Spectrum Awards -- Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction and Fantasy
Explore the Spectrum Awards, honoring the best in gay and lesbian science fiction and fantasy books. Discover award-winning LGBTQ+ speculative fiction and celebrated authors.
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Accidental Creatures
by Anne Harris
Anne Harris returns with an outstanding look at the near future. Never before has her technological insight been so acute, or her portrayal of sex and gender issues more startling or insightful. A bio-technology corporation has created a new species, intelligent, four-armed, humanoid "tetras" who can live in the vats in which "the company" grows biopolymers. Both the tetras and the human vat-divers they were created to replace are at the mercy of vicious corporate politics. But soon the victims become the aggressors, and something amazing, a transcendent change, occurs not only in their lives, but throughout the world. Anne Harris has created an extraordinary, breathtaking vision of the future.
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Dark Water's Embrace
by Stephen Leigh
Winner of the Specturm Award. Often compared to Ursula Le Guinn's ground-breaking "The Left Hand of Darkness," "Dark Water's Embrace" is a fascinating look at issues of human (and alien) sexuality. Stephen Leigh creates a rich world with elaborate care and uses this alien backdrop to delve into issues of survival, sexuality and the meaning of life itself. *****"The fact is that Stephen Leigh's new novel is a fine piece of work and one that deserves to reach a wide readership."--NY Review of Science Fiction*****
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The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse
by Keith Hartman
"A fine debut novel by Keith Hartman. What kind of novel I'm at a little of a loss to say. Equal arguments can be made that it's a police procedural, a contemporary Wiccan fantasy, a gay PI novel, a near future SF thriller, a novel of social commentary, and even, in the sections from the point of view of one character, a YA coming of age story. In the end, it's a bit of them all, I suppose, which is part of what made me enjoy it so much. I love a book that breaks down the walls between genres, that just tells a story,the author trusting himself and the story enough to let it go wherever it leads him. THE GUMSHOE, THE WITCH, AND THE VIRTUAL CORPSE is like it's title a somewhat busy book, but there's enough payoff in characterization, story, and ideas to make the trip through its pages a real pleasure." --Charles de Lint, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
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The Song of the Earth
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In a future world riven by gender strife, global warming, and religious warfare, a young man's death becomes the centerpiece of a popular cult of the artist living in the twenty-first century. QPB, InsightOut, & Reader's Subscription.
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Fire Logic
by Laurie J. Marks
"Marks is an absolute master of fantasy in this book." --Booklist (starred review) Earth * Air * Water * Fire These elements have sustained the peaceful people of Shaftal for generations, with their subtle powers of healing, truth, joy, and intuition. But now, Shaftal is dying. The earth witch who ruled Shaftal is dead, leaving no heir. Shaftal's ruling house has been scattered by the invading Sainnites. The Shaftali have mobilized a guerrilla army against these marauders, but every year the cost of resistance grows, leaving Shaftal's fate in the hands of three people: Emil, scholar and reluctant warrior; Zanja, the sole survivor of a slaughtered tribe; and Karis the metalsmith, a half-blood giant whose earth powers can heal, but only when she can muster the strength to hold off her addiction to a deadly drug. Separately, all they can do is watch as Shaftal falls from prosperity into lawlessness and famine. But if they can find a way to work together, they just may change the course of history. "A work that is filled with an intelligence that zings off the page."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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The Salt Roads
by Nalo Hopkinson
- The Salt Roads was published in Warner hardcover (0-446-53302-5) in 11/03 and received rave reviews. - Nalo Hopkinson made her debut with Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), winning the Aspect First Novel Contest and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. - The author's previous book, Skin Folk (Aspect, 2001), won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, was named Recommended Fiction for 2002 by Black Issues Book Review, and was named a New York Times Best book of the Year. Hopkinson's Midnight Robber (Aspect, 2000), a New York Times Recommended Book of Summer 2000, received an Honorable Mention for the Casa de las Americas Prize. It was a finalist for the Nubula Award for Best Novel, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award.
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Earth Logic
by Laurie J. Marks
A sweeping drama of war, intrigue, magic, and love With Earth Logic, Laurie J. Marks continues the epic of her stunningly imagined world of Shaftal, which she first introduced in Fire Logic. Shaftal has a ruler again, a woman with enough power to heal the war-torn land and expel the invading Sainnites from Shaftal. Or it would have a ruler if the earth witch Karis G'deon consented to rule. Instead, she lives in obscurity with the fractious family of elemental talents who gathered around her in Fire Logic. She is waiting for some sign, but no one, least of all Karis herself, knows what it is. Then the Sainnite garrison at Watford is attacked by a troop of zealots claiming to speak for the Lost G'deon, and a mysterious and deadly plague attacks the land, killing both Sainnites and Shaftali. Karis must act or watch her beloved country fall into famine and chaos. And when Karis acts, the very stones of the earth sit up and take notice.
