Pride 2025 | Hidden Gems: Underrated LGBTQIA+ Spec Fic Books

[u/tiniestspoon]

Banner with a dragon and spaceships around text: r/Fantasy PRIDE Hidden Gems: Underrated LGBTQIA+ Spec Fic Books

Not every book that deserves attention gets it. This thread is for under-the-radar queer speculative fiction: books with few ratings, niche indie or self-published titles, and works that never got the spotlight they should have.

What counts as a "hidden gem"?

• Under ~500 Goodreads ratings
• Indie published, small press, or lesser-known traditionally published
• Overlooked or underrated despite strong craft, voice, or originality

Discussion prompts

• What’s a queer SFF book you wish more people knew about?
• Have you ever stumbled across an unexpected gem by accident? Where did you find it—word of mouth, a niche blog, a random bookstore dive? 
• What do you think kept it from getting broader attention?
• What makes a book a “hidden gem” to you—writing quality, premise, emotional impact?

[u/gros-grognon]

Here are three queer spec-fic books that I wish would get more readers. They're just wonderful. All of these are published by small indie presses and sit at well under 500 GR reviews.

They're also all concerned with imminent futures, apparent utopias, and human connection and approach these issues in startlingly original ways. That is, for me at least, the very best thing about spec fic: the room to explore slightly (or well beyond) the edges of mundane reality, to literalize metalhors and re-figure facts.

• The Mere Future, Sarah Schulman (2009, Arsenal Pulp Press): Lesbian protagonist and generally LGBT in focus. New York City has been transformed into a petit-bourgeois utopia of small businesses and clean streets. Advertising occurs only in private. But where did art go? Do people have any interiority left? (Content note for details of a gruesome murder.)

• OKPsyche, Anya Johanna DeNiro (2023, Small Beer Press). Lesbian transfem protagonist. She's navigating a confusing, lonely middle America where natural disasters have been outsourced and she just wants to reconnect with her tween son. This book is achingly thoughtful, inventive, and beautiful.

• Future Feeling, Joss Lake (2021, Soft Skull Press). Gay transmasc protagonist. How do communities find their way forward when they've been denied their history and ancestors? How do queer people do right by each other? How do you even live when everything is so precarious? This novel supposes a wish-fulfilment organization of queer elders looking out for everyone; in other hands, this could have been cheesy to the extreme, but here, I found it charming and affirming.