My novels have been characterized as being “Afrofuturistic,” but to be honest I never thought of the subgenre while writing them. When I write I generally don’t think of any subgenre before I sit down to create the work. My thinking when writing is usually concentrated more on story and narrative construction, not on the genre. Mostly all that is happening is that I have a story to tell, I ...Read More
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LAVIE TIDHAR was born November 16, 1976 and raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has traveled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.
Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century. Story “Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs” ...Read More
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Your debut novel Mort(e) came out in 2015 and launched the War with No Name Series. Tell us about that book and the world it introduced.
The sales team likes to call it either “Animal Farm on steroids” or “Animal Farm with machine guns.” In short, the series is about a war between humans and sentient animals. In this world, a hyperintelligent queen of a globe-spanning ant colony has vowed ...Read More
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When I was a baby writer, I obsessively collected career advice from established writers, reading books and essays and attending panels on ‘‘How I broke in’’ featuring established pros. It’s a testament to the irrational, burning desire to publish that I continued to do this long after it became apparent that there was nothing of contemporary applicability in these discussions.
I mean, it was entertaining to hear a writer describe ...Read More
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Travis John Klune was born May 20, 1982, in Roseburg OR, where he lived until his family relocated to Tucson AZ when he was 16. He moved to Virginia in 2013, where he worked in insurance before becoming a full-time writer in 2016.
Klune began publishing with Bear, Otter and the Kid (2011), and has authored numerous queer romances. His first work of genre interest was Burn (2012). Lambda Award ...Read More
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Austin Grossman, Sean Stewart & Neal Stephenson collaborated on Audible Original New Found Land: The Long Haul, released in June 2021. Stewart sent a photo of the team at Enchanted Rock State Natural Area in Texas: “No, seriously, we really were doing research!” For details on the project: <www.audible.com/pd/New-Found-Land-The-Long-Haul-Audiobook/B096BMCLT3>.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on ...Read More
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Stephen Graham Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe, was born in 1972 in Midland TX, and grew up in Texas apart, from a year in Colorado when he was a teenager. He attended Texas Tech University, studying English and philosophy, and attained a master’s degree at the University of North Texas. He earned his PhD in creative writing at Florida State University. Jones taught at Texas Tech before accepting ...Read More
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Here’s some feedback I’ve received from editors, agents, and marketing managers in response to my work over the years:
“This is just a jumble of words.”
“I think this suffers from a failure of the imagination.”
“This is sorta too emotional.”
“Try again.”
One of the most difficult skills a writer must learn – whether writing novels, screenplays, marketing copy, or news articles – is how to receive, process, and ...Read More
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The Locus Awards Weekend took place on June 23-26, 2021, in its second virtual-only iteration. Connie Willis emceed the awards ceremony along with host Liza Trombi. There were over 150 registrations, and full members received a Locus t-shirt and awards program. There was also a sliding scale, attendance-only membership available.
This year’s online event added panels and doubled the number of readings. A pocket convention, the online events had seven ...Read More
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Tell us about your debut novel She Who Became the Sun — the world where it takes place, and the characters who inhabit that world.
She Who Became the Sun is set in China in the mid-1350s, which was the last gasps of a period of short-lived Mongol rule over China — the Yuan dynasty. The Mongols were steppe warriors from a nomadic culture, and China was a sedentary civilisation ...Read More
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Tell us a bit about The Freedom Race—the world where it takes place, and the characters who inhabit that world.
In The Freedom Race, which is set in the future, a second civil war, referred to as the Sequel, has transformed the country into the Disunited States. Other kinds of instability—climate change, refugee crises, ideological divisions, and pandemics—have also taken a toll. After the Sequel, rural areas of the ...Read More
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The “Enchanted: A History of Fantasy Illustration” exhibit, featuring pivotal works of science fiction and fantasy art from greats of the field both past and present, is on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge MA from June 12-October 31, 2021. Bob Eggleton said, “It is truly a pinnacle for fantasy art to be recognized in such a venue. Curator Jesse Kowalski brought it all together.” For more information ...Read More
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Zoe Khaw Joo Ee was born August 31, 1984 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but has gone by Cassandra Khaw for the past 20 years. Khaw lived in Malaysia until age 25, then spent ten years traveling before settling in Montreal, Canada. Khaw worked as a journalist and video game writer in addition to writing fiction, and is currently a senior scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal.
