There’s a moment in almost every great sci-fi or fantasy story where it happens. The ragtag group of misfits (the ones who bickered for two hundred pages, who had every reason to walk away from each other) realizes they’d burn down the world for one another. And every single time, no matter how many books I’ve read, it gets me.
That’s the found family trope, and it might be the most beloved trope in all of sci-fi and fantasy. Not the chosen one. Not enemies-to-lovers. This one: the family you build when the one you were born into is gone, or broken, or was never really yours to begin with.
Why does it hit so hard? I think it’s because it’s the trope that’s secretly about hope. Blood family is luck. Found family in sci-fi and fantasy tends to hit hard. It is proof that belonging is something you can find or build no matter how alone you start. Here are five books that do it best, plus where my own stories fit in, if you’ll have me.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: Becky Chambers
The modern flagship of the found family in sci-fi trope. A patchwork crew, human, alien, and AI, aboard a wormhole-tunneling ship takes on a long, dangerous job, and the plot is almost beside the point. The real story is how they cook for each other, get on each other’s nerves, and slowly become the kind of family that shows up. If someone asks you what “found family in space” means, you hand them this book.
Six of Crows: Leigh Bardugo
Found family with knives. Six criminals: a thief with a broken past, a sharpshooter with a gambling problem, a spy called the Wraith take on an impossible heist, and somewhere between the double-crosses they become the only people who have ever truly seen each other. It’s the beloved answer to a great question: what if your found family was also deeply dysfunctional and extremely armed? Over a million readers have it shelved for a reason.
The House in the Cerulean Sea: T.J. Klune
The warm-blanket version. A by-the-book government caseworker is sent to evaluate an island orphanage housing six “dangerous” magical children — a gnome, a wyvern, a were-Pomeranian, and, yes, the literal Antichrist — and instead finds the family he never let himself want, plus a gentle love story with the man who protects them. It’s about discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place and realizing that family is yours. Bring tissues.
All Systems Red: Martha Wells
The reluctant version — and maybe the funniest. Murderbot is a security android that hacked its own governor module and would like nothing more than to be left alone with its soap operas. Instead, its assigned humans keep almost dying, and it keeps saving them, and somewhere along the way “my clients” becomes something it refuses to name. Found family for everyone who insists they don’t need one. (We see you, Murderbot. We see you.)
Legends & Lattes : Travis Baldree
An orc barbarian hangs up her sword to open a coffee shop, and the family assembles one hire at a time — a succubus barista, a ratkin baker, a regular who won’t leave. Low stakes, high warmth. It’s the trope distilled to its purest form: build a place where people belong, and the people will come.
Where my books live in all this
If you’ve read this far, you can probably guess this found family in sci-fi trope thing is personal for me…it’s load-bearing in both of my worlds.
In The Last Wolf, Kat Borisyuk is the last of her kind. She is a wolf shifter with no pack left to claim her. The family she pieces together instead, from her aunt’s strange little taxidermy shop in New York to the friends she finds at a hidden academy in Central Park, is the beating heart of the Moonshifter Academy series. Being the last wolf is the premise; refusing to stay alone is the story.
And in Eden’s Maze, out now, Griffin loses the person he trusted most and finds unexpected kinship with Zenith, a captive stranger who wears his exact face. It’s an adult gay sci-fi adventure where big ideas, found family, and a love story that matters all share the page. When everything about where you come from is a lie, the people you choose are the only truth you get.
Because that’s the whole trope, isn’t it? Family isn’t who made you. It’s who stays.
Happy reading, MSK
Who’s your all-time favorite found family…in books, shows, anywhere? Tell me in the comments. Bonus points if it’s a crew that argues constantly and would still die for each other.
Recent Comments