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The Queersar Not An Award 2024
For excellence in queer SFF and SFF with queers released in 2024
Eddie
June 22, 2026
So here we are at the end of this quixotic exercise in alternate award history. Ten more volumes of queer SFF I think are brilliant. I do think, funnily enough, that this is tonally the most diverse set of books I’ve pulled together across these five years. Remember the key vibe I’m trying to replicate is midlist-esque “good quality, quirky but commercial SFF that's queer or full of queers”, and I contrasted this against the dichotomy of “queer romantasy and arty stuff” that tends to dominate the Lambda SFF award.
I’ve certainly got brilliant, overlooked commercial fiction here - Relics of Ruin and Between Dragons and their Wrath, for example, are excellent ‘should have been huge’ epic fantasies - but there are also two which could broadly be categorised as romantasy and three or four firmly at the more literary end of the genre. One of these was even nominated for a Lammy. I don’t think this means I’ve gone outside my self-imposed brief, I’m still paying attention to the core, and themes aren’t useful if they’re applied too prescriptively. I just think it’s interesting that what caught my attention this year had a broader range of aesthetics that, say, the pretty core ‘midlisty’ 2023 list.
This year is also the first year which overlaps with the start of this blog: unsurprisngly, many of these appeared on my favourite books of 2024 list. Where that’s the case, I’ve shamelessly borrowed (and in some cases lightly tweaked) the commentary from the list.
Have a look below. As with every year in this exercise, at least 4 of the 10 books have zero award attention: no nomination, no award wins. This year there are also literally zero books nominated for the Hugo or Nebula (Sophie Burnham has an Astounding award nomination, associated with but not a Hugo, which is also awarded to author, not book). To the extent what I’m doing has value, it’s to draw attention to these brilliant works of queer SFF not being recognised by the field’s major awards. I went into this exercise thinking there might be some value in this sort of ‘by queer nerds, for queer nerds’ spotlight; this year’s list as much or more than any of the previous four, suggests that in fact there is.
I’ll be back next month with some stats and overall reflections (including two notable under-representations, one in genre and one in authorship), but substantively this is it. As always, dig in below, and I hope you find something new.
Honour List
'Nathan Burgoine: Triad Magic (Bold Strokes Books)
The final volume in a gay urban fantasy trilogy (plus a few short stories) which literally opens with “so a wizard, a vampire, and a sex demon walk into a bar,” takes that premise and runs with it to create something truly excellent. For me, urban fantasy at its best requires excellent command of both the cast of characters and the city in which the story is set, and Burgoine does both. Our core trio of Curtis, Luc, and Anders have pretty amazing chemistry, and the supporting cast – their friends, their antagonists, those who might be both – is well-drawn; Burgoine is an excellent character writer.. The Ottawa setting rings completely true for anyone who knows the city, and evokes a sense of place for those who don’t. Triad Magic wraps up the longstanding plotlines across the series as well as deploying an effective single volume mystery plot. It’s wry, it’s funny, it’s really quite horny, and the action sequences work really well. What more can you ask for? There isn’t a lot of good quality urban fantasy out there by and about queer men, so it’s always a pleasure to find some and Triad Magic more than qualifies.
Triad Blood: Book 3
The law of three is everything: three vampires for a coterie, three demons for a pack, and three wizards for a coven. Those alone or in pairs are vulnerable to the rest. Luc, Anders, and Curtis—vampire, demon, and wizard—sidestepped tradition by binding themselves together.
Someone is killing those with the gift of prescience and prophecy, a feat that shouldn't be possible given the victims should all sense the danger at hand. The three try to catch the killer, but how do you outwit someone killing those who see the future?
As more psychics turn up dead, new demons move into Ottawa, the magical Families close ranks, and a rebellion is sparked. Luc, Anders, and Curtis must stop a plan set into motion decades ago by one of the strongest and most dangerous supernatural powers ever to exist in Ottawa.
They already used the power of blood, soul, and magic to kill him once.
Now they have to stop his future from coming to pass.
Award nominations: None.
