John P. Murphy attended Viable Paradise in 2010 and started selling fiction shortly after. His first publications came out in 2011: several pieces in The Drabblecast and “The Body and the Bomb” in Crossed Genres. “Tumbleweeds and Indelicate Questions” was his first pro sale, published in Nature. After a few novella and short story sales, […]

Taiyo Fujii, Japanese science fiction author of Gene Mapper and Orbital Cloud, invited me here. I only met him half a year earlier, at Worldcon in Dublin, but we quickly became friends and our plans took shape a few months later during dinner in Tokyo. The place is Lyon and the occasion is the AI […]

Lois McMaster Bujold has won the Hugo Award for Best Novel a record-tying four times: The Vor Game in 1991; Barrayar in 1992, which also won a Locus Award; Mirror Dance in 1995, which, again, also won a Locus Award; and Paladin of Souls in 2004, which also won a Nebula Award and a Locus […]

Tamsyn Muir landed on many readers’ radars with the release of full-length novel Gideon the Ninth, published by Tor.com publications in September 2019. Beyond blurbs and promises of something utterly unique, readers showed appreciation through Goodreads Choice nominations in two categories, as well as nominations and short listing for an array of other awards such […]

Martha Wells grew up in Texas reading science fiction and fantasy from a young age, getting books at her local library. In her teens, she was writing Star Wars and Godzilla fanfic, complete with maps of Monster Island. She received a BA in anthropology at Texas A&M but took other classes as well, including a […]

Raised on a kibbutz in Israel, Lavie Tidhar began his world travels at fifteen, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and Vanuatu. At twenty-two he published a collection of poetry, and he had his first fiction stories published at twenty-seven. In 2009, the first volume of The Apex Book of World SF came out, […]

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales. He earned degrees in astronomy from the Newcastle University in England and a PhD from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He began writing science fiction in his teens, and had his first publication in Interzone in 1990: “Nunivak Snowflakes.” In 1991 he moved to the […]

Born in Battle Ground WA, Kameron Hurley received a BA in historical studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a master’s from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, specializing in the history of South African resistance movements. She lived in Chicago for four years before moving to Dayton, OH. She began writing […]

The future is always closer than we think: Star Trek’s communicators to smartphones; Aldous Huxley’s soma to Prozac; Ray Bradbury’s seashells to earbuds. Tochi Onyebuchi is a science fiction author with a head full of visions, from automated police response to brains used as media storage to mechs piloted by vengeful women. A master of […]

With “100+ short stories, novelettes, and novellas,” the collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, a debut novel The Grace of Kings and second book in the Dandelion Dynasty Series The Wall of Storms, a Star Wars novel Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi The Legends of Luke Skywalker, and many translations (including Liu […]

With published fiction spanning three decades, you’ve probably read Walter Jon Williams, even if you don’t know it. He’s known for changing styles and writing both within genre and in defiance of genre definitions. His work has appeared on awards lists since the ’80s, including a Sidewise Award in ’96 for “Foreign Devils,” and Nebula […]

Victo Ngai’s images have captivated the science fiction community since her striking 2011 cover for Tor.com publishing’s Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order. It is a cover with soft pastels set against a dark, dangerous backdrop, with careful intimacy amidst the danger, and a spray of petals caught in […]

Peter Watts has been selling fiction for twenty years. He has won a number of awards for fiction including an Aurora Award for short story “A Niche,” a Hugo Award for novelette “The Island,” and a Shirley Jackson Award for short story “The Things.” He has been a finalist or been nominated for a host […]

Juliette Wade started writing fiction while studying for her PhD—a combination of linguistics and anthropology: “a ridiculously close look at cultural clashes inside classrooms where American students were learning Japanese, investigating how those impacted the way the students learned politeness grammar.” After finishing her degree, she continued to write in spare moments while working at […]

Since 1982, Susan Palwick has explored visions of the fantastic. She has crafted worlds resembling ours, as well as realms strikingly different; she has taken readers to the delightful, to the humorous, and to the horrific. In creative narratives, occasionally experimenting with style and structure, she has introduced interesting, memorable characters, capturing and exploring human […]