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Cagebird
by Karin Lowachee
Pirate Protege At age four, Yuri Kirov watched his home colony destroyed by the alien enemy. By six, he was a wounded soul, fending for himself in a desolate refugee camp, and still a child when the pirates found him. Now twenty-two, Yuri is a killer, a spy, an arms dealer, and a pirate captain himself-doing life in prison. That is until EarthHub Black Ops agents decide to make Yuri their secret weapon in a covert interstellar power grab. Released from jail, but put on a leash by the government, Yuri is more trapped than ever. Controlled by men even more ruthless than the brigands he's ordered to betray, Yuri is back again in deep space where his survival depends on a dangerous act: trusting a stranger's offer of help...
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Vellum
by Hal Duncan
An extraordinary, incendiary debut from a rare new talent, Vellum showcases a complex and sophisticated level of writing coupled with a fecund imagination that defies description. It’s 2017 and angels and demons walk the earth. Once they were human; now they are unkin, transformed by the ancient machine-code language of reality itself. They seek The Book of All Hours, the mythical tome within which the blueprint for all reality is transcribed, which has been lost somewhere in the Vellum—the vast realm of eternity upon which our world is a mere scratch. The Vellum, where the unkin are gathering for war. The Vellum, where a fallen angel and a renegade devil are about to settle an age-old feud. The Vellum, where the past, present, and future will collide with ancient worlds and myths. And the Vellum will burn. . . .
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Wicked Gentlemen
by Ginn Hale
Belimai Sykes is many things: a Prodigal, the descendant of ancient demons, a creature of dark temptations and rare powers. He is also a man with a brutal past and a dangerous addiction. And Belimai Sykes is the only man Captain William Harper can turn to when faced with a series of grisly murders. But Mr. Sykes does not work for free and the price of Belimai's company will cost Captain Harper far more than his reputation. From the ornate mansions of noblemen, where vivisection and sorcery are hidden beneath a veneer of gold, to the steaming slums of Hells Below, Captain Harper must fight for justice and for his life. His enemies are many and his only ally is a devil he knows too well. Such are the dangers of dealing with the wicked.
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Uranian Worlds
by Eric Garber
This reference has been updated and expanded to include some 100 new listings, and the addition of films and videos. It gives detailed annotations that document the representation of alternative sexuality in novels and stories as well as films; evaluates the writers' overall representation of gay and lesbian issues; and reveals changing popular attitudes toward sexual variance over several centuries. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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China Mountain Zhang
by Maureen F. McHugh
China Mountain Zhang, a Chineselooking New Yorker, travels the world and tackles the demanding discipline of jacked-in Organic Engineering in the 22nd century.
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Slow River
by Nicola Griffith
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide. Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed. Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future. But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be...
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Swordspoint
by Ellen Kushner
The cult classic fantasy of manners, now with three bonus stories “Swordspoint has an unforgettable opening and just gets better from there.”—George R. R. Martin Hailed by critics as “a bravura performance” (Locus) and “witty, sharp-eyed, [and] full of interesting people” (Newsday), this acclaimed novel, filled with remarkable plot twists and unexpected humor, takes fantasy to an unprecedented level of elegant writing and scintillating wit. Award-winning author Ellen Kushner has created a world of unforgettable characters whose political ambitions, passionate love affairs, and age-old rivalries collide with deadly results. On the treacherous streets of Riverside, a man lives and dies by the sword. Even the nobles on the Hill turn to duels to settle their disputes. Within this elite, dangerous world, Richard St. Vier is the undisputed master, as skilled as he is ruthless—until a death by the sword is met with outrage instead of awe, and the city discovers that the line between hero and villain can be altered in the blink of an eye.
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Imperial Earth
by Arthur C. Clarke
The year is 2276. On the world of Titan, an outer planet of Saturn, Duncan Mackenzie and many other colonists are about to leave their homeland for bicentennial celebrations on Earth. But for Duncan, the journey is also a delicate mission for himself, his family and the future of Titan.
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Dhalgren
by Samuel R. Delany
In one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude). Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.
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The Female Man
by Joanna Russ
Living in an altered past that never saw the end of the Great Depression, Jeannine, a librarian, is waiting to be married. Joanna lives in a different version of reality: she's a 1970s feminist trying to succeed in a man's world. Janet is from Whileaway, a utopian earth where only women exist. And Jael is a warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. When these four women meet, the results are startling, outrageous, and subversive.
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The Slave and The Free
by Suzy McKee Charnas
Walk to the end of the world. Alldera the Messenger is a slave among the Fems, in thrall to men whose own power is waning.
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The Door Into Fire
by Diane Duane
Herewiss, Prince of the Brightwood, decides to search other worlds for the secret of controlling the Power of the Flame in order to save his friend, Freelorn, exiled Prince of Arlen