I've always been a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, but lately, I've been moving further back in time to find reading material that I'm more likely to enjoy. Even though as a lesbian, I should glad that there's more queer fiction to choose from, most of the time LGBTQ themes in SFF ruin the story rather than add to it or exist without any big fanfare.

Every time I find a book that has a great concept, it's very quickly ruined by a half-baked 'sapphic romance' or 'polycule' or a gaggle of token TQs and woke oddities (see Rivers of Teeth). Most of the time, the authors are some flavour of queer women, but rarely use a concrete terms. I've almost made a game of it, looking at a list of upcoming titles and seeing how many have some kind of shoehorned 'queer content'. Seriously, there's a new Joan of Arc inspired sci-fi book, and would you guess the main character is NB, with the character's pronouns in brackets in the first fucking sentence of the summary.

So I ask you ladies of Bookvarit, are you having to read older SFF novels to avoid this sort of nonsense ruining an otherwise decent book, and if so, are there any especially egregious examples you have come across? That being said, what are some newer books you've read that escaped the SFF woke takeover's clutches mostly unscathed?