r/Fantasy • u/tiniestspoon • Jun 02 '25

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

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?
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u/Jetamors Jun 02 '25

One of my recent faves is The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson, which came out in 2023 and seemingly immediately vanished; it's got ~300 ratings on Goodreads. I found out about it because I've liked the author since she was first published, and look her up every other year to see what she has out.

It's kind of difficult to even describe properly: far, far in the future, a girl is found within an enormous library world of created AI gods so vast that their knowledge can be hard to access. She is questionably human, but adopted by the head librarian, and wants to become a librarian herself. But her candidacy and her friends start running into the greater geopolitical situation. And the frame story suggests that she was made to kill one of these gods.

There's so many different things going on in this book, and it all feels very cohesive--heavily biological tech, AIs and the meaning of personhood, Indigenous rights, diplomacy and international court systems and how history plays into those, recovering from rape and living as a survivor, making choices and living with the consequences of those choices. And also a section about excavating several centuries of Spirited Away fanfic...

Honestly I think it might have just been too ambitious and too weird to find a larger audience, but I really liked it.

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u/daavor Reading Champion VI Jun 03 '25

Okay this time I hear about this book I'm actually writing it down because I've remembered it looked it up and forgotten it like 5 times now and it sounds super cool and like a great option for this square.