) in “Body Renewal”; Danger to children in “Ghostly Defense”; Medical procedure, car crash and death of loved one in “What’s the Last Thing You Remember?”Reviews
Where to Find
Details
- Published May 18, 2018 by the Trans Women Writers Collective (now River Furnace)
- Trans Women Writers Collective booklet series #1
Wind: To match one’s body with one’s heartSand: To take the bearer where they wish
Song: In praise of the goddess Bird
Bone: To move unheard in the night
The Surun’ do not speak of the master weaver, Benesret, who creates the cloth of bone for assassins in the Great Burri Desert. But Uiziya now seeks her aunt Benesret in order to learn the final weave, although the price for knowledge may be far too dear to pay.
Among the Khana, women travel in caravans to trade, while men remain in the inner quarter as scholars. A nameless man struggles to embody Khana masculinity, after many years of performing the life of a woman, trader, wife, and grandmother.
As the past catches up to the nameless man, he must choose between the life he dreamed of and Uiziya, and Uiziya must discover how to challenge a tyrant, and weave from deaths that matter.
Set in R. B. Lemberg’s beloved Birdverse, The Four Profound Weaves hearkens to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. In this breathtaking debut, Lemberg offers a timeless chronicle of claiming one’s identity in a hostile world.
Representation Includes
- Trans man and trans woman protagonists
- Genderqueer and non-binary side characters
- Society with strict gender roles, but bisexuality and polyamory are the norm
Content Warnings
Transphobia; misogyny; loss of a loved one; misgendering and deadnaming; discussions of torture; body horror (mild)Reviews
Where to Find
Details
- Published September 1st 2020 by Tachyon Publications
- Print ISBN: 9781616963347
On her way home from a gay wedding, Sybil’s eponymous protagonist is ambushed, beaten, and left for dead on the train tracks. Days later, Sybil awakens in a hospital and finds her skull has been reconstructed, but it quickly becomes clear that her version of “normal” and “reality” may have been permanently altered. When she falls in love with a very beautiful, but very married, actress, Sybil does what comes naturally: she presents the object of her affection with a homemade explosive device, and then abruptly leaves town.
I’ve Got A Time Bomb chronicles her surrealistic journey living among the loners, losers, and leave-behinds in the dark corners of Amerika.
Representation Includes
- Bisexual trans woman protagonist with brain damage after assault
Content Warnings
Graphic violence; visceral descriptions of bodies and injured bodies; assault; transphobia and transmisogynistic violence; slurs; needles; lots of drug use; tone of depression and trauma; illustrations of naked peopleReviews
Where to Find
Details
- Published June 12th 2014 by Topside Press (first published May 27th 2014)
- Paperback ISBN13: 9781627290111
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom is the highly sensational, ultra-exciting, sort-of true coming-of-age story of a young Asian trans girl, pathological liar, and kung-fu expert who runs away from her parents’ abusive home in a rainy city called Gloom. Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who live in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles. Under the wings of this fierce and fabulous flock, Dearly blossoms into the woman she has always dreamed of being, with a little help from the unscrupulous Doctor Crocodile. When one of their number is brutally murdered, the protagonist joins her sisters in forming a vigilante gang to fight back against the transphobes, violent johns, and cops that stalk the Street of Miracles. But when things go terribly wrong, she must find the truth within herself in order to stop the violence and discover what it really means to grow up and find your family.
Representation Includes
- Asian-Canadian trans girl protagonist
- Trans women supporting characters of diverse races and presentations
Content Warnings
Transphobia and transmisogyny; murder of a trans woman; police brutality; sexual exploitation; abuse; racism; self-harm.Reviews
- Luna Merbruja’s review/interview with Kai Cheng Thom about the memoir and magical/fabulist aspects
- Jacob Wren’s review
- Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian’s review
- Megan Milks’s review
- Gwen Benaway’s review
Where to Find
Details
- Published November 2016 by Metonymy Press
- Paperback ISBN13: 9780994047137
I had a moment’s indecision—a stab of worry.“Trust me,” she said.
And so, I did.
The year is 1862. Driven by a leading from the Spirit, Chloë Parker Stanton leaves the woman she loves to enlist in the Union Army and fight for abolition in war as she has in the streets of Philadelphia. At home, her lover, Leigh Hunter, eagerly awaits Chloë’s letters, anxious to hear of her survival without discovery, for women are not allowed to wear the Union blue.
Three days after Gettysburg comes the news: the Seventeenth Pennsylvania Cavalry has survived, but Chloë Stanton is missing, presumed dead.
The year is 2020. Sergeant First Class Leigh Hunter came of age during her seventeen-year stint in uniform. Since childhood, she’d been drawn to the Army in search of something, all the while fighting her inner truth as a trans woman. After her final combat tour, Leigh left the military a decorated combat veteran and finally transitioned. She was quickly recruited by the Joint Temporal Integrity Commission: a new, secretive government agency tasked with intercepting temporal refugees and integrating them into present-day society.
Two years after joining the JTIC, Leigh is entrusted with a special assignment: personal custody of a Pennsylvania cavalry soldier from three days after Gettysburg.
Her name: Chloë Parker Stanton.
Grey Dawn is a tale of war, abolition, union, and women who forge ties that carry them from one life into the next. When the grey dawn breaks on a new era and a new cause, who can you trust to fight beside you?
Representation Includes
- Both protagonists are lesbian, and Leigh is a bi-racial/Japanese trans woman