Sophie Burnham: Sargassa (DAW)
Absolute firecracker of a debut novel. Alt history with a continuing Roman empire, set in the city of Sargassa, somewhere in North America. An excellent thriller plot, really fascinating historical extrapolation, great characters and an ongoing fixation on the pretty uncompromising logic of power. Plenty of queer characters, some of whom are attracted to each other and/or in love with each other. What I like about the book is it can hold all of this in its head at the same time without neglecting any one strand. A taut political thriller, a book open to queer folks and their lives and loves, and a piece of pitiless realpolitik which insists that love won’t save us while also never denying its importance. As Liz Bourke puts it, the book suggests “personal relationships cut across divisions of status: Love is real and important, but it is not enough to cut away everything else that matters, too.” The book ends with a hugely impressive set piece setting up a pretty dramatic transition to the second book in the series, in a way that leaves me eager for more rather than frustrated at a cliffhanger. Impressive work, and it feels like Burnham is going to be a major voice for a good long while.
Ex Romana: Book 1
The role of Imperial Historian is Selah Kelios's birthright, but she was supposed to have more time to learn the role from her father, the previous Historian. In the wake of her father’s sudden and shocking assassination, Selah finds herself custodian of more than just the Imperial Archives when an old flame returns intending to steal the Iveroa Stone—a seemingly harmless artifact containing secrets that could destroy the empire.
Theo Nix is a damn good spy, and they know it. By day, they work in Senator Naevia Kleios’s office; smart, unobtrusive, and grateful, they’re the model of a perfect plebeian. By night, their time belongs to Griff: master strategist, commander of the Revenants, the spider at the center of a very large and very dangerous web. When Griff gives Theo an assignment, they move, no questions asked, so it’s really no surprise Theo is flirting with Arran Alexander—Selah’s low-caste half brother is an obvious target. It is a surprise, however, that they’re enjoying it so much.
After a year away in the legions, Arran has recently returned home, only to find the cracks beneath his feet widening. Struggling with his own identity and purpose, drawn into an underground independence movement through his growing feelings for Theo, Arran must choose between the sister he loves and the chance to take control of his own life for the very first time.
Award nominations: Locus Award for best first novel, Astounding Award for best new writer
Award wins: Sidewise Award
A J Demas: The House of the Red Balconies (Self-published)
Demas will slip under the radar of a lot of SFF readers because her work is marketed as romance but if you like the sort of "I can't believe it's not history" fantasy of Guy Gavriel Kay and Megan Whalen Turner hear me out; this is great. All Demas's work is set in a thinly veiled fantasy classical Aegean - from minor islands to major cities to colonies in the hinterlands of not!Thrace, and the social worldbuilding is just impeccable. As Liz Bourke puts it, this society is "less awful in some respects than real antiquity, though it’s far from completely sanitised". This distinguishes it substantially from a significant portion of the romantasy put out in the last few years, where the SFnal elements and worldbuilding are very much just tertiary set dressing.
The House of Red Balconies does have a romance at its heart, with two compelling leads; Hylas, a 40ish engineer from a repressed militaristic society, and Zo, a younger, chronically ill courtesan, but the other elements of storytelling are not remotely neglected. The plot, outside the romance, is driven by the complicated geopolitical status of the island making it extremely difficult to get money and approval to complete a badly needed aqueduct. The progress of both romance and broader plot is subtle, slow, and very much minor key (without at all being a downer). KJ Charles has compared the vibe to ukiyo-e, and I think this is right. A quiet, bijou gem of a book that deserves a wider audience.
Hylas has come to Tykanos to build an aqueduct. He has not come to enjoy the island's main attraction: the six houses where the companions of Tykanos, courtesans both female and male, offer tea and elegant conversation. Yet he cannot ignore them as he finds himself renting a room in one of the tea houses and meeting his neighbour, the beautiful, chronically ill companion Zo.
Over breakfasts in Zo's garden, the two men begin a friendship that transforms the isolation of their lives. But Hylas's aqueduct project is threatened by bureaucratic delays, and Zo is pressured to secure a rich patron to help support his failing house. When they have begun to hope that they have found a home in each other, the world seems intent on forcing them apart.
Award nominations: None.