Poet, essayist, fiction writer, editor, publisher, and more, Jacob Weisman founded Tachyon Publications in 1995 to “champion the creative storytelling of authors who inspire us through intelligent prose and imaginative worlds.” Weisman went from running fanzine Thirteenth Moon to publishing authors such as Charlie Jane Anders, Daryl Gregory, Nancy Kress, Joe R. Lansdale, Tim Powers, […]

Humanity is depending on Seske Kaleigh in Nicky Drayden’s science fiction work, Escaping Exodus. Seske Kaleigh is meant to become matriarch. Her sister, cast aside by kinship rules, still challenges Seske’s claim at every turn. And then there’s Adalla, Seske’s beast worker best friend and possibly forbidden love, facing a grim destiny of her own, […]

Maurizio Manzieri was born in Naples, Italy. Almost weekly, he visited ruins of ancient civilizations spread along the gulf, under the shadow of a volcano. He began his artistic career working as a graphic artist in advertising; his first editorial sale came in 1994 for the British magazine Interzone. Today, he is a professional illustrator […]

Science meets space opera meets heist in Derek Künsken’s The Quantum Evolution series. It all starts when con man Belisarius Arjona—a homo quantus (his mind and body have been engineered to be able to see directly into the quantum realm) and his “ensemble-cast” crew have to move a squadron of secret warships across an enemy […]

Not all is bad and terrible and grim in the future. Sometimes disaster means change, and change means growth, and growth means a future full of cool ideas and good-hearted people. Hopepunk as a genre creates an opportunity for writers to explore positivity and kindness within the context of science fiction. Beckett’s “hopetopia” does just […]

You may not have noticed, but the short fiction editors in this field are quite friendly to one another. It strikes some as odd that we can be on such collegial terms with our peers at competing magazines and anthologies, but the very things that drew us to this field draw us to one another. […]

A well-worn fictional universe is something to love. When you’ve spent countless enjoyable pages exploring the depths of nebulas and far flung planets, you find yourself occasionally wanting to go back after the last page has been turned. Thankfully, authors love to dip back in and explore their universes almost as much as we do. […]

Marrying history and a far-flung future results in a partnership unique to science fiction. It allows authors and readers alike to explore the past, present, and potential future all at once. Like the best science fiction, it allows us to examine where we’ve been and where we may still go as a society. A Memory […]

Time is a slippery thing. So are stories. They intertwine. So when a story tackles time, and you invest your time in tackling that story . . . things get very interesting. Red and Blue slip along time threads. They’re on different sides of a war unlike any you’ve ever seen. They leave notes for one another, chiding […]

Soyeon Jeong is a major author of science fiction in South Korea, and a celebrated translator of science fiction (from English to Korean). She is also a practicing attorney, and has founded and directed a charity (which works to help children in developing nations gain a quality education), as well as founding and chairing the […]

Mixing archeology and mystery with science fiction makes for a heady and addictive reading experience. Jack McDevitt’s latest entry into his Alex Benedict series of novels, Octavia Gone, starts when an artifact goes missing from Gabe’s collection which leads the group to investigate the strange disappearance of a group of scientists from a space station […]

Big news! Story sale! I’m going to be in an anthology releasing later this year. It’s a YA GamerLit anthology called Game On! Hooray! But wait! This is the same anthology that I was supposed to be a part of last summer, before it even had a name. It really will be coming out this […]

Wishing to change the past is a common thought we all entertain. Whether it is to right a wrong, avoid regret, or to extend a kindness we didn’t have time for at the moment, hindsight provides a view of the good, the bad, and the murky. Messing with timelines has long been a popular topic […]

Most of us are prone to flights of fantasy. We imagine ourselves capable heroes of a mythical kingdom full of mystery, intrigue, swordplay, and magic. But fantasy stories are often shackled by shadows of elves, rings, and medieval knights. When a fantasy novel brings ideas both new and surprising, it’s worth celebrating. Anna Kashina’s new […]

A single-author collection of short stories allows for a unique peek into the mind of the writer. You get to explore worlds that have developed through different mind-sets and times. Whereas a novel is a singular coherent work of storytelling, it can only reflect one small piece of the many universes swirling around within an […]