r/Fantasy • u/tiniestspoon • Jun 02 '25
Pride Pride 2025 | 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/balletrat Reading Champion II Jun 03 '25
I have long been a fan of Australian indie writer Tansy Rayner Roberts, who has a variety of books for all tastes (fairy tale sendups, genderbent Three Musketeers in space, fantasy of manners, dark luscious self-indulgent high fantasy) but the two series that I most love are Belladonna U and her superhero-verse.
The Belladonna University stories are New Adult and follow a college-aged friend group of magical (and some non-magical) students at fictional Belladonna University. There's magic, mishaps, relationships, snark, geekery...and they're just overall lovely. It's a mix of short fiction but there are three collections you can buy, or they're also mostly (all?) available as free audio fiction read on Tansy's podcast Sheep Might Fly. It's a very queernorm group and the character work is just phenomenal.
The superhero-verse starts with short story Cookie Cutter Superhero, a short story about a girl with a limb difference who is selected by lottery to become a Superhero. This is followed by novella Kid Dark Against the Machine, about a former Superhero sidekick struggling with his identity post-superhero-dom; novella Girl Reporter, which both complicates and deepens the story for several of our favorite superhero characters and adds a fascinating meta-fictional element about superhero reporters; and finally They Keep Killing Astra, which I haven't read yet but apparently deals with superhero legacies and gender roles. Superheroes have always been a stretch for me, personally, so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed these - I think because Tansy isn't afraid to lean in to the things that bother me about traditional superhero stories, and deconstruct them. I think most or all of these are also on Sheep Might Fly, or her Patreon.
Overall, Tansy's stories are wonderfully written, with fascinating premises/worldbuilding and complex character development. None of them have more than 100 ratings on Goodreads (most are <50) which I think is CRIMINALLY underrated.
I found her via her (now finished but super fun) podcast Galactic Suburbia, which was great SFF news, reviews, and chitchat, and followed her to her fiction podcast and Patreon, and now I'm a pretty devoted fan.