In terms of writing style, I love Mary Shelley and Jane Austen—I like the cadence of tone of 19th-century language, the different way of storytelling in that era vs. the way novels are now. In terms of world building and how it’s revealed to the reader, I love Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler. In terms of dragon stuff, I love Anne McCaffrey and Naomi Novik. In terms of message and philosophy (and also worldbuilding), I love Terry Pratchett.

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath got a lot of attention, including winning you the Astounding and Lodestar awards! You also published a book in 2020 but I suspect you’ve been writing since before then. In fact, your publisher bio says you’ve been writing since age twelve, but writing is not the same as “trying to get published.” Tell us a bit about your journey in publishing. Have there been highs and lows; have there been frustrations and struggles; or has it been pretty smooth sailing, as soon as you decided to try to get work published?

For me it’s been pretty smooth sailing; I spent a lot of time finding the right fit for an agency and fielded a lot of rejections during that process, but I expected that and wasn’t put off by the time and effort it took. Once I’d found them (shout-out to Prentis Literary!) It was mostly waiting patiently on my part for my agency team to find a publisher. I’ve been studying the process of publishing since I was thirteen or fourteen, and I’ve published short stories, but To Shape a Dragon’s Breath was my first traditionally published work with a print run.

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath came out in 2023, and book two of Nampeshiweisit,To Ride a Rising Storm, is scheduled to publish soon! What was the process of writing the second book like, especially as compared to book one?

Writing a sequel is definitely the biggest writing challenge I’ve ever set for myself, and writing the third book of the trilogy is proving just as tricky—to the point that I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to write self-contained novels or not release the beginning of a series until the whole thing is entirely complete. Deadlines, as it turns out, make it way harder for me to get into flow state and make the writing process more difficult. Being unable to go back and change minor details like train and ferry schedules, or street names, or days of the week is far more of a hindrance than I’ve previously considered with projects that are released entire. I’ve learned a lot from this process, primarily that I don’t want to do it like this again!

In your Locus interview you talked about doing research for creating your dragons, and being very deliberate about creating dragons that were different from the way dragons are often depicted. Are there things about To Shape a Dragon’s Breath that people don’t seem to notice as much that you’d love for them to see; or that have been misinterpreted or misunderstood; or just things that you would otherwise like folks to know?

I want people to take from this book whatever they want to take from it; I largely stay out of reviewer spaces because those are for readers, not authors. Of people who’ve approached me directly to talk about my work, I can’t say that there’s anything in particular that readers don’t seem to notice as much as I’d love for them to notice—I’m happy when people are excited about whatever particular details excite them. Also, I love fan art, even when it doesn’t match the image that I have in my head.

How would you describe the main character, Anequs—what is she like, what do you love most about her, and where does her journey go in To Ride a Rising Storm?

Anequs is very grounded in her identity and culture; she’s curious, driven, and stubborn. She’s resistant to Anglish attempts to “civilize” her because she knows that there is nothing wrong with her civilization (and is willing and able to point out things that are wrong in Anglish society). She’s dedicated to fairness and justice, and wants these things for everyone, not just for herself. She has low tolerance for anything that she considers nonsense, which has both good and bad aspects.

As to where her journey takes her, the answer is “into a lot of trouble” because evil always triumphs in the middle of the story (hat tip Rich Burlew for that line)—in To Ride a Rising Storm we see the impact that her year at school and increased scrutiny from Anglish colonizers has had on her community, and how the Anglish at large are responding to increased knowledge of the people on the islands. We see what it means to have people in power paying attention in a way that they weren’t before—people who have marked her people and her specifically as an enemy other who needs to be subdued or destroyed.

The Grimdark review of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath praises, among other things, your “fully realized” characters as well as the way they are utilized throughout the narrative. In terms of craft, what is your approach to developing characters, and how does this approach change or transform in To Ride a Rising Storm?

If a character is important enough to the narrative to get a name, that means that in my world they’re a whole person with their own experiences, thoughts, feelings, agendas, etc. I introduce characters to the story to fulfill narrative needs, and then determine what kind of person would do the kind of thing that I need them to do in the story—what would their life look like up to that point, what would have led them to the action they’re taking. This is my approach across all of my writing—it hasn’t changed between To Shape a Dragon’s Breath and To Ride a Rising Storm.

What, for you, is important or central about To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, and do the same things stand as central in To Ride a Rising Storm? Or does the conversation and heart of the story shift, and if so, in what direction?

The most central message of the Nampeshiweisit series is that different cultures have wildly different philosophies and ways of being in the world, and that my narrative centers the (northeast coastal woodland) Indigenous worldview/lifeway.

What is your relationship to fantasy as a genre like, what does fantasy do that is interesting or special, and how does this show up or weave through these books?

I’m a huge fan of speculative fiction, both fantasy and sci-fi—and I believe that there’s significant overlap between those genres; it’s not always easy to determine what’s fantasy and what’s sci-fi and what’s both. I like fiction that asks “what if,” both as a reader and as an author.

The Nampeshiweisit series is, like McCaffrey’s Pern books, firmly shelved as “fantasy” because it’s got dragons and magic in it, but I’d argue that it could (and in the 19th century among peers like Mary Shelley and Jules Verne) be classed as “science fiction”; as an author I certainly know all the scientific underpinnings of what’s happening, even though the characters do not because the scientific revolution in their world is only just starting. To quote Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—the characters cite magic quite often, but what is literally happening is very rooted in the laws of physics. Chemistry, in this world, has been misidentified as supernatural.

Moniquill Blackgoose is the bestselling author of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which has won both the Nebula and Lodestar Awards. She began writing science fiction and fantasy when she was twelve and hasn’t stopped writing since. She is an enrolled member of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe and a lineal descendant of Ousamequin Massasoit. She is an avid costumer and an active member of the steampunk community. She has blogged, essayed, and discussed extensively across many platforms the depictions of Indigenous and Indigenous-coded characters in sci-fi and fantasy.

Return to Issue #99

When I first heard about the We Will Rise Again anthology, somehow I immediately thought of Octavia’s Brood (edited by adrienne maree brown & Walidah Imarisha, AK Press 2015), Mothership (edited by Bill Campbell & Edward Austin Hall, Rosarium Publishing 2013), So Long Been Dreaming (edited by Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan, Arsenal Pulp 2004), and even books like Dark Matter (edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Warner Aspect 2001) and the too often overlooked or forgotten Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (edited by Grace L. Dillon, University of Arizona Press 2012).* Did you each have precursors – books, authors, or editors that were important or inspirational, or that you see as tied in some way to this anthology? Or was this book very independent of those kinds of connections?

Malka: Octavia’s Brood was also the first thing I thought of when Annalee and Karen told me the idea; we reached out to adrienne and Walidah immediately and told them about the project, and once we got close to completion we asked them for an interview, and it was an amazing and humbling conversation—they had so many insights in an off-the-cuff interview, we were really pleased to be able to include it in the book.

Karen: We are so indebted to Octavia’s Brood. Our interview with them is fittingly at the start of the book, helping us to lay the foundation for everything that comes after.

Annalee: Other than Octavia’s Brood, which has been a huge inspiration, I was thinking about the hopeful science fiction anthology Hieroglyph, which was put together by ASU. What I liked about Hieroglyph was that it was explicitly about trying to imagine ways of solving big problems like climate change and renewable energy. Each author was paired with a scientist who could help make their solutions plausible and maybe even do-able in real life. I wondered what it would be like to have an anthology where we took social science and activism as seriously as Hieroglyph took science. And that’s why I knew from the jump that we would need activists and community leaders involved in this project; their knowledge and wisdom is so valuable, and deeply important for our storytelling about protest and resistance.

I’m always fascinated by collaborations, because not everyone works well (or plays well) with others. Not only this, but even in the conceptualization stage, so often creatives think of a project as “theirs” as opposed to something they can create with someone else. How did this project come about, what was the initial inspiration or process for deciding to do it?

Karen: Malka hosted the Sparkle Salon podcast where I said something that inspired Annalee to put together the concept for the anthology. Annalee approached me to co-edit, and I immediately said yes. As the magnitude of the project became more evident, I suggested to Annalee that we invite Malka as a third editor, and then Malka joined us. Perfect circle! But I always say it’s primarily Annalee’s anthology because they were the key instigator.

Annalee: I always say it was our collective action that brought the anthology together! I am so grateful that Karen and Malka wanted to join me and make this book happen. Truly it would not exist without all our ideas and hard work.

Malka: I was so thrilled when Annalee and Karen asked me to join them, because the idea and project are amazing and also because I love working with them. I had always enjoyed our conversations during the Sparkle Salon, as well as whenever we met at events or on virtual panels. And, to address the broader question a bit: we all knew this would be a lot of work, and we would need each other, both for the actual getting-it-done bits, and for the moral and psychological support of doing something we all believed worthwhile. And it’s wonderful to work with other writers – not just the editors, the contributors, too. There was the project of making the book and there was the way it contributed to the ongoing project of community building. There’s so much we can’t control in the publishing industry, and connecting, respecting, uplifting each other is both important and often its own reward.

How did you work together—who did what, and did things go smoothly, or were there adjustments that had to be made along the way?

Karen: All three of us are busy people, and the project began during the waning years of the pandemic when we were all stretched a bit thin by incessant crisis. My approach from the start was to be brutally honest with my “noes” if I felt I couldn’t handle something, and also to enthusiastically volunteer when I knew I had the time and skills to do the task well (or at least adequately!). Annalee and Malka are fantastic to work with because they are both frighteningly competent and remarkably free of ego. It was easy to be completely open with them and work together to find solutions.

Malka: Our virtual meetings were such a balm that we would often stay on chatting long after getting done what we needed to get done, or even schedule catch-up meetings just to see each other’s faces. It made such a difference to the project—which, let’s be real, was a lot of work over a long period of time when we were all really busy with other things—that it was such a pleasure to work together.

Annalee: Yes to all of this. I feel like we started this project as friendly colleagues and now we’re friends who built something wonderful together—with the help of even more friends! Whenever I was feeling overwhelmed, Karen or Malka could step in and pick up the slack—and vice versa. Plus the authors and activist contributors kept my spirits up when times were grim.

What did you learn or discover, or what surprised you, if anything, in the process of putting this book together?

Karen: One of the themes embedded in the anthology is that although art may be a response to suffering, art does not have to arise from suffering. Many of us had ongoing challenges in our lives, and of course the world was constantly demonstrating fresh horrors. But the process of putting the book together was so rewarding, even when it was hard work, that it felt like the opposite of suffering. There was joy. There was love. It didn’t surprise me exactly, because I always felt that was possible. But I needed the confirmation. I get angry at people who make it hard for creatives to create because they truly believe in the suffering artist myth, or just use it as a lazy excuse to be unkind to people.

