Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, published in 2015, is not only a novel, it’s the beginning of a trilogy. As such, it has the epic scope we expect of longer narratives: it spans countries and civilizations, oracles and ages. Large as life, it depicts horrific disasters on a global scale, and hints at human rights abuses to match. But at a certain point, a revivifying lull in its grim action, it brings together three major characters in a joyful male/female/male ménage à trois. At first awkward and unlooked for, (“‘So you have decided to share?’…She blinks as the words register. ‘Uh?’”) the relationship eventually becomes a source of solid comfort and stability for the witch, wizard, and pirate chief who enter into it. For as long as it lasts.

My next recommendation is a bit of a cheat, because it’s a short story rather than a novel. First published in 2013 and reprinted in 2015’s Stories for Chip, “Légendaire” by Kai Ashante Wilson features polyamory as a given, background to a fantastic tale of love and loss and imperious artistic destiny. “When she lies down with her husband or with her wife,” Wilson writes in the story’s fifth paragraph, matter-of-factly introducing us to the group marriage out of which his hero’s born. A few lines later he adds, so there’s no mistaking what’s meant, “Her wife and husband have long since gone to bed.” Such arrangements are not the focus of “«Légendaire.»” but its armature. In this case, the mundanity of multiply-partnered love is balm to my oversensitized, underprivileged heart.

To atone for choosing a short work I’ll recommend a second, bonus story by the same author, from 2014. In “The Devil in America”, Hazel Mae, mother of protagonist Easter, battles off the warped obscenities of an adversary accusing her of promiscuity, the vice most commonly–and mistakenly–associated with the polyamory she has secretly practiced.

Octavia E. Butler’s last novel, Fledgling, was also ostensibly lighter fare, at least according to the author: a vampire story. Of course it’s something more, because of Butler’s inevitable engagement with problems with gender roles, racial representation, and hierarchy. Heroine Shori Matthews spends the bulk of the book carefully constructing a polyamorous family for her own protection and nourishment. Trading sex and pleasure and improvements to their immune systems for humans’ blood, Shori takes male and female symbionts into her fold. Lots and lots of them—a mentor advises her that eight is a good number of symbionts, and that she should let any jealousies work themselves out without interference. On top of that, her species, which is called the Ina, mate with other Ina in groups, and they live communal yet sex-segregated lives. I so wish Butler had lived to write this 2005 book’s sequels.

Tales of Nevèrӱon contains one of my favorite polyamorous situations. Obviously thumbing his authorial nose at traditional anthropology’s tendency to reframe other cultures’ practices within its own values, Delany writes of the polygamous Rulvyn from a feminist viewpoint. Among these mountain people, the sage Venn explains, “a strong woman married a prestigious hunter; then another strong woman would join them in marriage—frequently her friend—and the family would grow.” Reversing the conventional interpretation of polygamy’s power dynamic while keeping numbers and gender identical, Delany calls familiar readings of such relationships into question. Yet the brief passage on Rulvyn mores is only one of the many neat tricks he pulls off in this stunning 1979 fantasy, which on its surface is simply another book in the sword-and-sorcery subgenre.

"Up the Long Ladder" - season 2, episode 8, after saving approximately 200 people from a threathened colony as well as helping another colony of people that had been cloning themselves, the solution to saving the cloned group was to integrate the 2 groups.

Dr. Pulaski then notes that the Bringloidi will also have to change. To encourage genetic diversity, polyandry will be permitted and encouraged for several generations; every woman in the colony will be allowed three spouses.

Featuring a bigger and better USS Enterprise, this series is set 78 years after the original series -- in the 24th century. Instead of Capt. James Kirk, a less volatile and more mature Capt. Jean-Luc Picard heads the crew of various humans and alien creatures in their adventures in space -- the final frontier.

The Doctor on the Enterprise, Dr Phlox is a native of Denobula Triaxa.

Denobulans are typically polyamorous, where a man typically has three wives, who each has three husbands. This creates extremely large extended families.

Denobulan families are large and complex; the family of Phlox, a typical member of the culture, had 720 members, with 42 romantic partnerships. An individual usually aims to acquire three spouses, each of whom will themselves have three other mates. Other combinations are not unknown, but tend to be frowned upon by mainstream Denobulan society.

Set early in the 22nd century, 150 years before James T. Kirk helmed the famous starship, this fifth installment of the "Star Trek" franchise explores the history of the intergalactic upheaval that eventually leads to the formation of the Federation.

Group marriage is portrayed as a perfectly normal, if atypical, lifestyle choice on Caprica, at least among Athenian devotees and clergy. Homosexuality, gay marriage, and adoption by same sex couples are all depicted as a normal and seemingly non-controversial part of Colonial culture.

One of the main characters, Sister Clarice Willow is in a group marriage with at least four husbands and three wives.

Two families, the Graystones and the Adamas, live together on a peaceful planet known as Caprica, where a startling breakthrough in artificial intelligence brings about unforeseen consequences. A spin-off of the Sci Fi Channel series "Battlestar Galactica" set 50 years prior to the events of that show.

NAME: Valentine Michael smith

ANCESTRY: Human
ORIGIN: Mars

Valentine Michael Smith is a human being raised on Mars, newly returned to Earth. Among his people for the first time, he struggles to understand the social mores and prejudices of human nature that are so alien to him, while teaching them his own fundamental beliefs in grokking, watersharing, and love.

Warning: This book contains lot's of grokking

Maureen Johnson, the somewhat irregular mother of Lazarus Long, wakes up in bed with a man and a cat. The cat is Pixel, well-known to fans of The Cat Who Walks through Walls. The man is a stranger to her, and besides that, he is dead . . .

So begins Robert A. Heinlein's, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Filled with the master's most beloved characters, this compelling work broadens and enriches his epic visions of time and space, life and death, love and desire. It is also an autobiographical masterpiece -

and a wondrous return to the alternate universes that all Heinlein fans have come to know and love...

The Old Gods have risen and moved on, leaving Earth in ruins.
Leon liked that just fine.
He got along better after the collapse of society, and has his own vision for how things should be run: with him in charge of his own fate, with many lovers beneath him.
Yet when he has a run-in with a beautiful and mysterious woman, his life will never be the same.