hi friends welcome to beautifully bookish bethany.
today in honor of pride month i'm going to be sharing with you 10 queer science fiction and
fantasy books targeted at an adult audience that i'm a fan of. previously i did 10 queer ya
sci-fi fantasy books, i'll link that video up above if you haven't seen it yet but for today i'm
going to recommend some adult titles that i love. first up is one of my favorite books that i
read this year this is winter's orbit by everina maxwell. it is a deb
ut sci-fi romance between
two men with a political arranged marriage. there's also kind of a mystery plot driving this.
i loved this a whole lot- i loved the characters, if you are a romance reader interested in getting
into science fiction this might be a great one to try out. it's a good crossover book, i
would say it's like 50% romance 50% sci-fi. i i have a whole standalone video review about
it so i'm not going to gush about it too much, you can check out that video if you want
to hea
r more, but i love this and i would recommend. another one of my favorite books that
i read this year was malice by heather walter. this is a retelling of sleeping beauty where the
evil sorceress falls in love with the princess. i love it, it's also kind of a villain backstory
which i'm also a fan of. we have a broody, morally gray main character because it's from the
perspective of the potentially evil sorceress and oh my god the ending, like burn the world
down and then leave us on a clif
fhanger needing book two because it's gonna be a duology.
so i loved this, i thought it was phenomenal. next is a book that i adore so much and i think
it's kind of underappreciated this is the queens of innis lear by tessa gratton. it is a queer
fantasy reimagining of king lear by shakespeare, this is quite slow paced i will say it takes its
time with the description, building the world, building the characters. if you're looking for a
plot driven narrative this is probably not going to be
your cup of tea because it's much more slow.
i loved it, i thought the writing was beautiful and actually i also listened to the audiobook and
the narrator is really really good. i think that the characters in this are so nuanced- it follows
three sisters who are the daughters of king lear and they're all very different from each other.
this is one that i should re-read at some point in the future, in fact i actually loved it enough
that there's a girl who runs an etsy shop where she'll do
painting on books and so i got her to
make me a special painted edition where each side represents one of the three sisters. so we have
the stars on top for the youngest sister who like gets prophecy from the stars, we have a tree for
the middle sister who is more of like a witch in touch with nature etc, and then on the bottom we
have a sword for the oldest sister who is very militant and you know maybe if she lived
in another world would have been trans or non-binary so very very interes
ting book, i
loved it a lot and i would love to see more people read it. my next recommendation
is one that is definitely polarizing, seems to be a book that most people either love or
hate and a lot of it is about whether or not you like the main character. okay i adore the main
character and it totally has my sense of humor, one of my favorite books is gideon the ninth by
tamsyn muir. this is not going to be everybody's cup of tea so i tend to recommend to people
if you can get it from y
our library or get a preview and read a few chapters and get a
sense of the tone and the vibe and see if you like gideon, because book one is all from gideon's
perspective, like that's going to give you a good sense of whether this may or may not be the book
for you. it is a really interesting genre blend where it's set in space, it's like loosely sci-fi.
i would say book two in the series has a lot more sci-fi elements than book one, book one reads more
like a fantasy blended with mystery
and horror. like it ends up becoming a like
isolated closed circle murder mystery, plus there's a lot of like body horror and horror
elements, plus there's fantasy elements and it's set in space so like it's an interesting
genre blend. i loved it, this has a lot of style. it's not everyone's cup of tea, i
was a huge fan and i actually think book two is brilliant but a mind trip. i have a standalone
review for that, actually for both of these, but for that one i'll link it up above if you
w
ant to hear more about it. but um if you've tried reading harrow the ninth and you're
confused, don't worry you're supposed to be. probably the first half of the book i was
very confused and disoriented and like wait what is happening? but don't worry eventually
it will all make sense and then you will think that she is an absolutely brilliant author
and won't be able to wait for book three. like me. because we're not getting until 2022,
which is really a bummer, but um highly recommend. th
is tends to get pitched as
lesbian necromancers in space, which is accurate but i see people being annoyed
because when they hear that they expect there to be a lesbian romance which it is not. it is a
book about necromancers in space who happen to be lesbians, so just to set your expectations, but
i thought it was phenomenal. all right next up we have the first book in one of my all-time favorite
series by one of my all-time favorite authors that of course is the fifth season by n.k jemisi
n.