Malka: Very much agree. It was really eye-opening to talk to the activists and hear from them about history and context that I didn’t know, and especially hope. I think a lot these days about the US war on Iraq and how there were these huge demonstrations and marches against that aggression, and I had, perhaps without overly analyzing, become somewhat cynical about what I saw as a lack of impact from that, so it was incredible to hear L. A. Kauffman, one of the organizers, talk about the long game, the other impacts we didn’t see, the way it connected people, what was learned from the action. It was very powerful to hear from her and the other activists who spoke to us about how they keep their hope up even as the tides of oppression rise and fall.

Annalee: I think the most surprising thing of all was that a big publisher picked it up and gave us enough of an advance that we could pay all our contributors professional rates, and pay ourselves as editors, too. I never thought that would happen. Having the Saga team behind us, and our incredible editor Sareena Kamath—it’s amazing. This isn’t usually the kind of book that gets institutional support from one of the Big Five. I feel unbelievably lucky.

What were the biggest challenges to making this book happen—whether in collaboration or publishing or gathering materials or something else—and how did you deal with those challenges?

Karen: I’m not sure if this counts as a challenge exactly, but I genuinely wasn’t sure who was going to publish it. I mean, that was a challenge for the agents, not for me, but still! A big book of stories, essays, and interviews. Why didn’t we try to keep it simple? What category will this be eligible for when it comes to awards? Anthology? Related work? But we knew what we wanted it to be, and we didn’t compromise.

Malka: An important challenge, and maybe a good lesson too if I can overlap with the previous question, was keeping up the momentum and the process even when it wasn’t at all clear that the book would ever get written or published. We weren’t sure at the beginning if we would find a grant to get started, or do crowdfunding, or manage to get a traditional publisher. There was a long period after we solicited stories of waiting to see what we would get, knowing some people would have to drop out of the project for whatever reason. We managed to do this virtual conference, with support from Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination (where I work part time) to get the potential writers together with activists, and we knew we were asking people to put time in with very little guarantee of what it would come to. As long-form authors we are, I think, all at least somewhat comfortable with the idea of incremental progress on big projects without knowing what they’ll look like at the end or whether anyone else will read them, but doing it collectively was a good reminder of the sort of faith and determination that it takes to keep moving forward step by step.

How were selections made, and were there pieces you had hoped to include which didn’t make it into the final book for one reason or another?

Karen: We expected and prepared for some writer attrition. We had a few authors who we’d hoped would have been able to contribute a story, but who ended up not being able to for the usual reasons (time, muse, etc.). However, out of the submitted pieces, none were rejected. Perhaps we curated our author list extremely well (of course!). But there were other factors. Requiring writers to have first-hand knowledge, or else talk to real-life activists with that knowledge. Having the virtual conference with presentations from movement leaders. Maybe that preparation before writing made a difference.

You are all respected fiction writers, and readers may or may not know but you all are also respected nonfiction writers. How does having written and published fiction and nonfiction change or impact your perspective or process when it comes to selecting pieces for an anthology like this?

Annalee: I think all of us agreed from the beginning that this was going to be a book that is heavily informed by real-world experience. But we didn’t want to give readers simple allegorical stories, or facile “this is the future of X political movement from the real world.” We wanted to demystify the process of using our imaginations to solve real-world problems, to offer readers a roadmap so they could do this in their own lives. That’s why we have nonfiction and interviews alongside our fiction. The idea is to show readers how we can use our imaginations to engage with vital social issues, to change people’s minds, and to expand our own understanding of what’s possible. Our hope is that this book can be educational, a teaching tool for movement leaders and anyone else who seeks community and hope.

I apologize for this question, because I know it annoys and traumatizes a lot of people. However, we have finite space! And we can’t get into each entry in depth! So: each of you please pick one entry, whether an essay or piece of fiction or something else, and tell us a bit more about it, just to give readers a closer or more specific taste of what’s in store.

Annalee: I worked a lot with Abdullah Moaswas on his story “Kifaah and the Gospel,” which is about what happens to the Palestinian people after Israel relocates its citizens to a distant planet where they can rule unopposed. He submitted the story in late 2023, and many of the satirical details he’d included—like a weaponized AI called “Gospel,” and the deliberate erasure of Palestinian history online—began to come true as the genocide continued. As the war went on, and we started working on edits, what emerged out of the story was a profound and grounded sense of hope. Abdullah has written about the meaning of food in his academic work, and he incorporated that into the story, imagining how Palestinian people would cleanse the war-ravaged land by encouraging the growth of native plants used in Palestinian cooking. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to read this story about the survival of Palestine—especially the survival of Palestinian traditions and foodways—in this dark time. This story balances perfectly between wrathful satire and sincere hope.

Karen: I want to highlight “Other Wars Elsewhere” by R.B. Lemberg. It’s set in a Europe-inspired, contemporary fantasy world and it deals with something I understand well as someone from the Caribbean—the concept of crisis fatigue, the struggle of trying to help with big, collective crises that linger and multiply while also managing personal crises that may seem not as important as war and disaster, but may yet be as wearying, and even as deadly. Without giving spoilers, there’s also a poignant portrayal of how we need both help and magic to “knit up the raveled sleeve of care…” that is, to mend our trauma and heal ourselves for the next battle. My heart was deeply touched by this story: the concept, craft, and prose all sing together.

Malka: “Where Memory Meets the Sea” made me cry, it is so beautiful and powerful on what is lost in exile and the power and hope of community.

The tag line for We Will Rise Again is “Speculative stories and essays on protest, resistance, and hope.” Why did this specifically need to be a book of speculative works, what does speculative work do which perhaps is important or different from works we might not call “speculative”?

Karen: You need the speculative if you’re going to imagine a different world.

Annalee: Honestly, it’s as simple as that. Realism and news reporting will take you only so far. We need to start working together on new narratives, new ways of imagining community and justice. Speculative storytelling is a good start.

Malka: Yeah, all of this. Particularly for structural, paradigmatic change—we need to not just imagine along the spectra and variables we have, but imagine new shifts. Speculative thinking is vital for that—for being free to imagine things that other people will say is impossible – I’m not going to repeat the Le Guin quote, but that—and also, often, because setting a story in the far future or a fantasy world gives readers the distance to see their own situation differently.

You each have a lot of work out in the world. Tell us about one project of your own, separate from this book (short fiction, essay, book, whatever you like!) that you feel most relates to We Will Rise Again.

Karen: I’d choose Unraveling. Two questions lie at the core of the novel: how do you change an unjust city? how do you redeem an intolerant soul? The answer is: you have to build something new, and become someone new.

Annalee: I’d say probably my nonfiction book Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. I argue in that book that one way to deescalate psychological warfare and toxic narratives is by changing the subject and lifting up new stories. It’s sort of the opposite strategy of “debate me, bro.” That’s a dead end. True cultural transformation begins when we say, “Hey, listen to something else now. A tune we’ve never heard before. Maybe we can sing it together.”

Malka: I don’t know, the Centenal Cycle trilogy (starting with Infomocracy) is more overtly political, but it’s also with some exceptions largely focused on governance rather than activism and resistance, and my current series, the Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti (starting with The Mimicking of Known Successes) is also very much about imagining alternatives to the structures and trends of right now.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you as individuals or as a team, your work, or We Will Rise Again?

Annalee: The book comes out Dec. 2, and we’ll have an in-person launch of the book that evening at Booksmith in San Francisco, followed by several virtual events. We’ll have a full list of dates and links for those events very soon.

*Note: this is not by any means an exhaustive list of books that came to mind… but these are some cool books! Check them out if you haven’t, and then find more like them. : ) —Arley

Barbadian writer and editor Karen Lord is the author of Redemption in Indigo, which won the 2011 William L. Crawford Award and the 2012 Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Best Debut), and was nominated for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her other works include Unraveling, the second novel in the Redemption series, and The Best of All Possible Worlds, The Galaxy Game, and The Blue, Beautiful World (longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction) in the Cygnus Beta series. She also edited New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, and coedited We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope with Annalee Newitz and Malka Older.

Malka Older is a writer, sociologist, and aid worker. A faculty associate at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, she teaches on the humanitarian-development spectrum and on predictive fictions, and is an associate researcher at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations. She’s spoken at venues including SXSW, the Personal Democracy Forum, the FWD50 conference, and the Hamburg International Summer Festival on topics such as democracy, data, narrative disorder, and speculative resistance. Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes was named a best book by Library Journal; its sequel, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, was just published. Older’s sci-fi political thriller Infomocracy was named a book of the year by Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, and The Washington Post. She is also author of Null States and State Tectonics, the creator of Ninth Step Station, and lead writer for the licensed sequel to Orphan Black. She’s written opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Nation, and Foreign Policy.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of four novels: Automatic Noodle, The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. They are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Scientific American, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and Technology Review, among others. They are the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and have contributed to the public radio shows Science Friday, On the Media, KQED Forum, and Here and Now. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

Return to Issue #99

At this point you’ve published work at different lengths, from short fiction to novellas to novels. Have you found that some story lengths feel more comfortable for you, are some more challenging? Do you have a preferred format or mode, or do you enjoy each form equally?

On the whole, I love writing short fiction, novellas, and novels equally—it just depends on my mood at the moment. Trying to force something that’s meant to be a short story to be a full-length book, or vice versa, is agonizing. One of my friends recently called me an “ideas writer,” which I kind of pushed against at the time, but I think she was right, at least for my shorter fiction, which often springs from a “what if?” question. My longer work is more character-driven, because I have the space to really dig into the characters. 

Different story lengths are challenging in different ways. I typically write short story drafts in one to three days; the words just come rushing out of me, and then I revise over weeks or even years. Novels take me at least a year or two of struggling with several casts, settings, and plots to figure out what exactly the story is before getting to a draft I’m happy with. Novellas are sort of in between; I write some sections rapidly, and the connective tissue takes me much longer.

If readers unfamiliar with your shorter fiction were to give one story a read, what would you most want them to read, and why?

Oh, that’s a tricky question! I know this is cheating, but it depends on what the reader’s looking for. If it’s a reflective, moody story, then “Thin Ice.” If it’s a fun horror-tinged romp, then “The Sufficient Loss Protocol.”

Your latest book is The King Must Die, just out from Saga Press! This is a far-future world of swords and quarterstaffs, of monsters and feudal-ish hierarchies, of huts and palaces, as well as technological miracles. What do you see as some of the most important similarities and differences in vibe and/or story between this book and The Splinter in the Sky?

I don’t necessarily write “hard” science fiction, but I always like throwing in real science tidbits into my stories, and building worlds that—at least at first glance—seem technically scientifically possible. Nevertheless, I love science fantasy aesthetics. So both The Splinter in the Sky and The King Must Die have a lot of traditional fantasy elements. And then there’s my usual multicultural worldbuilding and very queer dramatis personae. 

