Gerrold, David    

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: YA novel in the not-too-distant future about a boy's struggle to make sense of his life while caught in the middle of a custody battle. Started out slow, but got better as the novel progressed, though I did think someone should throw Stinky ouf of an airlock. The mother has a female lover. Gay men are also main characters, and the society has an interesting twist when it comes to homosexuality.

Wilkins, Connie, ed.    Lesbian Author!

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: Queer alternative histories. I wasn't that impressed. Some of my difficulty can be attributed to the fact that it is harder to grasp alternate histories when you don' t know the original history but the story assumes that you do. I also don't like stories that make

Huff, Tanya    Lesbian Author!

Category: Military Science Fiction
Summary: The 4th "Valor" book. I liked the third so much that I immediately started the fourth. I think this one is better. Huff has a fantastic imagination.

Huff, Tanya    Lesbian Author!

Category: Military Science Fiction
Summary: The third "Valor" novel. Huff's writing really draws you in. Kerr is awesome. Kerr herself has a male partner, but one of the female recruits has a crush on her. One nice thing about this universe is that one's sexual preferences are of no concern to anyone.

Bacigalupi, Paolo    

Category: Dystopian future
Summary: Most food crops have gone extinct from engineered diseases and pests. Several multi-national corporations control distribution of seeds genetically modified to be resistant to these threats. But Thailand has resisted their monopoly and has its own seedbank and gene hackers bringing extinct species back to life. Enter a suite of characters, each with different agendas that overlap and oppose each other. In the middle, the wild card, is the wind-up girl, a genetically engineered geisha who just wants to be free. More twists than a strand of DNA. The lesbian is a major character, though her sexuality is incidental to the story

Westwood, Kim    

Category: Dystopian future
Summary: This was an unusual book, defying easy categorization. Post-apocalyptic science fiction with a touch of fantasy and the absurd. You've got the misguided anti-science religious group barely surviving a devastated planet, and the fruit of said scientists' wombs, you could say, who are the only hope for the future. It kept me interested all the way through; I never quite knew what would happen next.

Reynolds, Alastair    

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: Reynolds is one of my favorite authors, and though he's had incredibly strong female characters in his books, this is the first where any are gay. Not that that's anything more than an aside; her sexuality is mentioned exactly twice and there are no love interests. That said, this is only a novella, so you might want to consider getting it used as opposed to paying the >$20 price tag for a new book. In my opinion, this is not his finest work, though it certainly has some of his trademark elements. I can't help wondering if this was one of his earlier, unpublished, works that is now being released because he has made a name for himself in the field.

Jackson, Shelley    

Category: Fantasy
Summary: A fabulous book about a pair of conjoined twins in a world where being a "twofer" (conjoined twin) is metaphorically equivalent to being queer today. Many or most of the characters are also queer.

Stross, Charles    

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: The thing about the female homosexual behavior in this book is that it is sadomasochistic and stereotyped. If you can overlook the offensiveness of that stuff, it's a pretty good book.

Ruff, Matt    

Category: Humorous Science Fiction
Summary: I think the term in use now for what's in this book is "metro sexuaity." People pretty much have sex with whomever they want. It's a fun, strange book.

Labonté, Richard and Lawrence Schimel, ed.    

Category: Science fiction
Summary: Collection of science fiction stories with queer themes and characters.

Claiborne, Sybil    

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: Another book about what would happen if AIDS mutated. In this future America, an Orwellian future has outlawed all sexual contact, ostensibly to keep the plague at bay, but really to control the populace. This is the story of one young woman's struggles to deal with her mother's toxic nostalgia, her best friend's cult obsession, and her new partner--a young man who is different from any other she's met. The character of the mother was quite well done (reminded me of my own mother).

Busby, F.M.    

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: AIDS mutates. Phoenix Pharmaceuticals finds a cure. The cure causes sterility. They find a cure for that. The only problem is, children born due to the treatment are all cyclical hermaphrodites--they change sex every month or two. The strange thing about these hermaphrodites is that they are all 100% heterosexual--no matter what sex they are, they are attracted only to those of the opposite sex. They form relationships with people they love, but only have sex when their two cycles sync up. They don't even experiment. It's very silly. Also, all the primary narrators were male, and the one strong female person was a psycho sadist. Despite all that, it was an entertaining story, which is why it got a 3 instead of a 2.

