List: author:gender:nb

An Unkindness of Ghosts is so good that it seems implausible that it is Rivers Solomon's debut novel. I mean, I'm very much into generational starships as a literary setting, but this is the best usage of the genre I've encountered so far (it nearly reached a five-star rating for me). We find ourselves on a generational starship, over 200 years into the journey away from a dead planet Earth. People are organized by deck, with the upper decks being the ruling class with a Sovereign, and the lower decks being the ill-treated worker class under guard. But instead of being as simplistic and YA-y as this sounds, An Unkindness of Ghosts goes deeper. Each deck has its own variations in language, and its own variation in culture and upbringing. It starts at words, it ends at default pronouns and religous views. Decks are also race-coded, with the ruling class being white and the lower decks being dark-skinned. The acts of both purposeful and casual violence were so believable that they were very disturbing, and made the various reactions of the main cast very believable. The main cast features a guy with strong gender dysphoria, a woman with heavy psychoses, and the protagonist who is a woman (probably enby, though) on the autism spectrum. All characters experience terrible violence over the course of their lives, and seeing them deal with it was realistic and heart-wrenching. The titular ghosts of this book will haunt me for some time.

Many if not most books on relationships out there are not good. Sometimes the author had a spot of luck and generalises. Sometimes it's just stuffed with common knowledge, or advice meant to make people feel in control. Of course, most of them are also horribly gendered, and subscribe to differences between men and women at ridiculous levels, and/or assume relationships to be heterosexual.

Short, sweet queer sci-fi romance, telling the story of a world where production of humanoid robots has been banned, but the last remaining ones are allowed to live out their life. Ace robot trope though.

Midnight Society is a Twitter account that I really and honestly enjoy reading, so when the recent Kickstarter came out, I backed it and got both the new and the old book – but I shouldn't have bothered. It's not that the production quality is bad (it's A4 print-on-demand, you get what you expect), it's that there was no care taken with the presentation at all.

More of the same: Good ideas, but go read them on Twitter, as the print version takes zero care with the layouting. Still glad I supported the account, but man, what a wasted chance.

Peter Pan returns to Neverland, coming to terms with being a trans boy in bad old England. He starts out as a cruel boy and experiences some character growth … through the magic of Hook's pretty eyes? I don't know, y'all.

Asian-inspired genderfun fantasy. Didn't compel me at all: the plot wasn't as focused as the short length warranted, and the characters didn't stand out to me at all. The plot was compressed and considering the high odds and tragedy, didn't make me care at all.

Crossing a trans guy's story with Jurassic Park. Occasionally sweet, but also unfocussed.

I tend to really like the experimental stuff, especially when it’s playing with language, and very especially epic poetry. So why didn’t this work for me? I don’t know. Harder for a non-native speaker to get into, I guess, because it runs on word-level vibes? Or maybe it’s that I spent half my time frustrated with the top/bottom format of the book – I’m used to works that are printed in two languages being side-by-side, and find that much easier to read. I constantly lost my place and then the flow was gone, and … eh. I don’t know. I’m sad that this wasn’t for me.

Word to the wise: this is not an "m/m fantasy romance". It's m/m, and it's fantasy, but mostly it's … slavery harem smut? I don't even know. Wouldn't have thought twice if this had been on AO3, but billed as fantasy, the lack of any serious reflection on the horrors or downsides of slavery, rape and oppression is a bit stunning. I'm guessing this is like a small-scale Fifty Shades thing, where people enjoy the horny parts and forget to also use their brain when later recommending the story to people.