Best Gay Sci-Fi / Futuristic (1° place): Dark Sun by M. J. O’Shea
Dark Sun is a little too sexy to be considered a Young Adult story, but if not for that, the feeling was really “young” and with a Romeo and Jules’s theme (after all, Romeo and Juliet were teenagers…).
Orion and Lynx are respectively, heir and second son of the most important triads in the city, Phoenix and Dragon. To an outsider they are pampered princes, with all the money and the chances in their pocket. In this post-apocalypse Seattle, the city is divided in three level, Cloud Level, Midtown and Bottom City, and you move from one level to the other through lifts. Of course Cloud level is the most near the sky, but nevertheless there is no natural light, a cloud of pollution is obscuring the sun, and people are living in constant artificial life, if they can afford it, or in perennial shadow, like in the Bottom City.
Supposedly Lynx is an enforcer, trained to be a warrior, but nor him or Orion have the right looks, on the contrary, from what I gather from the author’s description, they are both pretty and young boys, and maybe this adds to the feeling of being reading a Young Adult story, it was really like Orion and Lynx were fighting both against society than their own families; true, Orion in particular is doing good to the poor people of Bottom City, but both for him and especially for Lynx, there is a huge component of rebelling against their parents, and there was a little of bratty behaviour in them.
As the characters felt “young” so was the story, it was mostly like some sort of video-game, with the games culminating in the destruction of a target the heroes spent most of the novel trying to find through pieces of info here and there; and like in a video-game, I have never felt the heroes to be really in danger, like they had in any case some spare life to use.
I’m not usually a huge fan of urban fantasy, the gothic and dark atmosphere is sometime too heavy for my taste, but Dark Sun was not heavy at all, and that is a bonus from my point of view.
http://www.loose-id.com/Dark-Sun.aspx
Amazon Kindle: Dark Sun
Publisher: Loose Id LLC (July 5, 2011)
Reading List: http://www.librarything.com/catalog_bottom.php?tag=reading list&view=elisa.rolle
Cover Art by Anne Cain