As we mentioned earlier this year: The Otherwise Award had a hiatus a few years ago, then restarted last year. So we didn’t convene juries to celebrate works published in 2022 and 2023.

We don’t currently plan to give out Otherwise Awards for those years, but we would still like to spotlight gender-expanding genre fiction you may appreciate, and to encourage and celebrate people who created noteworthy work.

So, to help with this, we’ve invited some friends of Otherwise to recommend genre work they loved from those years. We are sharing those informal recommendations in a series of blog posts. The first was in August, the second was last month, and here’s the final batch!

2022: Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde

Eloghosa Osunde’s polyphonic, magical debut novel, Vagabonds!, is one of the most spectacularly queer books I’ve had the joy of reading—queer in the sense of refusing to abide by others’ norms, queer as in troubling borders and boundaries, queer as in entirely unique and also defiantly in community. A vagabond, according to the book’s introduction, is “an outsider, an unbelonger, unforgettably unloved.” A person who dresses in the fashion of the opposite gender, who fails to adhere to society’s rules. “In other words: invisible, hypervisible, threat, trouble.” The novel takes seriously the weight of living beneath these labels, under this sort of scrutiny, but it also insists upon hope, joy, the possibility of reclamation. An exclamation point turning a label into a rallying cry. In an interview, Osunde talks about the power of “stories that imagine us with more abundant options than conform or die… stories written by people who can see us flourishing without fleeing.” Vagabonds! is a compendium of such stories, gorgeously written and imagined. (Recommended by Emet North)

2023: The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

In some ways, Kitasei’s The Deep Sky follows in the feminist SF tradition of woman-only worlds, part of feminist SF and utopian writing since, well, the 16^th century. Set on a woman-only deep space mission, the story ostensibly is a murder mystery—in fact, I first came to it when searching for mystery novels and not science fiction ones—in which an 80-women crew of the mission try to figure out who sabotaged the mission and blew up one of its crew. The novel is told from the point of view of Asuka, who we learn via multiple flashbacks to the crew’s education, training, and selection that takes place on Earth, was not originally selected for the mission. As with many women-only groups, “traditional” gender stereotypes lose their meaning and we get to see all the crew as people, with all their flaws and shortcomings as well as their individual strengths. The twist is that everyone on the crew needs to be able to get pregnant as this mission is meant to preserve humanity by sending the ship to a habitable planet—thus some crew members identify as men or non-binary in addition to those who identify as women. I found the updated version of this “women-only” space to be intriguing. The space is both inclusive and completely exclusionary, due to physical attributes, nationality, and other sometimes questionable criteria. The story, characters, and underlying pushing of what we mean by gender, kept me involved in the story—as did the extensive use of virtual reality by the characters. (Recommended by Rebecca J. Holden)

2023: The Water Outlaws by S.L Huang

The Water Outlaws is a reimagining of the Chinese classic Water Margin, set in an imperial China-inspired fantasy world that interrogates the rigidity of gender norms and their deep entanglement with hierarchical and oppressive systems. The story follows Lin Chong, a disciplined and loyal arms instructor in the Empire’s army, whose faith in the system is shattered when she is punished for rejecting the obsession of a powerful man. Cast out and branded a criminal, she joins a band of rebels who are fighting not only against the Emperor’s corruption but also against the very structures that define justice, power, and identity. These outlaws are a morally complex and diverse group, many of whom live openly as queer, trans, or gender-nonconforming individuals. Huang presents their identities not as anomalies but as acts of resistance- living freely outside the Emperor’s binary rules becomes a political and personal rebellion. The novel illustrates how punishing difference is a deliberate strategy to suppress freedom and maintain elite control, compelling readers to reflect on the continued policing of queerness and gender in modern systems. While rooted in historical fantasy, The Water Outlaws resonated powerfully in the present, prompting us to not feel secure in a time when elite control continues to try and claw back control. (Recommended by Eleyna Haroun)

2022: “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” by John Chu

This novelette offers a splendid examination of queer masculinities, with so much richness of detail about everything from weightlifting to the life of a working actor in musical theater. It also goes deep into examining being Asian American at a time of increased racism in the US. Finally, it’s also a superhero story that engages with the roots of the genre in anti-racism and at the same time, is also strikingly contemporary in the way it is being told; we’re not retreading well-trodden ground, but rather seeing something familiar with fresh eyes. John Chu provides a masterclass in fitting so much into a small space without making the story feel overcrowded — everything flows together and will stay with you for a long time. (Recommended by Bogi Takács)

