Al Hess
Al Hess is an American author of science fiction and fantasy whose work centres LGBTQ+ characters — particularly transgender and non-binary protagonists — in genre narratives that prioritise warmth, humour, and emotional authenticity. He lives in Utah and writes fiction that draws on his own experience as a transgender man to create stories that feel genuinely lived-in rather than representationally schematic. His work has found a devoted readership among readers who want queer science fiction that is joyful and entertaining as well as meaningful.
Key Lime Sky (2022), available on WritersReview, is his debut novel and is a science fiction story set in a small Utah town that is suddenly visited by mysterious alien phenomenon — lights in the sky, strange occurrences, reality behaving oddly. The protagonist is a transgender man navigating both the alien crisis and the ordinary difficulties of his life in a community that doesn’t always understand him. The novel has been praised for the warmth and specificity of its characterisation, for its genuinely funny moments, and for the way it centres the protagonist’s gender identity as a natural and integral part of who he is rather than as the defining fact around which everything else orbits. This is queer fiction that treats queerness as a given rather than a problem to be solved, and the effect is both liberating and moving.
Hess’s work belongs to the “cosy” end of science fiction — it prioritises emotional safety, human connection, and the possibility of community alongside its genre elements — and it demonstrates that the cosy mode is not merely an aesthetic choice but an ethical one: a decision about whose experiences deserve to be rendered safe, warm, and worthy of a happy ending. In a genre that has often excluded or marginalised queer experience, this is not a trivial choice.
He represents a generation of LGBTQ+ authors who are building careers in genre fiction by writing stories they needed as young readers and didn’t find — stories in which people like them are protagonists rather than sidekicks, heroes rather than cautionary tales, and in which their identities are sources of strength, complexity, and joy rather than merely of suffering. His work is a welcome and well-crafted contribution to an expanding tradition of queer speculative fiction.