Erin M Evans: Relics of Ruin (Orbit/JABerwocky)
The second book of Evans’ Book of the Usurper series, Relics of Ruin more than lives up to the high standard of its predecessor. It deploys to great effect dual plot arcs; a mystery plot resolved in this book, and an ongoing metaplot across the series as a whole, which is progressed but not resolved. That balancing of tension, giving and withholding information, fits well with the thematic concerns of the book as well, where the contingency of knowledge, of memory, of identity - including of our point of view characters - is front and centre throughout. Throw in rock solid prose, fascinating worldbuilding, rock solid character work, casual queerness in a way that works for me (prominent in major characters and the worldbuilding, probably not in your face/central enough to warrant a wiggly marketing arrow), and a genuinely unique magic system (based on anxiety spirals) and this is basically a perfect piece of commercial fiction for me. Reads like the best of late 90s/early 2000s epic fantasy (Kate Elliot meets Ile-Rien-era Martha Wells?), updated impeccably for modern readers. I honestly do not know why this series is not huge; it really should appeal to everyone from the cozy queer crowd to BrandoSando fans.
Book of The Usurper, Book 2
Within the Imperial Archives, the Chapel of the Skeleton Saints holds the ornamented relics of the Orozhandi protectorate’s holy sorcerers.
And the bones of one misplaced murder victim.
Saint Hazaunu of the Wool has stood sentinel in the chapel for nearly a century—but the bones found beneath the floor of a crime scene are inarguably the saint’s. While the first question Archivist Superior Amadea Gintanas must ask is how were the bones stolen, the second is who exactly is standing in the saint’s niche? And how did they get there?
All eyes go to Tunuk, the lonely bone specialist of the Imperial Archives—who isn’t talking. Tunuk knows something happened to the saint twelve years ago—but not who took her place or why. But without answers, Tunuk’s the obvious suspect for both the murder and the theft—something neither Amadea nor her new apprentice, Quill, believe.
While tracing the rumors of a burgeoning attack from beyond the Salt Wall and keeping secrets that could shake the empire, Quill and Amadea must shine a light on a past Tunuk would rather keep in shadow. But when the bones of the saint are stolen again and a saboteur strikes too close to home, all three of them will have to reckon with the possibility all these perils are intimately connected.
Award wins: Endeavour Award.
Karin Lowachee: The Mountain Crown (Solaris)
After making quite a big splash in the early 2000s, Lowachee had been reasonably quiet on the publishing front in the last few years; The Mountain Crown is an excellent, very welcome, return. A hugely efficient piece of novella writing where choices of diction in the narration and dialogue do much of the work establishing setting, allowing a reasonably expansive fantasy story to be told in a novella length without feeling like there's anything missing. The main plot – go to mountain; get dragon – is quite simple, but the book spends a lot of time reflecting on what the current geopolitical situation (colonialism and a post-war new status quo, basically) has done to the indigenous inhabitants of the setting. It's effective in conveying the brutality and dislocation without ever feeling like a polemic, and also paints a rich culture alternatively subordinated or ignored by the colonial power. Also, again, casual queerness of main characters, including some of the complications in relationships (especially same-sex relationships) across cultures. Really very impressive, and the two volumes which follow maintain the high standard.
The Crowns of Ishia: Book 1
War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Méka’s nomadic people, the Ba’Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakan yoke, to serve their greed for gold alongside the dragons with whom the Ba’Suon share an empathic connection.
A decade later and under a fragile truce, Méka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary rite: gathering a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Méka’s act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the imperialistic authorities. They order the unwelcome addition of an enigmatic Ba’Suon traitor named Raka to accompany Méka and Lilley to the mountains.
The journey is filled with dangers both within and without. As conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the decisions – defiant or compliant – that Méka and her companions choose to make. But not even Méka, kin to the great dragons of the North, can anticipate the depth of the consequences to her world.
Award nominations: None.
Devin Madson: Between Dragons and Their Wrath (Orbit)
If you're not paying attention, this might look like a pretty standard, nicely done epic fantasy series opener. But wow is there so much more going on. There are, indeed, dragons in this book (one of the major points of view focuses on them), but the dragons of the title are also metaphorical. The book depicts a society founded on a colonial enterprise and extractive capitalism, and one which is deeply patriarchal and increasingly nationalistic. It is those dragons our characters begin their fight against in this book. It is also particularly Australian in its approach; not that the setting is fantasy Australia, but that the cultural approach and key concerns are I think pretty inarguably influenced by the author coming from this corner of the world.