2023: A Feast for Flies by Leigh Harlen

This is a novella that shows not only queerness but queer communities in a way that feels true to life: it’s not just the queer bar, but also the queer hairdresser, and all the fine details about how one chooses to present and why. It also focuses on not just queer, but specifically disabled queer lives with a carefully considered interior perspective even when the approach is SFnal. Have you wanted a disability-informed take on psychic powers? You get that here. Have you wanted a story where a service animal is an integral part of the telling? You get that too. We also see a situation where one is in a marginalized position and yet enforcing the will of an oppressor, and the protagonist’s attempts to get out of it while staying true to herself — I am always looking for this theme, and here it is done with great care and depth. Finally, A Feast for Flies is also a crackling, twisty noir tale that satisfied my need for adventure and conspiracy. (Recommended by Bogi Takács)

Thanks to all the people who nominated works for 2022 and for 2023, and who contributed to this series of informal recommendations blog posts. Please enjoy!

As we mentioned last month: The Otherwise Award had a hiatus a few years ago, then restarted last year. So we didn’t convene juries to celebrate works published in 2022 and 2023.

We don’t currently plan to give out Otherwise Awards for those years, but we would still like to spotlight gender-expanding genre fiction you may appreciate, and to encourage and celebrate people who created noteworthy work.

So, to help with this, we’ve invited some friends of Otherwise to recommend genre work they loved from those years. We are sharing those recommendations in a series of blog posts. The first was in August, and here’s the next batch!

2022: Squire by Nadia Shammas and Sara Alfageeh

I first encountered Squire by Nadia Shammas and Sara Alfageeh while planning for my undergraduate course ENG 2310: Contemporary Fantasy of Color at Ohio University (it ran in Spring 2024). The course is framed by Nnedi Okorafor’s essay “Organic Fantasy,” which argues that the genre of fantasy has often privileged a very narrow set of identities, worlds, cultures, and experiences. Therefore, my class would explore a range of fantasy literature, film, scholarship, even everyday practices to address the ways writers, artists, and academics of color have reimagined, repurposed, and reclaimed the genre in order to explore the realities of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other identities and embodiments. Squire proved to be both a pleasure and a surprise. It is a YA graphic novel set in an alternate history Middle East and tells the story of Aiza, a young woman training to become a Knight of the Bayt-Sajji Empire. Aiza dreams of becoming a hero, like the tales of old, and more importantly, a full citizen of the Empire; she must hide her status as a member of the Ornu people, who are oppressed and treated as second-class members of society. The graphic novel plays with and rewrites the “privileged” tropes, ideals, and values of “traditional” fantasy–knights in shining armor, princesses in a castle, who gets to be the hero, what parts of the world are othered and villainized—much needed interventions by Shammas, a Palestinian American writer, and Alfageeh, a Jordanian American illustrator. Squire is thoughtfully written and beautifully illustrated, centering non-Western characters, identities, bodies, architectures, cultures, and histories. On the surface, the graphic novel offers interesting characters, sweeping vistas, and epic worldbuilding, but simmering just below the surface, its narrative questions and critiques gender norms, personhood, belonging, war, colonization, friendship, and family. For Aiza, it turns out, the fantasy and magic are much more than just a coming-of-age, rags-to-riches, squire to Knight, good versus evil story. (Recommendation by Edmond Y. Chang)