As for differences… The King Must Die is a less serious book, or at least it takes itself less seriously. Both novels deal with difficult topics, but when I was writing my debut I felt that I had to include all my thoughts on colonialism and misogynoir because on some level, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get the chance to publish another book. Someone once described TSITS as my “tear apart the space empire with your bare hands” book, and to this day I think that just might be the best summary of it I’ve seen. TKMD, meanwhile, is my friendship book.

What was the initial inspiration for The King Must Die, and what were some of the major changes that happened through edits and development, as compared to the original vision?

TKMD is the book of my heart, as they say—I’ve been writing various versions of the same core story for the past eleven years: four unlikely friends go on a quest to kill a despot. Some of those stories were sprawling political thrillers; some were comedy-crammed adventures. TKMD combines all those elements, and is a lot more morally complex than the previous reincarnations. There’s more sci-fi stuff, since the first versions were fantasy stories heavily influenced by the anime I was inhaling as a kid: everything Studio Ghibli, especially Spirited Away; Noragami; Natsume Yuujinchou; and a dash of Kamisama Hajimemashita (Avatar: The Last Airbender was also a major inspiration, but it’s not anime, despite its major anime inspirations). TKMD is also more explicitly queer, and unlike the early stories, it’s coherent (I’m a pantser by nature, and continually wrote myself into plot holes).

What were some of the main challenges in writing this book, and were the challenges similar to those you faced with The Splinter in the Sky?

Even though TKMD is my third book, writing it was when I had my “sophomore slump.” There were long stretches of time when I couldn’t even look at the manuscript, let alone work on it. I had a real love-hate relationship with the book, because I was so anxious about how it would be received, as well as how to avoid the flaws of my first two books and repeat anything I did well previously. TSITS, in comparison, was almost easy to write. I was thinking about potential reception so much less than I do now. That’s the beauty of a debut novel, I think—they capture writers at their most daring, and therefore at their most vulnerable.

You have a background in science (biology and astrophysics), and The King Must Die does have science fictional grounding and conceits. At the same time, you’ve described the book as science fantasy, saying, “This story leans a little more toward the fantasy end of the science fantasy spectrum, but was very much shaped by research and coursework….” What does dipping into a fantasy-flavored modality allow you to do?

I just like science fantasy’s vibes. 

To give a better answer: in my brain, science fiction is cool and sleek, and fantasy is epic, dramatic, passionate. (Genres aren’t real, but that’s just what’s stuck in my head.) And when you mix sci-fi and fantasy, you get the best of both worlds.

What are one or two science fictional ideas in this book that you are really excited about, which you don’t mind sharing?

The ancestors of all the humans in the story were whisked off Earth by enigmatic, omnipotent aliens known as the Makers, who dumped everyone on a half-terraformed planet with a handful of murderous shapeshifting constructs called Accusers to enforce the Makers’ laws. I don’t go too deep into the Makers and Accusers, but I certainly liked writing about them, and there is a glimpse, at the beginning of the book, into the aliens’ perspective, with hints about their wildly destructive history. 

And then there’s the planet, Newearth. I knew I wanted to write about climate change, but I wanted to come at it from an angle I personally hadn’t seen before (of course, I’m sure many writers have done exactly what I did in the past). So in TKMD, impatient humans speed up the terraforming process so they can colonize their “gifted” world faster, and there are serious environmental and ecological consequences that eventually result in the human empire collapsing. And that’s where the book begins.

What can you tell us about the main characters, Fen and Alekhai? What do you love most about them, as well as their interplay through the narrative?

Fen is kind of a loser. She is the LVP (least valuable player) of the main squad, and the only reason she makes it as far as she does in the book is because she has great friends. She’s forced to work with Alekhai, a seemingly perfect chessmaster-esque character who’s been trained to manipulate people basically from the cradle, and Fen’s main skill seems to be “hitting people with a stick.” And she’s not even that good at it. She’s also a bit of a jerk. She has no place being the protagonist of an epic science fantasy tale—that would be Alekhai. I wish I could share my favorite things about him, but sadly, we’d have to venture into serious spoiler territory for that. But what I can say is that I love Fen and Alekhai’s relationship arc. TKMD is an enemies-to-besties story. I wanted to give the characters’ growing bond the level of time and care that’s typically afforded to a romance, and I think I did that. I’m really proud of how that part of the book turned out.

What is the heart of the story for The King Must Die? What is this book ultimately about for you?

The King Must Die is a story about: 

• Complicated people trying to do what’s right, even when everything is going horribly wrong.
• How hidden wounds fester when you pretend they don’t need healing – or worse, that they don’t exist. 
• Learning how to believe in something again – in yourself, in other people, in a cause, in anything.
• Trusting people even when they’ve betrayed you. 
• Letting yourself be vulnerable. 
• What happens after you’ve lost. 
• And it’s about friendship.

Being a best-selling author, having won and been nominated for awards, even landing on the Locus Recommended Reading List, what has been the impact of these kinds of milestones? Do they energize you, do they create a sense of pressure and anxiety, or do they do something completely different for you?

I feel very fortunate. And kind of weird about it! There’s definitely a level of imposter syndrome; I still think of myself as more of an “author” than an author. My feelings about awards, bestseller lists, etc. have also changed a lot since I started writing professionally. I’m far from the first to say it: publishing is not a meritocracy. I’m grateful for everything, of course, but I feel that all this stuff is 10% hard work, 90% luck and other forces beyond our control, and – critically – the often invisible and underappreciated efforts of other people. I have a great agent and great editors. Sydney Morris at Saga Press was my publicist for the hardcover edition of The Splinter in the Sky, and she was incredible. Sometimes these things bring lovely interactions – winning the Compton Crook led to a few glorious days of hanging out with the Baltimore Science Fiction Society at Balticon. I met quite a few BSFS members and they’re freaking awesome. And I’m not just saying that because they gave me a shiny plaque. They’re fellow nerds! I made new friends I hope I’ll stay in touch with forever.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about The King Must Die or you or your work in general?

I think of all of my stories as love stories—even though they’re primarily non-romantic. If you’re looking for a science fantasy standalone centered around friendship, then The King Must Die is for you.

(On a related note—whenever I pitch my work, it feels like I’m asking readers to go on a little quest with me. I don’t know if they’ll like it, or if they’ll get what they wanted at the end, but I do hope they find the journey interesting and entertaining. So I guess this is me asking readers to trust me for a couple hours.)

As for myself, I asked one of my roommates about this, and she said more people should know I’m “goofy ahh.” This is true, and I’m proud of it. I’ve had people tell me on several occasions that they were worried I was going to be really intense, like some sort of extremely Type A workaholic, but frankly that’s not me. I went to clown camp, y’know?

#

Kemi Ashing-Giwa is an author and scientist-in-training. Her work includes the Compton Crook Award-winning novel The Splinter in the Sky, the novella This World Is Not Yours, and the forthcoming novel The King Must Die. Her short fiction, which has been nominated for an Ignyte Award and featured on the Locus Recommended Reading List, has been reprinted in collections including Some of the Best from Tor.com: 15th Anniversary Edition and The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time. She is now pursuing a PhD in the Earth & Planetary Sciences department at Stanford.

Return to Issue #99

Tananarive Due

What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?

Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred strikes me more as fantasy than horror because the time travel in that novel is based on magic (unexplained magic at that) rather than physics as we understand it. Other than that, my favorite form of fantasy storytelling is definitely horror, and some of my favorite recent horror novels have been The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, The Fervor by Alma Katsu, and a novelette by Kai Ashante Wilson called The Devil in America. The latter two are historical, which also reveals one of my favorite uses of fantasy – inserting ritual/spells of “magic” in the past to explain a phenomenon that is hard to accept in realistic terms, i.e. mass racial attacks on Black communities, as in The Devil in America.

For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?

The idea of “magic” has always intrigued me, so that’s why many of my favorite fantasy novels delve into horror – not just the introduction of magic, but the cost of it, the dangers of abusing it, and the unintended results when a magical wish comes true. My novel in progress, Bear Creek Lodge, is really all about the unintended consequences of a wish coming true.

What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in The Reformatory, or other titles?

I’ll expand a bit on this idea of reimagining history, which has become one of my favorite uses of Fantasy (through magic, not necessarily just alternate history, which is considered science fiction). When I wrote The Reformatory, I wanted to create a better ending for my great-uncle, Robert Stephens, who died at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, FL in 1937. I also wanted to use the trope of ghosts, which readers usually find scary, to reimagine ghost manifestations that might be healing as well as horrifying.

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award­–winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and an episode for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone for Paramount Plus and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). Learn more at TananariveDue.com.

Yael Goldstein-Love

What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?

I’m not sure whether it counts as Fantasy, but I reread Orlando by Virginia Woolf every five years or so. I don’t mean to do this, it’s not like a timed regimen, but it happens that way. I think it has to do with the book’s blend of humor and gravity, the way it plays with what it means to live in a gendered body in a way that is at once total silly fun and brilliant analysis, and how the play and the profundity cannot come apart, not at all. Reading it always reminds me what the point of fiction is for me, although there is no way I could put in words what that is.

More recently I picked up The Fixed Stars by Brian Conn and it had a similar effect on me. It’s a very strange and wonderful book about – maybe? – disease, vampires, the joys and horrors of embodiment, and what is actually possible within a human society. But the way the language and imagery arise out the story, so that it almost seems like a new language is being written in which to render this book page by page, made me feel very alive and excited to write again at a time when I was struggling to remember why I devote so much of myself to making things up.

Kindred by Octavia Butler is another book that means a lot to me, for not dissimilar reasons. I remember reading it at maybe fourteen or fifteen and suddenly being struck with the realization that my love of fantasy novels was not something I had to give up along with other childish things – that, in fact, there was nothing childish about fantasy at all. It might be one of the happiest memories of my life.

For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?

I have a hard time thinking in terms of genre, which is both a blessing and curse as a writer. All the books I love seem dictated by their own urgent internal logic, which means that sometimes they are entirely realist but more often than not they play with reality in some way that is demanded by the material. I think that word “play” is really the heart of it. What I love about fiction is the same thing I loved about playing as a child, it’s a way to get around the big hulking concreteness of the Very Real Things that pretend they’re the sum total of reality – I’m picturing them right now as represented by a bank as it would be drawn in a Loony Toons cartoon – and to a richer vein of things, that dark, illogical, unstable just-as-real reality running through and around us, the real that makes up our internal world and our interpersonal world, that most often gives us our sense of meaning, of wonder. Fantasy has a leg up on getting to this more interesting, harder-to-pin-down reality because it never considers itself beholden to the hulking non-negotiables that make up Realism.

What was the main inspiration for The Possibilities, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?

