“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
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- Published July 10th, 2017
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
Common Bonds is an anthology of speculative short stories and poetry featuring aromantic characters. At the heart of this collection are the bonds that impact our lives from beginning to end: platonic relationships. Within this anthology, a cursed seamstress finds comfort in the presence of a witch, teams of demon hunters work with their rival to save one of their own, a peculiar scholar gets attached to those he was meant to study, and queerplatonic shopkeepers guide their pupil as they explore their relationship needs and desires. Through nineteen stories and poems, Common Bonds explores the ways platonic relationships enrich our lives.
Representation Includes
- Aromantic protagonists of various identities
Content Warnings
Content warnings for each story listed in the front of the book. Additionally, “Draconmōt Council of Human Study Report compiled by Usander Greystart” replicates some anti-Native American stereotypes; “Fishing Over the Bones of the Dragon” has discussions of dubiously-consensual sexual coercion or rape.Reviews
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- Edited by Claudie Arseneault, RoAnna Sylver, C. T. Callahan, and B. R. Sanders
- Featured Authors
- Published 2021 by The Kraken Collective
- Paperback ISBN-13: 9781775312970
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
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- Published May 18, 2018 by the Trans Women Writers Collective (now River Furnace)
- Trans Women Writers Collective booklet series #1
Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die is an anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction centering queer joy and community in the face of disaster. What does hope look like when everything is lost? Now, more than ever, we need to revel in the bright spots amidst the darkness.
The twenty-three stories (and two poems) contained here, as well as the roleplaying game Dream Askew by Avery Alder, imagine queer community in myriad futures interrupted by collapse. Post-apocalyptic futures glittering and bleak, challenging and eerie.
Glitter + Ashes is here to hold up a torch. Come gather round the fire.
Representation Includes
- 23 short stories, two poems, and a TTRPG
- Various queer identities, including but not limited to:
- Drag queens
- Jewish lesbians
- Queer Native American women
- Multiple trans protagonists and trans writers
Content Warnings
Help grow this entry by commenting below or emailing queersffbooks@theillustratedpage.net.Reviews
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- Published September 2020 by Neon Hemlock Press
- Paperback ISBN13: 9781952086106
Lethe Press is excited to be releasing the debut short story collection by Bogi Takács. Takács may be known more for their recent editorial efforts, winning a Lambda Literary Award for Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction. But Takács is a talented storyteller and poet. An uplifted octopus finds a strange capsule in the water and wonders if one of the long-vanished humans might be found inside; a team of scientists perform some reverse-engineering on a space station and shapeshifting becomes political; and other tales of AI, hybrids, and the far future.Representation Includes
- Queer, Jewish protagonists
- Many non-binary protagonists in particular
Content Warnings
Content warnings for each story are listed at the back of the book.Awards
- Nominated for the Lambda Literary Award (Transgender Fiction)
Reviews
Where to Find
Details
- Published October 7th 2019 by Lethe Press
A collection of seven stories about women faced with impossible situations. Each narrative unfolds its heightened, speculative version of the everyday reality we find ourselves in as racialized people, queer and mentally ill and colonial subjects, enemies or collaborators to the Western imperial machine, disposable labor for a capitalist system that is devouring the world. In “Mansion,” the story that opens the book, an unpaid intern falls into a nightmare after realizing how little she’s worth to the local Human Rights Campaign-esque nonprofit she’s been sacrificing herself for. And the book progresses through dystopian futures, ecastatic visions of liberation, narrow escapes, and betrayals until the last story, “Waiting Room,” where a trans woman and an android woman form a bond while waiting for the surgery consults that promise to bring them a measure of freedom.Representation Includes
- Trans women of color protagonists
- Mostly Latina trans lesbian protagonists
Content Warnings
Depictions of violence in many of the stories (except for “Subject”, “Beach House”, and “Cascadia”) as well depictions/discussions of sex (especially in “Subject”, “Beach House”, and “Valeria”), and abuse (“Subject”). Police brutality, transmisogyny, and racism also feature. There are no depictions of sexual violence in the book.Reviews
Where to Find
Details
- Published June 2017
- Pay-what-you-can on Gumroad; free on Patreon
For more than four decades, Ursula K. Le Guin has enthralled readers with her imagination, clarity, and moral vision. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and five Hugo and five Nebula Awards, this renowned writer has, in each story and novel, created a provocative, ever-evolving universe filled with diverse worlds and rich characters reminiscent of our earthly selves. Now, in The Birthday of the World, this gifted artist returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the essence of humanity.
