The future is lesbian, or at least it can be in sapphic speculative fiction. Part of the power of speculative fiction is that it allows marginalized people to imagine worlds in which our dreams are front and center, a landscape that takes what is and reimagines it into what could be. As a nonbinary lesbian of color, I see my own sapphic identity as one that subverts the violence of patriarchy, heteronormative gender, and white supremacy—as an identity and politics that is expansive. When I dream, I want to see lesbians in space, sexy chefs in post-apocalyptic bunkers, women going on journeys to save their clone sisters from a disease that threatens their collective sapphic future. I want to see lesbians doing stuff that tears the very fabric of our society and weaves it anew. I want to see worlds where sapphics can want and be messy and gnaw and heal in ways that inform how we move through universes. I want to see hundreds and millions of alternate worlds in which every one of us can, against all odds, grow old.
My only access to sapphic speculative literature as a teenager was fanfiction. These works were filled with sapphic themes of resilience, grit, and yearning—themes brought on by characters forced to constantly swim against the current. I remember scanning AO3 for sapphic pairings in my boarding school dorm room, retellings of popular media where women characters fell in love with each other instead of men. I’d go so far as to argue that fanfiction is inherently speculative in its basis in an imagined alternate reality, necessitated by the dearth of sapphic characters in mainstream media. Though these fics taught me in many ways how to love against odds and bare my teeth, I found myself hungry for science fiction and fantasy where lesbian relationships were canon, and it wasn’t until college that I read my first sapphic science fiction book and tapped into the larger network of sapphic literary legacy, an experience that made me want to be a writer for the first time.
When compiling this book list, I was interested in following characters whose queer desires informed their politics and their choices within the plot of their stories. As political violence across our world attempts to enact an increasingly narrow version of sapphic futures, I have looked to sapphic sci-fi and fantasy for ways forward. These eight books present different ideas of scrappy sapphic futurity amidst extremist space cults, communities of exiled pathogenic women, rival xianxia-style martial arts sects, and more.
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
Marghe Taishan is an anthropologist testing a vaccine against a virus that, centuries ago, killed all men and most women sent to colonize the planet Jeep. The women who survived found themselves changed—able to reproduce pathogenically, share memories—and developed their own society on the planet’s harsh and frigid landscape. If the new vaccine works, the Company plans to recolonize the planet, threatening the women who live there. Shortly after her arrival, Marghe is captured by a cult-like group of nomadic women called the Echraidhe whose leader sees her as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Fighting to escape, she finds herself drawn to the commune of women and increasingly doubtful of her allegiance to the Company. Written in 1992 and awarded the 1993 Lambda Award for Lesbian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ammonite is a classic piece of feminist science fiction that explores the concept of gender in a world with only women.
The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai
In the year 2145, Groom Kirilow lives in Grist Village, a lesbian society of exiled clone women that relies on “starfish,” women who can indefinitely regrow limbs and organs to give to other Grist sisters, and “doublers,” women who can spontaneously become pregnant and reproduce new women. When a stranger from the male-dominated Saltwater City brings with him aerial attack from a megacorporation and a flu that kills both Kirilow’s starfish girlfriend and Grist Village’s last doubler, Kirilow journeys to the pandemic-ridden Saltwater City in search of a new starfish. There, Kirilow meets a girl, Kora, who may be the lost starfish that can save Grist Village. Told in a dual point-of-view between Kirilow and Kora, The Tiger Flu contends with questions of memory, biopower, exploitation, and otherness through a visceral kaleidoscope of fragmented structure.