I wrote this book to make meaning out of the rich chaos of my postpartum experience. My son almost died during his birth, and afterwards the utter contingency of life, though hardly news, seemed to me to have depths and dimensions I’d never before grasped. I wanted to tame my feelings about my son’s contingen​cy – he all too easily could have not made it – into a shape I could understand. I had a more artistic challenge in mind as well. Becoming a parent changed how I conceived of the human mind. Concepts that I’d previously thought of as useful theoretical constructs – an unconscious peopled with characters and events (real and fantasied) from our past, through which we filter our present – now ​struck me as viscerally true. I was awed by this new understanding of what we really are and what we carry inside of us at every moment, and I wanted to do justice to it through narrative. After all, true unconscious material is famously untranslatable. So could I capture the fantasy-esque way I believe our minds actually work in a way that was comprehensible​, compelling, even artistically exciting? I knew that if I could then I could also convey an aspect of parenthood I’d never seen depicted to my satisfaction – the existential fear that is woven into so much of the misery and bliss of loving a child. 

Your novel, The Possibilities, was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?

People have classified this book in so many different ways – as fantasy, as sci-fi, as literary, as a book for mothers, as a book that absolutely no mother should read, as difficult, as a page-turner. To me, the lack of any unanimity about even the most basic aspects of a work is the sign that I’ve pulled off what I always want to pull off with my writing, which is to make sure that every piece is only exactly itself as closely as I can manage. I guess it comes back to that phrase I find myself falling back on a lot in this interview – dictated by its own internal logic. I love this book for being so hard to classify because it means I allowed it to be dictated by its own internal logic.

What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in The Possibilities, or other titles?

This was the first book I wrote that anyone would think to call fantasy, although I’ve played with reality in subtler ways in other works. I didn’t really set out to try my hand at a new genre. There was simply no other way to get at what I wanted to get at in writing this book, which was to capture something about what it really is to live inside the world with the minds we have, and especially to do so during the wildly strange period of learning to exist as a parent, which is a period of learning to be a whole new internal self within a whole new external reality. Like I said, my son had nearly died during his birth. For over an hour they couldn’t tell me whether he would make it and so I just lay there in the recovery room not knowing whether I was going to be taking home a newborn or whether I was in the midst of an unfolding tragedy. In the end he was fine, we took him home, and that’s when things got strange. At home with a healthy newborn, I felt I was existing in multiple realities simultaneously. It wasn’t just a second reality in which my son had died that felt like a shadow world lurking beside my own; there was also a world in which he’d rolled off the changing table, one in which his head slipped beneath the water during his bath, and so on. My mind was constantly split between these possibilities, and the result was so psychologically trippy that I felt there was no way I could capture it in realistic fiction. It was fantasy that gave me the perfect metaphor for the existential strangeness I was experiencing: suppose at the moment a baby is born, the laws of physics briefly change so that parallel worlds not only exist simultaneously but also affect each other. To me it felt almost true. There is something about giving birth—when the universe spores off a new universe, a whole new human, that the preceding one did not have – that seems as though it ought to complicate the physical laws of reality for several months at least. I had this very particular reason for feeling this way – my son’s birth had also been his almost-death – but I later learned that this new sense of reality in which contingency is so much more salient, so swollen, is a common experience for new parents. I don’t think there’s a way to capture what that’s like without resorting to some form of fantasy.

Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of The Passion of Tasha Darsky and the co-founder of the literary studio Plympton. She also practices psychotherapy with a particular interest in the transition to parenthood and is working toward her doctorate in clinical psychology. She lives with her son in Berkeley, California.

Catriona Ward

What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?

I grew up in Kenya, Madagascar, the US, Morocco and Yemen. As a family we often took long road trips – days and weeks long. For many years we listened, over and over, to the twelve-cassette unabridged recording of The Lord of the Rings. It was my first introduction to fantasy. Even Tolkien’s source material seemed exotic to me at the time – some of the most beautiful passages in the book are almost nature writing – descriptions of the UK landscape, of weather, of green hills and rain. As a child brought up in warm climates, even this seemed like fantasy to me.

I love Ursula le Guin with a passion. No other writer for me has so much humanity, combined with a terrifying clinical eye. Kelly Link blends genre, particularly fantasy, with realism in a particularly weird and exciting way. Her worlds seem more real than this one at times.

For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?

I think all those genres provide a mirror to show us back ourselves. Fantasy in particular throws human nature into relief by throwing it into new worlds. It’s what writing is for, isn’t it? To open imaginative and empathetic worlds. As a species we’ve always understood ourselves best through storytelling and myth. Fantasy seems very much the natural inheritor of these things. Because whatever the story, our human sorrow and fear and love are there all the same. Sometimes you read to find yourself, sometimes it’s to lose yourself. Fantasy lets you do both at once.

What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in Looking Glass Sound, or other titles?

It can be difficult to let yourself go, as a writer, to allow the world of the book to take over. The more I read the more I feel that all novels have their own worldbuilding, as intricate as any secondary world fantasy. Even in seemingly realistic works supposedly couched in the rules of our world – there is still a specific tone and strict set of rules the novel will abide by. This kind of worldbuilding is essential to plot, to character, to completely immersing the reader in whatever dream or nightmare you’ve created. Nothing can reproduce reality – and if it did it would only be the author’s reality. Writing is building a structure where reader and writer can meet – a world. Maybe all novels are fantasy novels in the end.

Your novel, Looking Glass Sound, was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?

It’s also about writers and writing which can be a gamble – the physical act of writing is not actually a very dramatic thing to write about. And books about books and writers can run the risk of being self-congratulatory or romanticised. I wanted to focus on the monstrosity of writing, as an almost at times cannibalistic act. And without giving too much away, I have wanted for some time to write a novel where the very nature of the book changes – in your hand – as you read. The structure of this book challenged me more than anything I’ve ever written.

What was the main inspiration for Looking Glass Sound, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?

My partner was recovering from a grave illness when I wrote this book, and I think a lot of that fear and care makes its way into the story. Love is at the heart of Looking Glass Sound. The protagonist, Wilder, wants to fall in love – it’s all he wants from the first page of the book. I found as I wrote that books and love came to seem more and more similar. Both start in this passionate heady idealised state. Both change and grow, sometimes into something very different to what you had planned, as time passes.

This book draws deeply from Stephen King – not just the setting, Maine, but from that other great place he explores in so many novels – youth, on the cusp of adulthood. It’s my love letter to all the things that made me a writer.

CATRIONA WARD was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. She studied English at the University of Oxford and later earned her master’s degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Ward is a three-time winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel: for The Girl from Rawblood, her debut; Little Eve; and The Last House on Needless Street. Little Eve also won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. Ward is the international bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street and Sundial.

How did you get into genre fiction as a reader, and what were some of your faves when you were growing up?

Growing up mostly inside the local Barnes & Noble, I absolutely worshipped Tamora Pierce (shoutout to all the Circle of Magic fans out there). Other household favorites of mine were Diana Wynne Jones, Gail Carson Levine, and Scott Westerfeld. I’m old enough that YA was still fairly nascent, so I also grew up alongside Twilight and Harry Potter; it’s fascinating to see how these series have changed (for better and for worse) for the next generation.

In addition to speculative books, I used to absolutely binge mystery novels as a teen, and I’ve noticed that a lot of young genre readers across the board are able jump right to the adult side. So I was reading probably one too many Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes cases during car rides, and some meatier Tolkien and Le Guin when I could really sit down at home and focus.

What does genre fiction do that is special, unique, or different from fiction without speculative or fantastic elements?

Having worked in more grounded spaces, I love that you can really play with every single aspect of a world in SFF. Being able to take one characteristic, like the capabilities of AI or the power of the elements, and tune that all the way up or down so that the what-ifs become more about our own choices than real-world limitations, is totally unique and opens up a new way of thinking.

One novella that I read before joining Saga, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War, as well as my very first acquisition here, Sascha Stronach’s debut The Dawnhounds, were mind-bending in different, amazing ways that really stuck with me.

How did reading lead to a career in publishing?

While I did always go the more reading-intensive routes in school, it was actually the editing side of things that drew me to the industry! I genuinely enjoyed editing and proofreading whatever I could get my hands on—friends’ papers, articles for the school daily, short-form translations (I studied French for many years). In retrospect, I was probably quite annoying to the friends whose work I marked up, but I’m grateful for them, because that eventually led me here.

What have been some of the more difficult aspects of the publishing industry for you, as well as some of the biggest surprises? Do you have any advice for folks who are interested in pursuing a career in the industry, whether as editors, agents, or some other avenue?

One of the most difficult aspects of the industry is breaking in. Publishing is very opaque to an outsider, and especially if you’re starting out far away from New York without any industry contacts, it can take a lot of legwork to land that first internship. I think I finagled my first internship at my best friend’s coworker’s sister’s literary agency, so I definitely went in pulling on every connection I had.

I’m not going to skirt around it: the starting publishing salaries were brutal as a young person living in NYC. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s gradually getting better on an industry-wide scale, and my best advice is to always advocate for yourself and know when you’ve outgrown your position and it’s time to move on.

Most of my surprises have been in editorial. The job is about a hundred times more social than I would’ve expected; there is no hiding at your desk behind manuscripts. It’s all a delicate balance of networking, project management, and editorial taste and feedback. I encounter new problems to solve every day, and I’m going to count it as a blessing to be kept on my toes

Early in 2021 the news came out that you had joined Simon & Schuster imprint Saga Press. What have been some of the best things about being a part of the Saga team?

Saga has been the best fit for me in so many ways. Not only are its mission and tastes exactly in line with what I want to be doing, but this team has some of the hardest-working, most collaborative folks in publishing. I’ve watched the imprint grow from three people to a dozen in my four years here, and every single member is a heavy-hitter in what they bring to the table. To say I love meetings might be an extreme, but I do love the discussions we have about the genre and new projects. I aways walk away with a new thought to chew on.

How would you describe a “Saga Press” title, and how would you describe an “Amara Hoshijo at Saga Press” title?

While we run the gamut across just about every subgenre (having a Stephen Graham Jones gory slasher alongside Peter Beagle’s fun dragon novel isn’t always on the bingo card at an imprint!), I’d classify a Saga Press book as a little left of center; while we’re aware of trends within SFF, we rarely follow them to a T. We’re a very editorially driven team, so strong writing and a fresh take on something, even a seemingly familiar legend or trope, is key. The imprint was founded on and continues to prioritize diversity—for Saga, that’s not just a buzzword, but an integral part of why we show up every day.

As for Amara as an editor(!), I’ve come to specialize in romantasy and cozy fantasy at Saga, simply because they make me the happiest to read, and we all need more of that right now. I will say that my romantasy tends to have a fairly strong fantasy and political backbone—Rebecca Robinson’s stunning debut, The Serpent & the Wolf, and Stacey McEwan’s fiery new first-in-series A Forbidden Alchemy are perfect examples of this. On the cozy side, I can’t get enough of found family self-discovery, and healing, as in Jaysea Lynn’s For Whom the Belle Tolls and Cecilia Edward’s forthcoming An Ancient Witch’s Guide to Modern Dating, which both take turns between being laugh-out-loud and poignant.

