alisfranklin:

lucyliuism:

i feel like reading fanfic has kind of broken my desire to read published stories bc like theyre so bland tbh like. where the hell am i gonna get queer android romance in a bookstore. who writes about past assassins working together in a coffeeshop. all i see are straight white people making out like really like REALLY

Good news! Actually stories like this aren’t so difficult to find lately, and are getting less and less so.

Take “queer android romance”, for example, and go check out Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. It’s about an artificial intelligence stuck in a human body, living in a society where gender is considered irrelevant and isn’t recognised; “she” is the default pronoun, and all fashion is androgynous. Admittedly, it’s not quite a romance, though there are some semi-romantic plotlines (it’s complicated, but makes sense in the context of the world presented in the book). Ancillary Justice just won a Hugo award, so it’s Kind Of A Big Deal in SFF right now.

For “past assassins working together in a coffeeshop”, check out Kameron Hurley’s God’s War. It’s another sci-fi, this one a magitek biopunk set on a plant colonised by what are pretty heavily implied as having been Muslim colonists. It’s also one of the few pieces of media I’ve ever seen that presents a legitimate misandrist matriarchy, i.e. what a female-dominated society would actually look like if it were, yanno, made by women, not horny fantasising men yeah you know the ones I mean. It’s a fair bit DARKER and EDGIER than Leckie’s, the main character is a bisexual ex-assassin with her Obligatory Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, and there are definitely a non-zero number of scenes set in coffeeshop-like locales. Hurley also recently picked up some Hugos, for her biting feminist critique of tired tropes in the SFF genre, particularly this essay.

And those are only the two most immediate options that come to mind because, a) I’ve read both recently, and b) the authors have been receiving a bunch of (very, very deserved) accolades from the industry. I’m sure there are others! And lots of other interesting things, besides.

Point being, don’t give up hope, OP (and subsequent rebloggers)! There’s plenty of amazing stuff out there, just waiting for you to find it.