Interstellar MegaChef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Now that humanity has expanded across the galaxy and made a new home alongside alien life on the planet Primus, Earth is seen as an uncivilized wasteland. Saraswati Kaveri, a disgraced Earth-based chef whose career has been destroyed by a scathing review, travels to Primus to compete in the prestigious Interstellar MegaChef competition. Things do not go as planned, however, and Saras is quickly eliminated from the competition in a humiliating and xenophobic televised ousting. Forced to pivot, Swati finds work at a restaurant and on an artificial reality food project with tech prodigy Serenity Ko, who is recovering from a drunken public crashout. The project quickly becomes both of their greatest chance at redemption, and the two navigate their attraction to each other alongside questions of culture, self-acceptance, and belonging. Interstellar MegaChef explores themes of culinary imperialism and the ways power constructs food’s value, as well as access and elitism in the restaurant industry.
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
Set in a speculative near-future, Land of Milk and Honey follows an unnamed chef through her pursuit of taste and pleasure after Earth’s crops and animal populations are decimated by a widespread smog. Unable to return home from Europe and suffering as a cook in a dying culinary industry, our narrator scams her way into a private chef position for the ultra-wealthy at a mysterious Italian research facility on a mountain the smog has not yet reached. There, she develops a tense relationship with her employer and his scientist daughter, Aida, whose coldness and brilliance at once repulses and intrigues her. The relationship between the narrator and Aida mirrors the novel’s contentions with power, inequity, and racialized violence, creating a complex, deeply human emotional landscape.
Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard
Việt Nhi is a shy junior navigator for the Rooster clan, one of 12 dueling clans that use xianxia-style powers to guide spaceships through dangerous, monster-infested dimensions called “Hollows.” When one of these monsters escapes and threatens to wreak havoc on humanity, Việt Nhi is volunteered for an unwelcome joint-clan mission alongside three ill-suited navigators from opposing clans. During the mission, Việt Nhi is forced to rely on fellow crew-member Hạc Cúc, part of the snake clan, whose shady reputation and penchant for poisons makes her difficult to trust, especially after the mission’s envoy is assassinated and the crew is plunged into a larger and far more dangerous conspiracy.
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
After a war with aliens destroyed Earth, most of humanity chose to integrate with alien society and submit to the all-knowing governance of a supercomputer called The Wisdom. Those on Gaea Station, humanity’s last holdout, see this as a betrayal. There, Magnus is assigned a secret suicide-mission to destroy The Wisdom, while his sister Kyr is assigned to a gender-essentialist nursery position where she is expected to give birth to future soldiers indefinitely. Her opportunity to leave Gaea comes in the form of a captured alien, Yiso, whose ship allows Kyr, Yiso, and one of Magnus’s friends to escape. Off the station, Kyr is confronted with the idea that everything she’s learned all her life has been extremist propaganda, that she alone can choose what she fights for and who she wants to be. A mind-bending space opera with a phenomenal exploration of its sapphic main character, Some Desperate Glory is ultimately a tale of redemption, accountability, forgiveness, and transformation.
The Deep by Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes
Yetu is the historian for the wajinru, a water-dwelling society of merfolk descended from pregnant Black women drowned by white slavers during the transatlantic slave trade. Her task is to literally bear the story of their traumatic origins, taking memories from others, putting them inside herself, and endlessly re-experiencing them. Once a year, during the Remembrance, Yetu is relieved of this weight and shares all the memories with the wajinru so that can fill the void of longing to know who they are and where they come from. Unsure if she can survive being filled with the memories again, Yetu swims away and winds up onshore. There, she meets her first human, Oori, and must decide whether to return or go her own way. Told in both collective and singular voice, The Deep presents a tremendous, sapphic, Afrofuturist future that both draws from and builds upon the past.
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom
When 60 mermaids beach themselves and keen a simultaneous death cry in the nameless narrator’s polluted hometown of Gloom, she decides to finally leave for the City of Smoke and Lights and start living as a girl. In the City of Smoke and Lights, a person can become anything, and beautiful, dangerous femmes are everywhere if one knows how to look. When a trans woman in the community is murdered, the narrator joins a gang of trans women who seek vigilante justice against bad Johns and those who commit violence against trans women. Told in both letters, poetry, and traditional narrative, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars draws upon Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography to bring into question what truth really is and what it is to tell a story that is emotionally truthful.