The writers out there will want to know the secret to getting published. What is your advice for authors who would love to see their books land at Saga?

It’s always good to have a clear idea of where your book might sit on the shelf—its inspirations, its contemporaries, even its competition. I would say all of us at Saga appreciate an ambitious vision for a book or series, along with strong prose and freshness in concept. We’re always looking for a way in, the moment a manuscript really hooks us in and doesn’t let go.

Are there a few titles you’ve worked on – whether recent, upcoming, or just notable – that you’d like Fantasy Magazine readers to know about?

Wow, so many just popped into my head! Okay, I’m narrowing it down to 3 recent-ish books:

1. If you like mind-jumping and a good battle royale: Immortal Longings by Chloe Gong
2. A lighter dragon novel with romance: The Last Dragon of the East by Katrina Kwan
3. A gritty, addictive Mad Max motorcycle fantasy: Road to Ruin by Hana Lee

What are some of the things about the publishing industry, about books, or about writers that you feel more readers should know?

Just that we’re all real people with chaotic workloads who really love the books we work on! Please be nice, especially to our tireless social media folks.

Amara Hoshijo is a senior editor at Saga Press. She loves secondary-world scifi/fantasy with complex magic, political, or tech systems and a unique cultural lens. Originally from Honolulu, Amara lived in New York City for over a decade and is now based in Los Angeles. Prior to joining Saga Press, she was a crime fiction editor at Soho Press. She also managed the company’s subrights initiative and is a former Frankfurt Fellow.

HI Rivers! Wonderful to “chat” with you again! It’s been just over five years since our Locus Magazine interview. What, for you, have been a few highlights since then? Career, personal, whatever you’d like to share.

I love this question because it gives me a chance to reflect on all my many blessings. I believe both An Unkindness of Ghosts and The Deep were out during our last chat, but since then I’ve published two more books: Sorrowland and most recently Model Home, which came out in the US last October and is a haunted house story set in a wealthy Dallas, Texas suburb — so, you know, the horror isn’t just the house, but being in a Dallas, Texas suburb ha. Additionally, Paris Review published my short story This Is Everything There Will Ever Be, whose audio version is read by Lena Waithe, which still amazes me. On a more personal front, I feel more myself than ever, and every year, I continue to learn and grow and exist.

An Unkindness of Ghosts came out in 2017, which was your debut novel. Model Home was just published by MCD and Merky. Has your writing changed in any important ways since that first book?

I’m most certain that it has, but I’m not sure I’m easily able to identify the ways that is has. I’ve always been more drawn to language, character, and moments in fiction than story. In fact, I often see plot and narrative as a kind of hindrance. But I still use it and rely on it, of course. Lately, though, I’ve been moved to abandon it all together, or to make it more and more skeletal so I can focus on the parts of writing that interest me most. This is most apparent in my shorter work, probably, but I’m hoping to be able to bring it into my book projects as well. This is not to say “no plot” — just, I never want to feel like my books have to conform to a standard of how a story must go.

I’m always delighted to see your work come out. What has your publishing journey been like overall?

Ups and downs but honestly, mostly ups. An Unkindness of Ghosts came out with a mid-sized independent press, Akashic Books, whom I admire so deeply and did everything to make the book take off. I think Amal’s review of the novel in NPR really shifted the direction of my career, too, really putting the book on the map, and eventually paving the way for the publication of The Deep. In fact, I think my editor for The Deep specifically received my name from Amal! So, the beauty of word of mouth and the proper alignment of the stars! Things took a little pause after The Deep. Sorrowland was difficult to write and a slight shift from my previous works. I remained with that same press, MCD, and editor, for Model Home.

After having several acclaimed books out, what, for you, is significant or useful about the way the fantastic (or: fantastic/speculative elements) can be utilized in narrative? What has it enabled you to do in your own work?

This is such a great question but one I’m terrible at answering! I have such a head-and-the-clouds type of brain that fantasy is so infused into how I view the world anyway that I don’t necessarily think of it as that separate from “real life.” Further, often what draws me most to the speculative is aesthetic and vibe — not necessarily it’s usefulness. But what’s beautiful about fiction is that I can make everything up. Why not take that as far as it can go? Human beings are so drawn to metaphor and symbols, why not use the fantastic to really tackle really important what-if questions?

What are some of your favorite things about central characters Emmanuele, Eve, and Ezri?

Mostly, I enjoy their sibling dynamic. The three of them together and how they interact has such vibrancy! They each feel so specific to me, but when they come together, they also become something distinct. Ezri is weird, disembodied, and strange, almost anti-character/anti-persona. They struggle with having a subjectivity at all. But their siblings each have such a strong voice that it grounds them.

One of the Locus reviews for Model Home talks about the book’s “compelling narrative voice” as well as “the richness of characterization of the siblings”. In terms of craft and writing approach, what do you see as key to delivering great characterization and voice?

Detail and dialogue forreal. Put your characters in a scene and let them move and speak and be. I love TV and film, and I tend to apply my love of it to my writing. I need to visualise the characters, see them moving through space, interacting, hear them speaking. It’s not unusual for me to have a specific character from a favourite piece of media who’s an inspiration or a seed for who my character will be.

Another review describes Model Home as “a novel about a haunted house in which said house sits in the background while haunted people take center stage” and talks about several different themes. What, for you, is the heart of the story?

Oh, I love that quote. I think that’s right. For me, the heart of Model Home is that there’s no such thing as exorcism. Hauntings are a part of life. Everything remains, forever. And we still move and live despite it, or because of it! The past, present, and future are forever fused.

When you think about Model Home, the central story, and the journey to getting this book out in the world, what are you most proud of; or, what are you happiest with in terms of the writing, story, or other aspects of the book?

I really let myself be strange and weird in Model Home. If I wanted to write something, I wrote it, even if I couldn’t necessarily justify it narratively. This book was so, so difficult for me to write, but also so incredibly fun. I think it’s my most “me” book. Part of that is because it’s so contemporary and the least informed by the speculative, so it’s deeply drawing on life as we know it now.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about Model Home, you, or your work?

A lot of reviews of my work focus a lot on race, trauma, and identity, and I guess I’m not beating the allegations; but I also just want to say that these are just normal everyday life things for so many people, and so really, Model Home, and all of my books, are about what it’s like to be and suffer and love and survive and laugh for as long as we’re in this mortal coil.

Rivers Solomon writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honor List and winning a Firecracker Award, Solomon’s debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, was a finalist for Lambda, Hurston/Wright, Otherwise (formerly Tiptree), and Locus Awards. Solomon’s second book, The Deep, based on the Hugo-nominated song by the Daveed Diggs–fronted hip-hop group clipping, was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award and was short-listed for the Nebula, Locus, Hugo, Ignyte, Brooklyn Library Literary, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. Their work appears in Black Warrior Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Guernica, Best American Short Stories, Tor.com, Best American Horror and Dark Fantasy, and elsewhere. A refugee of the transatlantic slave trade, Solomon was born on Turtle Island but currently resides on an isle in an archipelago off the western coast of the Eurasian continent.

Return to Issue #97

Alix E. Harrow

What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?

Oh, so many! I was just re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, one of my all-time favorites. It strikes me now as an inversion of a classic epic fantasy – instead of battles, there are diplomatic talks; instead of the young princess, the protagonist is a middle-aged advisor; instead of claiming power, the final climax is resolved by an act of surrender.

For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?

The thing fantasy does best is exaggerate. I mean that sincerely – it has the ability to work on a scale that makes things that are invisible or intangible (love, power, hunger, fear, desire) visible. A woman’s agency can become literal witchcraft; the sins of our past can become literal ghosts.

What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in Starling House, or other titles?

Anything I do well I’ve stolen from better books – I’m a much better reader than I am a writer. But I sort of like the feeling that I’m intentionally echoing the authors that were formative to me. In Starling House I got to do a sentient house, and I liked imagining all the other magical houses I’d grown up loving – Howl’s Moving Castle, the Abhorsen’s house, every castle in every retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I know we celebrate fantasy as a genre of endless invention, and it is, but it charms me how often we invent the same things, in each other’s footsteps.

Your novel, Starling House, was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?

Oh! I guess, compared to my other stuff, it’s more personal? I never know what that means in interviews, but in this case it means it’s literally personal: I never really thought I’d write a fantasy protagonist that grew up in the same place I did.

What was the main inspiration for Starling House, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?

I’m from Kentucky, and so are both sides of my family, way back. But none of my books and stories, prior to this one, were set there. It was only when we’d decided to leave – we moved to Virginia a few years ago – that I suddenly knew how to write about home.

There’s also a lot of John Prine in there, and family lore, and a very reasonable fear of sinkholes. The heart of it, I’d say, is loving a place that doesn’t always love you back.

Alix E. Harrow is the NYT-bestselling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, Starling House, and various short fiction, including a duology of retold fairy tales (A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended). Her work has won a Hugo and a British Fantasy Award, and been shortlisted for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, Southern Book Prize, and Goodreads Choice awards. She’s from Kentucky, but now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids.

Wole Talabi

What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?

While I read and write a lot of things, I am primarily a science fiction reader. So, when I read fantasy for pleasure, it tends to be contemporary fantasy, urban fantasy, or literary fiction with a speculative bent. Something that is both thoughtful and fun with unique style. As much as I appreciate epic or high fantasy, I don’t love it. Possibly because I came to fantasy via the everyday supernatural – I grew up with stories of spirits and shapeshifters and magic that were believed to be real, and I love stories that reflect that in some way.

Which may be why I love Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard about a man who follows his palm wine tapper into the land of the dead, encountering many supernatural adventures along the way – for its unapologetically creative amalgamation of several separate Yoruba folktales into an outlandish and wildly entertaining adventure told in naturalistic, heady prose.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark is also one of my favorites. It’s such a clever and entertaining supernatural whodunnit set in an alternate steampunk Cairo with angels, demons and magic. It’s full of sly commentary about our world with engaging characters and richly imagined mythos.

I know not everyone considers alternate history a kind of fantasy, but I do, depending on the execution and by that measure, The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson is also a favorite. The book imagines how world history might have been different if the Black Death had killed 99% of Europe’s population, instead of a third as it did in our reality and does so thoughtfully. It’s a rich and poetic rendition of a world that could have been.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, perhaps my favorite of Lauren Beukes’ novels, takes place in Johannesburg, in a slum where criminals are forced to literally carry the burdens of their sins with them in the form of animals like witches’ familiars. It’s like crime fiction with drugs, sex, politics, music, social consciousness, journalism, and magic all mashed together and I loved it.

For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?

I think Fantasy, like all well-executed speculative fiction, can do something special – which is expand the scope of our natural human story telling ability, giving us a wider range of possibility in our fiction. More ways to explore, to reflect, to distort, to exaggerate, to abstract, or to ‘heighten’ any aspect of the human experience, to examine it in new and different ways, to reveal something about ourselves.

