Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Book Lists

We would like to thank WWEnder and Uber User Stephen Poltz (spoltz) for all the work he put into making this list for WWEnd. Below you will find a description of his process for creating the list. We have a thread in the forum where you can join the discussion about the list as well.

What is an LGBTQ book? If you read the blurb from David Pratt's fantasy "Bob the Book", a gay book is a book attracted to another book of the same gender. But seriously, what makes a book lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer? Is it the orientation of the author? Perhaps the main character is a bisexual vampire or a supporting character has a very fluid sense of gender. And just how do you find such a book?

These were some of the questions that came up for me as I tried to find books for the LGBT Reading Challenge here on Worlds Without End. I had no real resource for finding books to read other than the books being picked by participants in the challenge. I soon found the Lambda Literary Awards which aim to identify and celebrate the best LGBTQ books and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, for genre books with positive LGBTQ themes, characters, and issues.

I did some research into adding these awards to WWEnd and began entering books in the database. Unfortunately, we came across a few problems. We found that the Lambda Award contains mystery books, a genre we don't track at WWEnd, and the Spectrum Awards seem to be more or less defunct. We also found that many of the books were blatantly erotica. (The admins at WWEnd have always eschewed erotica regardless of orientation, though not to the exclusion of books with general sexual content.)

So we were posed with the question of how to have an LGBTQ resource without those specific awards. The answer pointed to us making our own list culled from the two awards and other resources that we could find on the internet along with recommendations from other WWEnders.

To create the list I came up with a set of criteria:

• Include as many different authors as possible - once an author is on the list, a reader can do their own research for other books by him/her. (I only included multiple books by authors if they have won multiple awards or have a long list of nominees. Nicola Griffith and Elizabeth Bear are two examples who have a lot of nominations and LGBTQ content.)
• Include as many award winners and hall of fame books as possible.
• Ensure the books have LGBTQ content and are not just books by an LGBTQ author. Examples of this are Nalo Hopkinson and Octavia Butler - while they are self-identified as lesbian, not all their books have such content.
• Ensure the LGBTQ content is significant. E.g. One Spectrum nominated book had the main character's best friend's mother as a positively portrayed lesbian character, which seems less significant than if the main character or her best friend were a lesbian.
• Have at least 100 books on the list but no more than 200.
• Whenever an omnibus of a series exists, include that. Otherwise only list the first book of a series, unless a major LGBTQ character appears in a later work or if a later work won an award as well.
• Include as much SF as possible because Fantasy and Horror are quite over-represented.
• Eliminate books identified as erotica.