2023: Golden Cobra Challenge 2023 Winners

My shoutout for 2023 is the Golden Cobra Challenge and the winners and honorees for the year. The Golden Cobra Challenge is a “a friendly contest open to anyone interested in writing and playing freeform larp.” Freeform larps or live-action role-playing are often small, short, games that foreground character-driven narratives, player interaction, and personal or social situations with minimal rules, mechanics, props, or other structures. The Challenge grew out of Metatopia, a convention for gaming industry professionals (held annually in Morristown, New Jersey), and was created to encourage new, independent, unsung, and emerging designers to showcase their work. In fact, diversity, inclusivity, and intersectionality are goals of the challenge, and the games selected by a panel of peers often engage with and unpack race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, nature, technology, history, and futurity as well as form, genre, narrative, gameplay, and worldbuilding. Many of the games draw on fantasy, science fiction, horror, magical realism, alternative history, and other speculative genres; unlike traditional or mainstream gaming, many of the designers represent diverse backgrounds, identities, embodiments, communities, and places of origin. Highlights from the 2023 winners include At the Doll Café by Carly Kocurek, a game about dolls at a tea party, which won “Most Brilliant Commentary or Critique” for its existential examination of gender, self-image, bodies, and agency with questions like “Would anyone care about me, if I was no longer beautiful?” or “If no child loves me, do I matter at all?” or “Do I have free will?”; Benediction by Laura op de Beke, which earned “Game That Made Us Cry the Most,” and according to the jurors is about “a group of medieval nuns await the arrival of a holy man set to change all their lives. It’s an intensely focused, well-researched, and emotionally heavy game about women given the chance to be introspective about their roles, their God, their fears and their desire”; and even my little game–called The Secret Lives of Junk(kin) Drawers, which is about household spirits that collect, trade, and reminisce about items that humans seemingly have forgotten–subtlety explores domesticity, kitchens, home, family, and the low-key fetishization and/or vituperation of Japanese professional organizer Marie Kondo; the game earned an Honorable Mention for being a “cute, prosocial game.” Each year offers up different ideas, problems, issues, solutions, and hopes. All of the games are open access. The Golden Cobra Challenge exemplifies the critical potential and inclusive generosity of indie games. (Recommendation by Edmond Y. Chang)

2022: The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg

As much as I would love to discuss my own debut which released in 2022 and involves explorations of gender-affirming care in a transnormative secondary world, I’d be remiss not to point to someone else also published by Tachyon that year: R.B. Lemberg and their debut novel The Unbalancing. Set in their Birdverse, The Unbalancing expands on a poem Lemberg published in Strange Horizons, “Ranra’s Unbalancing” (read after the book unless you want spoilers!), exploring the relationship between a nonbinary, autistic poet (whose understanding of their own gender changes throughout the novel) and their community’s new starkeeper (who literally keeps the stars in balance), all while facing the reality of an impending apocalypse. The Unbalancing is a gentle book; as one character is actively exploring their gender, we glimpse another corner in Lemberg’s multiplicitous Birdverse, one where queerness is embraced rather than ostracized (as in The Four Profound Weaves), and one where each character’s understanding of themself ultimately triumphs over what others would seek to make of them. (Recommendation by Naseem Jamnia)

2022: Mage of Fools by Eugen Bacon

“The bones of the ancestors pop with metamorphic hymns of water that is ruler and land that is slave, as people degenerate into crustaceans.” Eugen Bacon’s Mage of Fools is an extraordinary Afrofuturistic dystopian novel that—as multi-award-winning author Jeffrey Ford puts it—is “a techno/folklore blend with a resourceful mother at its heart.” The writing is bold and poetic, lush and vivid in its characterizations and themes of climate change, socialism, free will and the spirit of humanity in the face of atrocity. In the dystopian world of Mafinga (a made-up country borrowed from the East African Republic of Tanzania), our protagonist Jasmin must contend with a dictator’s sorcerer to cleanse the socialist state of its deadly pollution. The novel heroes strong women and the power of storytelling. It’s about hopes and dreams, country, liberty and belonging, as a secret story machine tells of fate, love and promise, charted by bold authors and their indelible scripts. (Recommendation by Eugen Bacon)

2023: “The Way of Baa’gh” by Cheryl S. Ntumy, in Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology

“Red is a sign of decay.” Cheryl S. Ntumy’s “The Way of Baa’gh” has one of the most impactful opening lines. This science fiction / dark fantasy short story, in first person and characterized from the perspective of a nonhumanoid, is set in the Afrocentric Sauútiverse—a federation of planets that draws from real-life languages, cultural practices, rituals and beliefs, settling on the power of rich and complex sound magic as the pivot for cross-genre storytelling. Ntumy draws from the uniqueness of the Sauútiverse use of song and sound magic to engage with difference in themes of imprisonment and sacrifice for a bigger cause. We encounter our protagonist SS’ku in the ceremony of Tor-Tor where ritualistic cannibalism happens in a cycle of living. (Recommendation by Eugen Bacon)

More recommendations to come!