Your novel, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?

Usually when I write, I start with an idea or a concept and then characters appear as a way for me to explore that idea. In the case of Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, it was the inverse. The characters of Shigidi and Nneoma essentially jumped into my head fully formed and the rest of the story blossomed out from them, as I tried to figure out who these characters were, what motivated them, the world they inhabited, and how it had shaped them. I loved going on that journey of discovery, building the story character-out instead of concept-in. And I think it shows in how much some readers have latched on to these flawed, fascinating characters emotionally.

What was the main inspiration for Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?

The book is the culmination of three elements.

First Shigidi himself, the protagonist. I have always been interested in the nature of faith, religion and mythology. Particularly Yoruba mythology but all mythologies really (and gods/creatures from other pantheons make appearances in the book). My version of Shigidi is inspired by the same-named minor god of nightmares in Yoruba mythology, who came across to me as someone stuck in an unfortunate situation. Doing a shitty, necessary job. I wanted to take him and turn him into an unexpected anti-hero. So, I wrote the short story called “I, Shigidi” around 2015/2016 which went through several iterations before being published as a novelette in Abyss & Apex magazine.

Second, Nneoma. The co-protagonist. I wrote a short story about her back in December of 2015, and she is inspired by both Judeo-Christian mysticism and my desire to subvert the tropes of classic Nigerian movies like Nneka the Pretty Serpent (1994), about dangerous, beautiful spirit-women who use seduction as power. I put Nneoma and Shigidi together because I knew a reluctant nightmare god and secretive succubus make a good pairing – Nneoma makes an appearance in the final version of “I, Shigidi”. But I always wanted to tell a bigger story with them as the main protagonists, I just wasn’t sure what story it would be, which is where the third element came in. I went back to London in 2018 and visited the British museum where I felt an overwhelming urge to liberate all the stolen cultural artifacts housed there. So, I took that feeling and channeled it into a story about Nneoma and Shigidi on a heist to retrieve an item – the titular brass head – from the museum while coming to terms with their own relationship and the world around them.

I think faith is at the heart of the story – faith in gods, faith in others, faith in ourselves. Belief in something. It is the thing that propels us to change ourselves, and the world around us. I explore faith in multiple ways in the novel and it is faith that brings Shigidi and Nneoma together and enables them grow over the course of the story.

WOLE TALABI is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the World Fantasy award nominated novel SHIGIDI AND THE BRASS HEAD OF OBALUFON, listed by the Washington Post as one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2023, which was also nominated for the Nebula award, Locus award, British Fantasy award and other major awards. His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, The Africa Risen anthology and is collected in the books CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS (2024) and INCOMPLETE SOLUTIONS (2019). He has also been a finalist for the Hugo, BSFA, and Crawford awards, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing. He has won the Nommo award for African speculative fiction and the Sidewise award for alternate history. He has edited five anthologies including the acclaimed AFRICANFUTURISM: AN ANTHOLOGY (2020) and MOTHERSOUND: THE SAUÚTIVERSE ANTHOLOGY (2023). He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Australia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and at @wtalabi online.

Martha Wells

What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo, and also her more recent novel The Fox Wife. I think the way both books gently blend a real historical time period with the supernatural is one of my favorite approaches to fantasy. Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful are also great examples of this. Black Water Sister by Zen Cho and Will Do Magic For Small Change by Andrea Hairston blend subtle and fantastic fantasy with contemporary time periods. And the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch, which is a fantasy mystery/detective procedural.

I also really love secondary worlds, the more different they are from our world, the better. Some examples are The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, Court of Fives by Kate Elliott, The Tiger’s Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. Also I’m a big fan of Tanith Lee and the lush, vivid fantasy worlds she created.

For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?

I think it’s the sense of the otherworldly for me, whether it’s a blend with our own world or a totally alien created world. I also love fantasy worlds that feel limitless, like you could travel through them forever and never find a border or boundary.

What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in Witch King, or other titles?

The feel of starting in a strange place and traveling to somewhere even stranger. I’ve always loved books that start that way, and it’s a fun way to write, to build the world outward and discover it with the reader. In Witch King I went a little further, starting in an enclosed, confined space, and going outward into a wider and wider world.

Witch King was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?

I was very excited, it was the first time I’ve ever made the WFA ballot! I think I learned a lot from writing The Murderbot Diaries, and I don’t think I could have written Witch King without that experience. Playing with perspective and point of view in Murderbot was a real education for me as a writer.

What I loved most about Witch King was getting back into creating a fantasy world, and also a new world, all new characters. Writing a series and having the room to continually add more complexity to your world and characters is great, but starting from a clean slate where anything could happen is a lot of fun.

What was the main inspiration for Witch King, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?

It was written in 2020 and it’s very much a pandemic book, in a lot of ways. In the first part of the year, I had been working on the next Murderbot Diaries novella, and once the lockdowns started, I had writer’s block and couldn’t make any progress. I was just stuck in place for about six terrible months. But I was reading a lot of the great fantasy that was coming out that year, and also watching the Chinese and Korean dramas/fantasies that were starting to become available on streaming channels. I decided to pull out an old idea I had tried to work on several times over the years, and then given up on. That ended up becoming the first chapter. For me, the heart of the story is fighting for your world and your way of life.

Martha Wells has been writing science fiction and fantasy since 1993. Her work includes The Murderbot Diaries, The Books of the Raksura, the Ile-Rien series, and most recently Witch King and its sequel Queen Demon, as well as other novels, short fiction, non-fiction, and media tie-ins. She is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and her work has won Nebula, Hugo, Locus Awards, and an Alex Award and a Dragon Award. It has also appeared on the World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, and the British Science Fiction Association Award ballots, as well as the New York Times, USA Today, and the Sunday Times Bestseller Lists. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages.

Return to Issue #97 | Support Fantasy Magazine

The past three years have been a remarkable epoch in our lives. We are so grateful for your support of our magazine and our authors–it’s been an honor to showcase the first professional publications of so many of them. We’ll be watching their careers blossom, as we imagine you will, too.

We can’t go without making sure you know exactly who’s been working behind the scenes, making us look good. Every single one of them volunteered their time and expertise to this project.

Phoebe Barton and Mayookh Barua interviewed authors for the Author Spotlights. Phoebe joined us shortly after we launched; Mayookh took over when Veronica Henry moved on to focus on her novels. Mayookh has also handled a lot of our social media. In the time they’ve been with us, Phoebe has won an Aurora Award, and Mayookh earned his MFA and acceptance into a PhD program.

Madison Brake is our author wrangler, ensuring that we have updated bios where you can learn more about our authors and their accomplishments. She continues her work with the Lightspeed and Nightmare teams.

Chloe Smith is our tireless copyeditor; she has saved us from ourselves many times, as did Alex Puncekar before her.  Anthony Cardno has been proofreader for both Fantasy Magazine and Lightspeed for many years; Devin Marcus joined him in 2016 and has been proofreader for all three magazines in our publishing family since. Anyone who has worked in any kind of quality control role knows what all three of them have put up with: Everyone gets to be late but them, and they have tolerated our lapses with grace.

Wendy Wagner helped us get on our feet in the beginning, showing us the ropes of the Managing Editor role and generally being her amazing, supportive self.

The website itself was artfully designed and is expertly maintained by Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios.

Our submissions system is Moksha, created and maintained by Matt Kressel. Matt has simplified the lives of countless authors and editors.

And of course, the great John Joseph Adams is ultimately our publisher, the guy who handles all the fiddly details, makes sure that our authors get paid, our subscribers get their ebooks, and the web content isn’t eaten by packet mites.

Our content will remain online for you to read and hopefully for others to discover.

Christie has other editorial irons in the fire and will be giving them the attention they deserve, much to the relief of the authors patiently waiting for her to do so. She’s also looking forward to getting back to her own writing.

Arley has taken on a new role as Associate Agent with kt literary, which he describes as “in many ways, a continuation of things I did as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy.” He recently taught week five of the six-week Clarion West Workshop. He is still a senior editor at Locus Magazine, still working with F&SF, Clarkesworld, and others, including reviewing books for Lightspeed. Look him up at arleysorg.com for calendar info and so on.

• • • •

Christie: What a ride this has been! We’ve had the good fortune to work with so many wonderful people, and I hope to do so again, one way or another. Everyone on this team has left their mark, and we wish every one of them the very best in all things. Thanks, too, to the many authors who submitted their work to us, whether or not we ultimately purchased it. It’s always an honor to be trusted with a person’s art.

To our readers, thank you so much for giving us a try and sticking with us. We hope that you’ve found stories here that moved and inspired you.

One of the things that I love about the SFF short fiction community is the “coopetition” between magazines. I’m grateful to all of the other editors and publishers out there who boosted FM and supported us from the start. Go subscribe and support your favorites!

Finally, I’m so glad to have done this with Arley. This has been a project of shared values and shared goals, and we’ve stayed true to them and to each other for the entirety of this three year run. It’s a thing we made together, and I love that Arley will forever be such a huge part of my personal and professional journey.

Arley: I’m immensely grateful to everyone who gave this magazine a read – I believe we did something special with this space, and I’m glad it touched so many people. I’m super grateful for the authors who worked with us, who trusted us, and whose work we had the privilege of publishing. It’s been wonderful to get to share these amazing works with the world! I’m even glad I got to read a lot of the work we didn’t have room to publish, and I sincerely hope more readers get to see those pieces. I feel immensely lucky to have been able to do this, and I’m really glad I got to do it with Christie Yant, who is a powerhouse and a creative force. I’m super super super grateful to both Christie and John – look, y’all: folks who don’t work in this industry have no idea how much trust and faith goes into the simple act of letting someone do something with your mag. Besides this, they put in tons of “behind the scenes” work, and gave me room to make creative decisions. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who had their hands in making Fantasy Magazine happen. THANK YOU to reviewers and other folks who shouted about how much they loved something they read. A huge THANK YOU to all of you, taking a moment to look at this editorial. Support your favorite mags, authors, and venues, and please be kind to each other.

We invited editors from three recent, notable anthologies to do brief interviews. We hope you get as much out of these conversations as we did!

Infinite Constellations
edited by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura
University of Alabama Press/FC2

What is important or special to you about the fantastic or the speculative? Why are they important in storytelling?

K + K: Speculation is imagination. We all speculate about possible lives, freedoms, pathways, and futures. Creating the fantastic and the speculative in any genre or form gives us—creators, editors, and readers/viewers—license to imagine new ways of being. It’s also important to use our imaginations in our everyday lives, to question what’s considered “normal” or ordinary, and respect our creativity as part of who we are as thinking beings. It can be inspiring to just see the different ways that people live and dream. Sometimes, when seeing people making different life choices, an epiphany hits you like, “Oh, that’s possible?” And it changes the game for you. Speculation is moving beyond limitations. Every day we make new choices that create new spaces for speculation and visioning. And for people whose existences and/or choices aren’t widely represented or respected, we have to speculate our very selves. In storytelling, we star in our own fantasies, far beyond the images imposed upon us externally. We originally subtitled the anthology “Speculating Us,” because we knew that the work we’d collected focused beautifully on the infinitude of our many existences—both extant and possible.