this has quite a lot of queer characters in it, it's not the main focus of the book necessarily
but there is a lot of representation. in fact there is a polyamorous relationship in this book,
one of the few in literature that i have ever really fully rooted for. i was part of a whole
panel discussion for the world hoppers channel where we gushed about n.k jemisin and her books
and the series so i'm going to actually link that video up above because i don't want to like get
deeply into i
t here, but i adore adore this series so much. i think it is a freaking masterpiece,
i'm really excited because i'm planning a reread, readalong this fall and yeah i think it's going
to be great so highly recommend, everyone should read this. my next recommendation is definitely a
tome but a good one. this is priory of the orange tree by samantha shannon. it is a standalone, i
actually kind of think this would have been better as a duology to be perfectly honest um because it
has some like
pacing things that aren't perfect, but i still really loved it. it's got
a lot of politics, it's got dragons, it's got a sapphic romance, um if you like epic
fantasy and you like dragons and you like politics it is worth the read. even if it's a brick it's
it's very good. the audiobook is good, i might recommend the audiobook. oh we're running out of
battery let's change that. my next recommendation is one that i read pretty recently. this is the
chosen and the beautiful by nghi vo. this is
a really interesting book, it's a reimagining of the
great gatsby from the perspective of jordan baker, with jordan baker being a vietnamese immigrant. it
also makes pretty much all of the main characters in the story queer in some way which is a really
interesting approach to complicating the narrative and i think what this book does is it pulls out a
lot of the subtext of the original book on issues of race, potential readings of queerness among
some of the characters, and makes those mo
re explicit, in a world that has some fantastical
elements to it. there is a bit of magic and this has kind of a dreamlike quality to
it when you read it. it's really interesting, really smart, i think this is gonna be
one that a lot of people are gonna love. my next recommendation is a sci-fi book that is
going to come with a caveat in that there are many many content or trigger warnings for this book and
it can be quite bleak, but i think it's also kind of brilliant. this is an unkindness
of ghosts
by rivers solomon. it is an intensely character driven piece of science fiction with genderqueer
main characters. it's set on a spaceship that is highly segregated by class and race and gender
and is um very oppressive, deeply homophobic, it's it's a very very brutal place. if you want
to see all of the content warnings for this i would check out my goodreads review, my goodreads
is always linked in the video description down below. yeah i was not expecting this book to be
as da
rk and bleak and intense as it was, although the the darkness and bleakness is punctuated
by moments of human connection and warmth. um yeah it's a really interesting book and so if
it sounds like something that would be up your alley it's worth a try. my next recommendation is
one that apparently is not everybody's cup of tea but i really enjoyed it. i thought it was like a
rollicking good time. this is american hippo by sarah gailey. it is a bind up of two novellas
and two short stories a
ll set in this alternate american history. i thought this was really
fun, i met sarah gailey at an event and they pitched this book to me and i was like well yeah
i need to read this. and i ended up adoring it. i did try giving it to my friend liene from
liene's library for a tbr swap video and she was not a fan, but i really love it
so maybe some of you will also love it. the entire premise of this is based on
the fact that in actual american history there was a proposed bill that would im
port
hippos to raise like cattle essentially for meat production, which is apparently a really
terrible idea if you know anything about hippos, for a lot of reasons, and it never got passed
but this book imagines what if it did happen and now there's a bunch of feral hippos who
need to be herded down the mississippi river. and so you have kind of a diverse, ragtag crew of
people who are hired to herd these feral hippos down the mississippi river and i
just thought this was really fun and f
unny. i liked the characters, i liked all
of the diversity and the silliness, it's like, i thought it was a pretty good time. so for
your consideration, american hippo. all right my final recommendation for this video is really
an entire author but i'm going to specifically talk about one book and uh the author is becky
chambers. this is the long way to a small angry planet. becky chambers writes queer, soft sci-fi
for the most part. there are some exceptions, she does have some that's a li
ttle more like
intensely sci-fi, but this book in particular is really just soft and character-driven and it's
like feel-good sci-fi. i i just love it. it's about like hanging out with this crew of quirky,
diverse people on a spaceship as they make their way through space and kind of have escapades, but
it's really about like hanging out with the crew. i loved it, it made me really happy. if you
need a lot of plot and action this may not be your cup of tea, but if like a character-driven,
soft, feel-good sci-fi book sounds good to you, definitely worth a try. so there you go, those
are ten queer sci-fi and fantasy books for adults that i really loved and i hope some of you will as
well. i hope something here piqued your interest. talk to me in the comments down below, let me
know any thoughts or feelings on anything i talked about in this video and for your question
of the day, recommend to me a book that you would recommend if there are people on this video
looking for quee
r sci-fi fantasy books, what is a book that you think they should definitely
give a try to? let me know in the comments down below. if you like this video give it a thumbs
up, subscribe if you want to see more and if you want to support the work of the channel check out
the patreon linked down below or check out channel memberships if you are so inclined. thank you
so much for watching and i'll see you next time.
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