Shepherd, Joel    

Category: Tough Women
Summary: This is the sequel to Crossover and is an utterly tedious read. My comments in Crossover about the prose apply here, except I think they rushed this one to press without the final editing stage. As for the lesbian content, you find out pretty much right away, in a scene that was so awful that I cringed while reading it, that Cassandra is 100% heterosexual. Vanessa, however, is bi, so the book goes on the list. I'm guessing more Cassandra Kresnov novels are forthcoming; you won't be seeing them here.

Watts, Peter    

Category: Science fiction
Summary: Deep sea thermal power station crewed by social misfits; new life forms that threaten to overtake the earth; evil corporations trying to suppress the threat; artificial intelligence with different priorities than the programmers intended. Those are some of the themes of this dark and complex novel. Two of the female rifters are lovers.

Pollack, Rachel    

Category: Fantasy
Summary: Satirical look at an America that has embraced Wicca/New Age philosophies and a new take on the virgin birth.

Williams, Liz    

Category: Humans on another planet
Summary: A crew from the planet Irie St Syre come to Monde D'Isle to find out what happened to their lost colony, and to bring it back to the Gaian fold if necessary. What they find are a new kind of human, designed to live in harmony with the environment, and only one crewmember has the insight and wisdom to question the purpose of their original mission. The natives of Monde D'Isle are all bisexual and one of the main crewmembers is mourning the death of her female lover.

Burdekin, Katharine    

Category: Far future
Summary: Written in the 1930's, but unpublished until recently, this book depicts a future utopia where women rule a peaceful, prosperous society, but at a cost. The men are infantilized; barely more than children mentally and emotionally. One woman believes it is time for men and women to be equal and sets about trying to start a revolution. The reason I gave this a 1 was because 3/4s of the book is nothing but her telling the history of their world to her son and since it is all just exposition, I found it boring. It does have historical and academic merit though.

Eskridge, Kelley    Lesbian Author!

Category: Science fantasy
Summary: These stories aren't really science fiction, but there's a touch of it here and there, and some fantasy. Mostly they are just fantastic pieces of writing. Even though there's a link to Amazon, you should buy this through the publisher, Aqueduct Press at http://www.aqueductpress.com.

Spencer, Wen    

Category: Fantasy
Summary: In this tale of boy meets girl(s), gender roles are flipped. In this world that is reminiscent of the US Wild West, women are in charge, and men are kept at home to cook, clean, and take care of the children. The ratio of men to women is on the order of 1 to 10, so men are rare and precious and are closely guarded against kidnappers. It's a good read, like all of Spencer's novels. One of Jerin's new wives alludes to a past relationship with another woman.

Rosenblum, Mary    

Category: Space-based
Summary: Ahni has traveled to the New York Up orbital to avenge the death of her brother. Instead, she ends up embroiled in a political maelstrom over the fate of the orbitals and the strange new creatures inhabiting them. Ahni has a female ex-lover and a few lesbian couples make brief appearances. However, the portrayals are not particularly positive.

Bear, Elizabeth    

Category: Humans on another planet
Summary: Michelangelo and Vincent, Coalition spies posing as diplomats, come to New Amazonia to broker an agreement between the two governments. As the story unfolds, you find that nothing is as it seems. Michelangelo and Vincent are lovers, which is why they were chosen for the mission--New Amazonia is ruled by women and they are suspicious of "stud" males. The women of New Amazonia, especially Lesa, are strong and interesting, though the "gay" females in the story are separatists and are not sympathetic characters. Bear did a great job of depicting how cultural assumptions and biases influence our perceptions.

Ore, Rebecca    

Category: Time travel
Summary: Not your typical time travel story. Earth in the 24th century has received time machines from its own future. The "Archives" use them to grab people from the past. Most of them go crazy or die, until they bring up the Italian woman Benedetta. The book is somewhat unusual in that it never reveals what is going on behind the scenes--you're left just as uncertain as the characters themselves. For me, the biggest flaw was that Benedetta didn't get enough airtime. The two male protagonists got more than their 66% worth, and since both of them started out as unlikable, it made me even more frustrated that I didn't get more of Benedetta's side of things. Ore has another book in this collection, but my favorite of her's is Gaia's Toys, which is in the Other Books section.

Larbalestier, Justine    

Category: Short stories
Summary: A mix of stories and lit crit that examines the history and role of women in science fiction, starting in the pulps of the 1920s. The stories chosen for the collection are all excellent and the articles about them are okay. I was pretty surprised at what some women were writing in the thirties and fifties.

Tiptree, James Jr.    Lesbian Author?

Category: Alien society
Summary: This is one of those novels where you can just tell that something bad is going to happen and as things move along you just want to scream at the characters to pay attention to what they are feeling because everything is getting all f*ed up.