How did Infinite Constellations come about, how did it develop, and what were the biggest challenges to making this anthology happen?

K + K: The process began when Khadijah was approached by an editor at FC2 press to edit a speculative anthology, and immediately thought of K—her expertise in speculative fiction and beyond, her editorial and organizational skills, and similar mindset felt like a natural fit. We have known each other since MFA school at Antioch University, and got into the flow easily. Our busy schedules meant we needed to calibrate often according to our energy levels, and that helped us develop the project with patience and honestly a lot of love for the work.

What was beautiful was that we were able to support each other throughout the process. We each took turns stepping forward when we had more energy, time, and space than the other. We were able to avoid the trap of have-to and deadlines by empowering each other to TAKE OUR TIME. In our first conversation about the anthology, we discussed the fact that culturally-focused anthologies tend to talk about oppression and pain, highlighting vital discussions about the difficulty of our experiences. We wanted to do something different from what we usually see.

As far as the challenges, we didn’t confront many. We had a great collaboration and a clear vision. From the beginning, we envisioned an anthology that centered celebration, joy, imagination, connection, care, and our inherent power to center ourselves and our stories. We also were committed to hybridity and/or experimental pieces to highlight the range of written expression. Guided by this vision, we selected pieces that had strong voice and personal perspectives. We wanted to feel that we were in the journey of an individual’s authentic experience.

Are there one or two stories here that you feel are more daring in some ways, or that will challenge readers more?

K + K: One of the stories that we felt embodied hybrity (more in character than in form) was Cindy Juyoung Ok’s “Red Green Blue.” We loved the clash and combination of cultures that was displayed through this multi-ethnic, irreverent, contemporary group of friends traveling through Italy. We were surprised to find that more than one reviewer was challenged by one character’s nickname. In the story, Ok writes, “On the fourth day, we drove to Marsala to meet White Chris, which everyone began calling him the year we worked with Black Chris, even thought White Chris’s dad is Palestinian, because he is also white, down to his constant confidence that things might work out fairly.” More than one reviewer thought the nickname was dismissive or disrespectful, when actually the nickname is just functional and reflective of the way many communities of color will name someone based on their most apparent characteristic—which, in this group of children of immigrants, plus one Italian from New Jersey, was his whiteness. As editors, we wondered if some of the bristling was due to the infrequency with which whiteness is commented on as a distinguisher in such a casual fashion. The practice is frequent within certain cultural circles but possibly jarring in the context of a world that holds whiteness as the norm, rather than a deviation or distinguisher. This story definitely throws you into the world of these particular characters and, as a reader, you have to be willing to surrender to their worldview.

Another piece that might challenge readers a bit more is André O. Hoilette’s poem “Sealing the Room.” A long poem focusing on a Jamaican mythical figure called Cothilda or flame woman, the ghostly and sinister presence at first might not seem to fit the celebratory vision we articulated earlier. However, the epic quality of this spirit’s journey and backstory, told within the poem’s action—ritual practice of protection from her—provided great tension and even compassion within the contrast. We have humans and animals, babies and elders. We have life and death stakes, and we don’t get to escape the influence of the afterlife, either. There are so many parallels to discover in this poem, of time and of history and more, all framed by lush images and sensory details that ground you in the world Hoilette creates.

I truly enjoyed this book (my review is proof!) and I know you both loved the pieces you published. That said . . . ! If someone were going to read two pieces, for each of you, which entries would you tell them to read, and why?

K + K: We do truly love the work in this anthology. The range of sensations, perspectives, approaches, and experiences is delightful and invigorating. Reading the book, cover to cover, is a journey that we recommend.

In terms of pieces we’d tell people to engage with, definitely Lynn C. Pitts’ “The Swan.” As the first accepted story, it helped to set the tone for the anthology. And it was an immediate acceptance—the story is hilarious, surprising, fantastic and grounded at the same time, sensual and joyful, with elements of spirituality and nature that felt both relatable and impossible. The depiction of self-discovery, friendship, and the joys/perils of life choices melded spectacularly. Identity was front and center as the particular obsessions and interests of the character and her friends guided us through her escapades.

And also, “Reflection on Spices,” which is an excerpt from a three-part poem of the same name. We love the way Sarah Sophia Yanni plunges us headfirst into the sensory world of spices and its intense connection to her lineage. This poem causes you to time travel—into spaces that we may not have visited before, but that we recognize. It also celebrates her mother as a culture bearer, a woman who upholds her traditions, and protects them with a sly smile. She is emblematic of the ways that so many communities navigate the larger world. She chooses to continue her vibrant lineage, and does not engage the powers that be who may not support or understand its value. Such a beautiful reflection of the various spaces we inhabit and navigate.

What did you get or learn or find, if anything, from the process of putting this book together, which you might bring to other projects, or even to your own work?

K + K: One, we discovered that we work well together. And, I think we both discovered that editing an anthology is manageable. Collaboration is powerful and the shared labor and shared perspectives made Infinite Constellations a pleasure to work on. Working on this anthology also opened our eyes to power and ownership of spaces. When we made our call, we didn’t originally receive many submissions from indigenous authors. We wanted the anthology to reflect multiple perspectives, how could we create this multi-voiced space and not include the people who originated civilization in this country? We put in extra work, emailing colleagues and posting on boards for Native American writers to seek contributors for the anthology. We learned that with this opportunity came the power to give voice to others. Many of the authors in this anthology are emerging authors and we didn’t anticipate the joy and responsibility of bringing these voices to light. There are incredible writers who may not see themselves in the original call for publication. They may not raise their hand when an opportunity comes their way. We encouraged folks to contribute to the project. Determining how to include as many as voices as possible felt like part of the process and a requirement of editing the anthology.

Is there anything else you’d really like readers to know about Infinite Constellations?

K + K: We hope readers will take their time and savor the work we collected. The identities that the authors share on the end pages are just a sprinkling of the many combinations and expressions of human life. This anthology is an opportunity to experience the many shades of being human—one unique journey at a time.

• • • •

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of innovative poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams award from the Poetry Society of America. Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women’s Performance Writing, and included a full staged production by The Relationship theater company in New York City. Individual poems and prose appear in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK) and widely elsewhere. A zuihitsu about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 2020. A Cave Canem fellow, she holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver and teaches creative writing, literature, and poetics at Virginia Tech. In 2022, she received a Disability Futures Fellowship from United States Artists, and she will be a Civitella Foundation Fellow in 2023. Her book of literary theory and criticism, Radical Poetics, is forthcoming in 2024 from University of Michigan Press.

K. Ibura is a writer, editor, and artist from New Orleans—the original home of the Chitimacha Tribe. She writes essays about identity and gender, and fantastical fiction about ancient histories and future imaginings. She is the author of two speculative fiction collections: Ancient, Ancient—winner of the James Tiptree Award, and When the World Wounds; and a novel for children When the World Turns Upside Down. She is the co-editor of the Infinite Constellations anthology and she has a series of ebooks examining the emotional underpinnings of the writing life. Learn more about her at kiburabooks.com and kibura.com.

Never Whistle At Night
edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
Vintage

What is it about the fantastic or the speculative that is important or special to you? Why are they important in storytelling?

Shane: The fantastic and speculative realms hold a special place in Indigenous storytelling, allowing us to bridge the natural with the supernatural, the seen and the unseen. These narratives, rooted in our deep connection to the land and our ancestors, offer a way to explore the boundaries of reality, to question, to dream, and to understand our world beyond its surface. By weaving tales infused with wonder and elements of the unknown, we create stories that can resonate deeply, remaining etched in memory while fostering curiosity and introspection.

In the world of horror, the fantastic becomes a mirror, reflecting our fears, traumas, and collective anxieties. It’s an outlet to address these darker facets in a cathartic manner, shedding light on our own experiences and struggles–or bringing to light that of our Elders’ experiences and struggles. By welcoming more Indigenous voices into this genre, we’re not only sharing our unique perspectives and contemporary challenges but also enriching the tapestry of the fantastic with our age-old spirits and stories.

Ted: I think fantastic and speculative are relative terms. For instance, I love teaching Tracks by Louise Erdrich with my students and one of my favorite moments is when Pauline turns into an owl. Does she? Is it metaphorical? The Native students have always been like, “Well, yeah. She’s an owl.” The non-Native students take a bit to get there sometimes, but when they do, that class takes right off. So for me, those two concepts, however they are named, are invaluable in stories. You’ve already asked the reader/listener to enter into a world other than their own, so why shouldn’t it contain all of the necessary beings and encounters and relatives and times and spaces for the best possible tell?

How did Never Whistle at Night come about, how did it develop, and what were the biggest challenges to making this anthology happen?

Shane: This anthology came to fruition after Ted and I got nudged by a tweet asking for an Indigenous horror anthology. The person who tweeted that, Bear Lee, is a horror writer and book reviewer, and they helped us read submissions for NWAN in the end! Ted and I asked horror writer Gabino Iglesias if he could help us find a legitimate press or even a one-time literary agent willing to represent us based on this concept. We were even considering a crowdfunding platform to make it happen. Lo and behold, Cherie Dimaline’s agent, Rachel Letofsky, offered us representation once I explained the vision of the project. Rachel had me draft a proposal and we all edited it as a team with CookeMcDermid. We received numerous offers and chose Penguin Random House via Vintage Books, Random House Canada, and McClelland & Stewart. I’d say the most challenging aspect of making this anthology coalesce was the sheer organization required to make it happen and keeping communication alive between myself, Ted, our publishing team, and the twenty-six other Indigenous creatives involved.

Ted: Shane gave all the great details for us here. For myself, I’d had this idea for a long time to collect “those stories,” the stories we’d tell around the fire or in the hotel lobby at Native Lit conferences after everyone else had gone to bed. It floated around in folders as sketches in my laptop and then bam, one day it just came together when Shane put it out there. The response was more amazing than I hoped it would be, ‘cause we’ve all got “those stories,” yeah?

Are there one or two stories here that you feel are more daring in some ways, or that will challenge readers more?

Shane: I will try to tackle daring and challenging in two different ways. First, I’d say David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s “Sundays” requires all of the content warnings. It stands out as a potent and emotionally charged story, especially with its heavy themes and content. Weiden demands emotional resilience and awareness from his readers for this piece, e.g., it opens with the protagonist reliving the act of being r*ped at an Indian boarding school in a horrific nightmare. And another story that is challenging for readers in a different way would be Brandon Hobson’s “The Ones Who Killed Us.” With Hobson utilizing the first-person “we” to tell this story, he forces readers to be mindful of the past—particularly those who are not Native—and feel deep down how the wars, the betrayals, the kidnappings, and the endless death have impacted the protagonists’ people. In a way, he’s also under the assumption that the reader may not want to hear these hard truths because his narrators say atvdasdiha (“listen” in ᏣᎳᎩ) five times throughout the story.