The other thing it does that I really appreciate is almost obsess over control of information and narrative. In all three points of view, who gets to tell stories and who gets to hear them is a major driver of the plot. In one particular case, one character is told "not everyone is owed all of every story", and we then get a major plot revelation entirely off-screen and are never told exactly what was said; we can only infer it from the actions the characters take in reaction to it. I cackled out loud at this sort of metafictional audacity coming up in a genre not known for it.
If I have any criticism at all of this book it's that it is very firmly in Book 1 mode; the plot drive is a little slow, and most of what happens here is setup. But the setup is so good, and I'm so here for the space Madson is working in, that I don't really mind. A cracker of a starter to what I expect will be a towering modern epic fantasy series.
The Shattered Kingdom: Book 1
Conquest built the Celes Basin, now enemies once more threaten its borders. But when the Lord Reacher declares himself supreme ruler to enforce unity, old angers erupt, threatening to tear the basin apart from within.
Tesha, a glassblower's apprentice with a talent for poisonwork, becomes a false tribute bride as part of a desperate political plot. In the Reacher's court, she's perfectly placed to sabotage him, but her heart has other plans.
Naili is laundress to an eccentric alchemist, a job that has left her with strange new abilities that are slowly consuming her--and attracting the notice of the city's underground rulers. With time running out, she'll have to gain power by any means just to survive, let alone change the world.
And in the desolate Shield Mountains, sharp-shooting dragon rider Ashadi protects the basin from the monsters of The Sands beyond, but when an impossible shot pierces his dragon's glass scales, he becomes the hunted one.
As chaos sweeps across the land, Tesha, Naili, and Ashadi must fight to survive political enemies, long-buried secrets, and monsters both within and without.
Award nominations: None.
Sascha Stronach: The Sunforge (Saga)
I liked The Dawnhounds. A distinctive prose voice drawing on NZ vernacular, science fantasy worldbuilding very much drawing on the Pacific and Southeast Asia rather than reheated Europeanisms. A fine taste for fungus, some pirates, touches of weirdness and queerness. I really like The Sunforge. It takes those elements from The Dawnhounds and dials them all up to eleven. It’s weirder – games with timelines and with unstable character identity – it’s queerer, and it is angrier. The anti-colonialism comes even more to the fore, and the anti-nationalism intensifies. The book also does something more interesting with the concept of incarnate gods than I’m used to seeing in fantasy. If you pay attention, you can also see very interesting answers to big questions being teased.
This is the only book on this any of these lists where I’m personal friends with the author, but that really has nothing to do with why it’s on here. The Sunforge is top quality, ambitious speculative fiction, brave enough to be interesting enough that some people will absolutely hate it; the rest of us can marvel and enjoy, and look forward to the final book in the trilogy (due in 2027).
The Endsong: Book 2
The steel city of Radovan is consumed by fire between. Stranded in its harbor is the crew of the Kopek, the survivors of a bioterror attack overseas. But they bear scars: their captain, Sibbi, has gone missing; Yat, their newest Weaver, is fighting for control of her own mind; and their Weaving powers are in a badly weakened state.
To disable the technology that prevents the group from escaping, Sen and Kiada must plot their way through the ruins of the foreign capital, which is patrolled by a hostile militia, using wits alone. But to navigate through Radovan, Kiada will have to rely on her own history with the city—one she shares with a band of misfits dubbed Fort Tomorrow and their leader, Ari, a charismatic thief.
Ari may hold the key not only to saving Radovan from complete annihilation, but the history of their world, which will come into play as the gods begin to unleash destruction on humanity and one another.
Award nominations: Lambda Award.
Nghi Vo: The City in Glass (Tordotcom)
Nghi Vo never misses, and this is her at her best. She's an incredible prose stylist, and that's deployed here in a short novel narrative that covers a sweep of 600 years in its limited page count. It's a difficult trick to make this engaging; we have two immortal characters at the centre, but their interactions aren't the core of the novel. That core is the rise and fall and rise and fall of Azril, the city our point of view demon, Vitrine, is the patron (?) of. Adrian Tchaikovsky pulls of the "city as character" thing in the Tyrant Philosophers. Brian Aldiss managed the "plot about society across centuries" thing with Helliconia. Vo pulls both together here. And the ending is both perfect and absolutely wild. Vo says in the author's note that this was a pandemic book, and that completely makes sense – reality redefining destruction coming out of nowhere, with no clear meaning or context. I found the book moving; hopeful about the possibiltiy of something new, contrasted against the inevitability that something new means something old has to end.
