'Why would I close the door to a queer person?' LGBTQ fantasy comes of age | Books | The Guardian

Fantasy's default mode still tends to be a faux-medieval past matched with archaic sexual and social codes, while sci-fi authors often imagine brave new worlds where a man will happily have sex with an alien, but not another man. However, many writers are solving one of the largest blocks for queer romance by simply doing away with homophobia in their fictional universes. In 2019 alone, we had Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower, with a trans protagonist whose trans-ness is interrogated as important but not other; Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, starring the best cast of lesbians the world has ever seen; Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, which makes space in its epic sci-fi plot for a romance between two women; and Jennifer Giesbrecht's The Monster of Elendhaven, in which the central gay couple break every norm - except their universe's rules on sexuality, because there aren't any.