Ted: That’s a tough question. Some of the more challenging things happening here for a broader readership I think are the sheer diversity of stories as well as the very contemporary settings for a lot of folks who are educated in systems that erase and elide rich Indigenous histories and art, let alone examine the issues that affect Native people today. With that, I’d have to say Nick Medina’s “Quantum,” and Amber Blaeser-Wardzala’s “Collections” are two stories that illuminate those contemporary issues in surprising and disturbing ways.

I truly enjoyed this book (my review is proof!) and I know you both loved the pieces you published. That said . . . ! If someone were going to read two pieces, for each of you, which entries would you tell them to read, and why?

Shane: I think Ted and I are on the same page about Mathilda Zeller’s “Kushtuka.” There’s a reason it opens up the anthology, and hopefully readers will see why. There are so many stories to choose from; why must you make this so difficult?! I will have to go with Richard Van Camp’s “Scariest Story. Ever.” as my second go-to for new readers. Van Camp’s writing has always impressed me as it’s chock full of wisdom and heart. I love how his tale focuses on the importance of storytelling in itself, which makes it a little fun, meta-wise. And within his spooky tale, he also convinces readers that listening to our Elders is of the utmost importance, and I hope that speaks just as much to non-Native readers as it does to the rest of us.

Ted: Man, no fair! This is an even tougher question! To get the vibe, the what-we’re-trying-to-do here, I’d have to recommend “Kushtuka” from Mathilda Zeller along with D.H. Trujillo’s “Snakes are Born in the Dark.” Horror, dark and moody, broody and terrifying from north to south and everywhere in between. These two bookend that work in amazing ways.

What did you get or learn or find, if anything, from the process of putting this book together, which you might bring to other projects, or even to your own work?

Shane: Working alongside Ted to curate this anthology was a transformative experience. We delved deep into a reservoir of Indigenous stories that breathed life into the familiar horror tropes, yet offered fresh, nuanced perspectives rooted in rich cultural traditions and experiences. The most significant revelation was the universality of emotion—fear, hope, loss, and love—embedded in these stories. While the process was challenging, especially when choosing among such powerful submissions, it underscored the importance of getting it right because We haven’t had an opportunity like this before at the Big 5 level. Every tale, every voice, brought a world into focus, revealing layers of meaning, history, and shared experience. This journey has reinforced my belief in the importance of amplifying Native voices in the Horror landscape. As I move forward, whether in editing or my own writing, I’ll be reminded of the depth and breadth of stories waiting to be told and the responsibility I hold to help tell them.

Ted: It’s a big, diverse book, and having multiple eyes and ears on what’s happening in it, what it could be, where it can go from here was essential. And the process of having to choose what ultimately stayed in from all the entries was as painful as the editing process you do with your own work. The idea of what’s best for the book in the end was a driver that helps you understand how important it is to get it right, and to recognize that a book has its own life, one that you’re surely responsible for bringing into the world, even if afterward it lives independently.

Is there anything else you’d really like readers to know about Never Whistle at Night?

Shane: Readers, please don’t skip the introduction penned by Stephen Graham Jones as it really sets up the book nicely. The story order was constructed in a manner that respected flow, content, emotions, style, region, etc. but if you don’t like following rules, no one is stopping you from hopping and skipping around the anthology. With that said, I highly recommend not plowing through this book. Let our stories marinate in your mind, then let them simmer. We really hope you take something away from this book of twenty-six tales!

Ted: Please know that a lot of work from a lot of folks went into NWAN, and that we’re all so excited for you to read and hopefully enjoy what we’ve put together. This is the first collection of its kind from a major publisher, and we hope it won’t be the last.
Thanks for taking the time to let us share!

• • • •

Shane Hawk (enrolled Cheyenne-Arapaho, Hidatsa and Potawatomi descent) is a history teacher by day and a horror writer by night. Hawk is the author of Anoka: A Collection of Indigenous Horror and other short fiction featured in numerous anthologies. He lives in San Diego with his beautiful wife, Tori. Learn more by visiting shanehawk.com.

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (enrolled Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians) is the author of award-winning mosaic novels Sacred Smokes and Sacred City as well as the editor of The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones. He is an active Horror Writers Association member whose work has been published in Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Chicago Review, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Apex Magazine, Red Earth Review, Electric Literature, Indian Country Today, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Upcoming books include Sacred Folks from University of New Mexico Press and the Southern Gothic novella Pour One for the Devil from Lanternfish Press, both available in 2024. You can find him online at IG/FB/Twitter/Bluesky at @TVAyyyy.

Queer Little Nightmares
edited by David Ly & Daniel Zomparelli
Arsenal Pulp

What is it about the fantastic or the speculative that is important or special to you? Why are they important in storytelling?

David: I think for me, I read (and try to) write fantastic or speculative stories and poems as a way to explore sometimes dark(er) subjects and themes. There’s something I find special about immersing myself in this kind of writing where the world I’m in falls quiet and I can exist and be an observer to stories quite different from ones I’m living, but can still find threads that are relatable.

Daniel: Much like David, I enjoy it for the way it lets me be an outsider to a world. In that way, I can understand and grapple with emotions and the psychology of human nature from a bit of a distance. Like the way a ghost can be a symbol of grief or a monster can be a way to show someone who is unable to fit in.

How did Queer Little Nightmares come about, how did it develop, and what were the biggest challenges to making this anthology happen?

David: Daniel and I just always shared a love for monsters and horror movies so I think it was just a matter of time we came up with this idea of collecting pieces from queer writers who also shared our love. The biggest challenge was selecting which pieces to include! We had to strike a balance between the diversity of monsters being explored, while also including an array of voices and tones that spoke to them.

Daniel: David and I knew we wanted to do something to this effect and we just felt the moment was right to get an anthology going and the publisher was on board right away. The other challenge was having to make selections when there were so many great stories and poems. Our submissions pile was way more than we expected.

Are there one or two stories here that you feel are more daring in some ways, or that will challenge readers more?

David: Hiromi Goto’s story is something I didn’t expect to jump out. I think it cleverly speaks to the ideas of monstrosity and the way Hiromi explores that is beautiful, weird, and funny.

Daniel: I agree, Hiromi’s stands out in this respect, and I would say Eddy Boudel Tan’s “Strange Case” challenged me as to who or what can make a monster.

I truly enjoyed this book (my review is proof!) and I know you both loved the pieces you published. That said . . . ! If someone were going to read two pieces, for each of you, which entries would you tell them to read, and why?

David: Victoria Mbabazi’s two poems are ones I highly recommend. Their poetry is stellar and I think they are good representations of the kinds of narratives you can expect in this book, that approach monsters in a way seldom seen.

Daniel: Two of the stories that I think will hopefully draw in a reader to read all of the stories (I’m biased, but they’re all great!) is Levi Cain’s “Gruesome My Love” and Anuja Varghese’s “The Vetala’s Song.” They both are these beautifully lyrically written stories that get at the darker themes of monsters while being also about love.

What did you get or learn or find, if anything, from the process of putting this book together, which you might bring to other projects, or even to your own work?

David: Anthologies are a lot of work! In terms of my own work, I think I have learned to slow down a bit. It was a bit of a marathon putting together Queer Little Nightmares (though I enjoyed every step of it), but I think it’s time to slow down! That said, if another anthology is down the road, I’d work with Daniel again 100%.

Daniel: Haha yes! It was a lot of work. The thing I learned most from this project and the writing itself is that if anything, I can get weirder, more fantastical, and more ambitious in my writing and that there is an audience for that.

Is there anything else you’d really like readers to know about Queer Little Nightmares?

David: It’s a fun and delicious read that showcases monsters in unexpected ways; a wonderful and heartfelt homage to the queerness of canonically feared monsters.

Daniel: And that there’s plenty of humor in there, along with horror there are wonderfully comical works. Monsters, after all, can be very funny as well.

• • • •

David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Poetry Award, and Dream of Me as Water (2022), both published under the Anstruther Books imprint of Palimpsest Press. He is also co-editor (with Daniel Zomparelli) of Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). David’s poems have appeared in publications such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, PRISM International, and The Ex-Puritan, where he won the inaugural Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. David is the Poetry Editor at This Magazine.

Daniel Zomparelli is the author of Davie Street Translations, and Rom Com co-written with Dina Del Bucchia. His collection Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and won the ReLit Short Fiction Award. He co-edited Queer Little Nightmares with David Ly (Arsenal, 2022).

This month, we’re proud to introduce you to the podcast team:

Stefan Rudnicki has been producing the podcasts for our family of magazines since Lightspeed launched in 2010. A Grammy and Audie award-winning producer and tremendous voice actor, he has narrated many of our stories himself–but he has also taken great care to be true to the author’s intent, seeking out and hiring actors to ensure a personal, authentic voice for each production. You can discover more of his work at Skyboat Media, where he and Gabrielle de Cuir record, produce, and direct audio books.

Speaking of Gabrielle–another incredible, award-winning talent–she also recorded many of our stories, and introduced each podcast episode with her signature verve. Alison Belle Bews rounds out the Skyboat team with her directorial expertise.

Acclaimed voice actor Janina Edwards took over for Gabrielle, and has brought a warm, professional polish to every podcast episode. Janina is an Audie award finalist and has been featured in the New York Times for her work voicing BIPOC stories and audio books. Her audio blog is full of depth and insight into the audio book field and her creative world. You can learn more at her website, https://www.janinaspeaksvolumes.com.

Jim Freund is our post-production editor. Jim is the host of the SFF radio show Hour of the Wolf out of New York City, which has been running since 1974. He’s also the Executive Curator for the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series, a vital part of the SFF literary community on the east coast of the U.S. Jim’s meticulous attention to detail ensures a final product that our authors and the entire podcast team can be proud of.

We can’t emphasize enough just how lucky we feel and how grateful we are for all of these incredible professionals who have devoted their time, talent, and skill to these productions over the years.

If you’ll miss their work and your fantasy audio fix, take heart–the team is adding fantasy stories back into the podcast over at Lightspeed, starting with the November issue.

Next month we’ll introduce you to our amazing editorial team.

In this issue we’re proud to bring you short stories by Lowry Poletti (“Dread of the White Dog”) and Sam Kyung Yoo (“Set Yourself on Fire”); flash fiction by Angela Liu (“The Cursed Universe Inside Your Eye”) and Alex V. Cruz (“Bacá”); poetry by Zynab Iliyasu Bobi (“Brief History of Monsterification”) and Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe (“A Mortal’s Guide to Attaining Godhood in the Era of Chaos”); and an interview with a few of the many anthologists doing interesting work in the field. Enjoy!