A demon. An angel. A city.
The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.
And then the angels come, and the city falls.
Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.
She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.
Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.
The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.
Award nominations: Le Guin Prize, Locus Award for fantasy novel, Mythopoeic Award.
Ursula Whitcher: North Continent Ribbon (Neon Hemlock)
One of the best examples of a mosaic novel in SFF I've read in ages. A collection of six stories, set over several hundred years in the history of the planet Nakharat. What's different about this as a mosaic to others I've read and enjoyed (Rakesfall, in this list; Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang), is it isn't a fixup - i.e. existing short work given additional context and narrative structure with newly-written material for the novel. It's six previously published stories which, when put next to each other in a single volume, add up to a more comprehensive portrait of the society they depict than they do apart. The through lines become more apparent: why and how attitudes to machine decision-making vacillate over time; how the collectivist union ethos important in one later story developed in an earlier one. All this adds to a startlingly real depiction of a society that does not exist, including (relevantly for the purposes of this exercise) multiple different expressions of queerness. As with the other novellas/short novels on this list, this only works because Whitcher is an excellent crafter of prose, evoking setting, character, and emotion in comparatively few words. A complete triumph.
On Nakharat, every contract is a ribbon and every ribbon is a secret, braided tight and tucked behind a veil. Artificial intelligence threatens the tightly-woven network. Stability depends on giving each machine a human conscience--but the humans are not volunteers. In the midst of strife, individual people struggle to hold onto their jobs and protect their lovers, those trusted few who could draw back the veil.
Award nominations: Le Guin Prize.
Spotlight
Alex Jeffers: A Mourning Coat (Neon Hemlock)
As at the time of writing, A Mourning Coat has 13 ratings on Goodreads, 18 on Storygraph, and 3 – t h r e e – on Amazon. It has zero award wins and zero award nominations. It is also one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years and almost certainly the best novella. Just an impeccable piece of writing craft, to put across meaning, emotion, character, and setting in a very short word count. What struck me here is the efficiency of the prose. This can sound clinical, but I more mean to get at its depth. For a novella to function as a novella – rather than a cut-down novel – each sentence, each word, might need to put across what a paragraph might in a novel. And Jeffers manages this superbly.
This is a short, beautiful story of grief and renewal. It is in a lot of ways essentially inward-looking, as grief is. But the interactions with the characters brave and caring enough to pierce the solitude of grief, and Therre's own recollections of his relationship with his father, let in the world in a way that makes me very much want to read more set here. That world is not Earth; the book wears its SFFnal elements lightly but they do very much matter. Cultural differences and expectations, constructed religions, and the occasional plot critical spot of what might be magic are conveyed with the same efficiency as the character and plot work and contribute meaningfully to what makes this such a good book.
As Roseanna Pendlebury says, the titular mourning coat is a metaphor for the character arc of the book. Therre is a costumier, a profession he put aside to care for his dying father. In deciding to make a coat for his father’s funeral “he crafts himself a statement about who he is, was, loves and possibly hopes to be.” His slow opening up afterwards, and potential return to his work, includes growing openness to his potential attraction to an old male acquaintance, something he’d previously not realised about himself. Like everything else about the book, this is done with a light, sympathetic touch. An exquisitely crafted, perfectly observed story unlike much else out there is the broader SFF field, A Mourning Coat packs worlds into its short page count. It is both inexplicable and shameful that it’s not had more attention – do yourself a favour and correct that.
Caregiving has taken over Therre’s entire life, eclipsing his own small fame as a costumier. When his father dies, the funeral affairs are complicated by the long shadow of his late father’s internationally renowned career as an actor. To honor the man who made him, Therre tailors himself a stunning mourning coat as he navigates the forgotten shores of the man he used to be.
Award nominations: None.