Here are stories that explore complex social interactions and troublesome issues of gender and sex; that define and defy notions of personal relationships and of society itself; that examine loyalty, survival, and introversion; that bring to light the vicissitudes of slavery and the meaning of transformation, religion, and history.
The first six tales in this spectacular volume are set in the author’s signature world of the Ekumen, “my pseudo-coherent universe with holes in the elbows,” as Le Guin describes it — a world made familiar in her award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness. The seventh, title story was hailed by Publishers Weekly as “remarkable . . . a standout.” The final offering in the collection, Paradises Lost, is a mesmerizing novella of space exploration and the pursuit of happiness.
In her foreword, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “to create difference-to establish strangeness-then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as no other.” In The Birthday of the World, this gifted literary acrobat exhibits a dazzling array of skills that will fascinate and satisfy us all.
Representation Includes
- Explorations of gender, gender fluidity, sexual orientation, relationships, social structures, and polyamory through a sci-fi lens
- Here is a short story from the collection about a F/F/F/M polyamorous marriage in a society where such things are common, and a woman passing as a man and having feelings about her public and private presentations
Content Warnings
Assumptions of gender-binarism recurring; Complex and toxic romantic relationships; Graphic sexual content, discussion of rape and suicide, and acceptance of incestuous relationships in “Coming of Age in Karhide”; Gender-segregated society and oppression in “The Matter of Seggri”; Animal death, sympathetic but practical animal slaughter on a farm, and woman-disguised-as-a-man plot, in “Mountain Ways”; Slavery, oppression, graphic torture, and revolt in “Old Music and the Slave Women”; Incestuous sibling relationship in “The Birthday of the World”; more content warnings neededReviews
- Juushika’s review
- Quinn Daley’s review
- Brianna da Silva’s review
- More trans and non-binary reviewers needed
Where to Find
Details
- Published March 5, 2002 by Harper Perennial
- Paperback ISBN13: 9780060509064
The fifteen tantalizing, thrilling, and ingenious tales in Steam-Powered put a new spin on steampunk by putting women where they belong — in the captain’s chair, the laboratory, and one another’s arms. Here you’ll meet inventors, diamond thieves, lonely pawn brokers, clockwork empresses, brilliant asylum inmates, and privateers in the service of San Francisco’s eccentric empire. Though they hail from across the globe and universes far away, each character is driven to follow her own path to independence and to romance. The women of Steam-Powered push steampunk to its limits and beyond. “From colonial India to New Orleans in slavery times, from a rogue San Francisco to the Lower East Side of old New York, these stories are thoughtful, wide-ranging, exciting, and often very, very sexy. Anybody who thinks that “steampunk” and “lesbian” are niche interests should read Steam-Powered and get their horizons seriously expanded.” -Delia Sherman, Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner and author of Through a Brazen Mirror.
Representation Includes
- Lesbian protagonists
Content Warnings
Help grow this entry by providing content warnings. Comment below or email queersffbooks@theillustratedpage.net.Reviews
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Dapper. Lesbian. Capybara. Pirate.Cinrak the Dapper is a keeper of secrets, a righter of wrongs, the saltiest capybara on the sea and a rider of both falling stars and a great glass whale. Join her, her beloveds, the rat Queen Orvilia and the marmot diva Loquolchi, lead soprano of the Theatre Rat-oyal, her loyal cabin kit, Benj the chinchilla, and Agnes, last of the great krakens, as they hunt for treasures of all kinds and find adventures beyond their wildest dreams. Let Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning storyteller A.J. Fitzwater take you on a glorious journey about finding yourself, discovering true love and found family, and exploring the greatest secrets of the deep. Also, dapperness.
The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper includes seven stories about Cinrak and her crew:
• “Young Cinrak”
• “Perfidy at the Felidae Isles
• “The Wild Ride of the Untamed Stars”
• “Search for the Heart of the Ocean”
• “The Hirsute Pursuit”
• “Cetaceous Secrets of the Jewelled Nadit”
• “Flight of the Hydro Chorus”
Representation Includes
- Lesbian protagonist
Content Warnings
Help grow this entry by providing content warnings! Email queersffbooks@theillustratedpage.net or comment below.Reviews
Where to Find
Details
- Published April 6th 2020 by Queen of Swords Press
- Paperback isbn13: 9781732583382