We need your recommendations of works for the Otherwise Award jurors to consider. If you’ve read a recently published work of science fiction or fantasy that explores or expands our understanding of gender, please tell us about it by filling out the recommendation form below. If you have more than one, fill out the form again for each recommendation.
(Works can be books, stories, music, video, fanfic, social media posts, or any other form of speculative fiction.)
Please only recommend works that were published in 2024 or 2025. (For works published in 2024, check to make sure they weren’t on the 2024 recommendations list.)
In the form below, anything that you enter in the Author, Title, Publisher, Link, and Additional Comments fields will be publicly visible. If you want to add non-public comments about the work that you’re recommending, email recommendations@otherwiseaward.org.
The Additional Comments field is optional, but we recommend saying something in that field about the ways in which the work explores or expands gender.
Because anyone can recommend a work, a work’s presence on this list doesn’t indicate recognition by the Otherwise Award, so please don’t use a work’s presence on this list to promote the work. You’re welcome to promote works that win the award, or that appear on an Honor List.
Recommendations for this year’s award close in late 2025. (Recommendations after that will go to the 2026 award.) The 2025 awards will be given in 2026, location to be determined.
To let us know something related to recommendations that doesn’t fit in the form, email recommendations@otherwiseaward.org.
The 2025 Otherwise Award Recommendations
| Author | Title | Publisher | Comments | Sub Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Judith Segal | Marie Antoinette Comes To Marilyn Monroe In A Dream | WestWord Lit Mag | This fantasy links the status and fates of Marilyn Monroe and Marie Antoinette, as visible women in a man's world, across two centuries.westword.substack.com/p/marie-antoinette… | 2025-02-13 07:47:12 | |
| Kit Bashir | untitled | self | Evocative in its brevity.aus.social/@unixbigot/113959239985030359 | 2025-02-11 07:15:42 | |
| Rachel Bolton | And She Had Been So Reasonable | Apex Magazine | apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine… | 2025-01-28 19:28:47 | |
| Jared Pechacek | The West Passage | Tordotcom | I don't know if this is enough "exploration and expansion of gender," but it's a great book, and one of the main characters changes pronouns halfway through, so I'm going to throw it out there! Delightfully gross and weird and inventive high fantasy in a palace where almost nothing is as it seems at first. | 2025-01-12 18:36:28 | |
| Heather Werner | Summit's Shadow | Launch Point Press | Mountaineering is a man's world--or so it would seem from an outside perspective. Books, movies, and television shows rarely showcase women's expeditions, and spend even less time on LGBTQ+ stories, despite this rapidly growing demographic among the sport. Summit's Shadow dives into the heart-pounding world of high-altitude climbing and narrows its focus to an all-women team: their unique struggles, their unbreakable friendship, and their blossoming love. It's a story that warms the heart while chilling the bones, and offers a more diverse glimpse into one of the most extreme sports on the planet.barnesandnoble.com/w/summits-shadow-heat… | 2024-12-29 14:21:21 | |
| Justin Snead | The UFO Chronicles Four Short Stories | 2024-12-28 22:16:43 | |||
| Olga Tokarczuk Translator: Antonia Lloyd-Jones | The Empusium | Riverhead Books | 2024-12-23 16:10:57 | ||
| April McCloud | The Switch | QueerSpace/Rebel Satori | This book absolutely blew my mind. The author does an incredible job of expanding their main character's perspectives on gender, identity, and disability. Naomi (the MC) is forced into a situation where the only way out is an illegal body-swap. She experiences living in bodies that don't match her gender identity and meets people with a variety of relationships to gender and self. It's action-packed, creative, and incredibly readable, but just as impressive, it makes its points about gender, disability, and identity in slow, gentle ways that are accessible to even people with little life-experience outside of abled- and cishet-normativity. I wish everyone in the world could get a copy of this book. I think it would start some important conversations.rebelsatori.com/product/the-switch/ | 2024-11-24 09:16:48 | |
| Miranda Mellis | Crocosmia | Nightboat Books | From the author/publisher: A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the “great turning”—an epochal shift towards egalitarian eco-socialism. She recalls growing up on a rural commune run by anarchist nuns and how her mother, Jane, created a telekinetic artwork with the uncanny power to intervene in geopolitics. Maya and Jane’s relationship enacts the tension between a life of wounded, lyrical solitude and militant, anti-statist action. This lush novel is a meditation on how, on the precipice of biospheric unraveling, dreams of communal care can bloom.nightboat.org/book/crocosmia/ | 2024-11-20 20:52:40 | |
| Lana Min | Alaric | Medium | medium.com/the-black-veil/there-once-was… | 2024-11-17 14:08:15 | |
| Sarah Salcedo | In a Clearing on the Darkest Day | Kaleidotrope | kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2024/in-a-cleari… | 2024-11-16 13:59:49 | |
| Linda H. Codega | Motheater | Erehwon | 2024-07-29 11:41:08 |