Khaw began publishing short fiction in ...Read More
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CHRISTOPHER TRACY BROWN was born June 10, 1964 in Des Moines IA. He grew up there, then went to Phillips Exeter, a prep school in New Hampshire, for high school (where his classmates included author Dan Brown; no relation). He spent a gap year traveling in Europe and working in Washington DC, then attended college at Tulane University in New Orleans, studying political economy, and spent a year at Oxford ...Read More
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I care about monopolies for exactly one reason: self-determination. I don’t care about competition as an end unto itself, or fetishize “choice” for its own sake. What I care about is your ability to live your life in the way you think will suit you, to the greatest extent possible, and taking into account the obvious limits when other people’s needs and wants conflict with you realizing your own desires. ...Read More
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Bacchanal is a richly imagined historical fantasy. Tell us a bit about the book: the world where it takes place, and the characters who inhabit that world.
Bacchanal is set against the backdrop of The Great Depression and culminates with the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. At the center of this maelstrom is an unusual young woman, Eliza Meeks. She’s alone, ostracized and struggling to navigate her reality – a family that ...Read More
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The Library of the Dead is the first book in a new series from Tor. Tell us a bit about it — the world where it takes place, and the characters who inhabit that world
My new book, The Library of the Dead, is the first in a brand-new series called Edinburgh Nights. It tells the story of Ropa Moyo, a young girl who delivers messages from ghosts to ...Read More
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Alison Campbell-Wise was born December 30, 1979 in Montreal, Canada. She moved to New Jersey 20 years ago with her husband, and they now live in the Philadelphia PA area.
She began publishing short fiction in 2005. Notable stories include Nebula Award finalists “How the Trick Is Done” (2019) and novella Catfish Lullaby, Sunburst Award winner “The Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)” ...Read More
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CHARLES CHOWKAI YU was born January 3, 1976 in Los Angeles CA. He attended UC Berkeley, where he studied molecular and cell biology, graduating in 1997, and then went to Columbia Law School, earning his law degree in 2001. He worked as a lawyer until 2014, when he took a job writing for SF drama Westworld on HBO. He went on to write for other shows (including Lodge 49 and ...Read More
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Like most authors, I have more experience writing beginnings than I do endings, but perhaps not in the way one would expect. Some of this is an artifact of the linear way we have evolved to see time. It’s how many of us were taught to approach narrative. For many years I began every story with a scene, an inciting incident, a mood, a situation, and wrote until I figured ...Read More
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Reiko Murakami is a US-based concept artist and illustrator specializing in surreal fantasy and horror art. With her subtle and expressive gesture drawings she focuses on capturing moments filled with unspeakable emotions. Her illustrations have appeared on many projects such as Tor.com, Magic: the Gathering, and Basketful of Heads (Hill House Comics, DC). Her work has been exhibited at Nucleus Portland, Helikon Gallery, Krabjab Studio, Light Grey Art Lab and ...Read More
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Nghi Dong Vo was born December 4, 1981 in Peoria IL. She lived there until attending college at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where she studied political science and media studies. In 2007 she settled in Milwaukee WI.
Vo’s first story was “Gift of Flight” in 2007, and she has since published almost 20 stories in various publications. Her first book was Crawford Award winning novella The Empress of ...Read More
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It’s a little dangerous, after selling a story to a professional science fiction or fantasy publication, to start calculating the odds of pulling in an award nomination. The draw is inexorable though – the Nebula Awards, the Hugos, World Fantasy, Locus. It’s the stuff of legends. Through the years, now-familiar SF/F names have stood to accept these awards, held them up to the light and heard that applause. It’s accomplishment, ...Read More
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Nnedimma Nkemdili Okorafor was born April 8, 1974 in Cincinnati OH to Igbo parents who emigrated from Nigeria in 1969. She earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of Illinois in 1996 and an MA in journalism from Michigan State University in 1999. She attended the University of Chicago, getting her MA in English in 2002 and completing her PhD in 2007. She attended the Clarion writing workshop in ...Read More
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Tell us about Windumanoth. Where are you based, how often are issues released, and what kind of material do you publish?
Windumanoth is officially based in Barcelona, Spain. But the reality is that most of the staff live in different places in the country, and we’ve worked remotely from the beginning.
The issues are released every four months. This is a somewhat long publication cadence to be able to ...Read More
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Norwescon 43 was held April 1-4, 2021 as an online event; the theme was “The Longest Night”. Guests of honor, held over from 2020, were Jacqueline Carey (writer), Sana Takeda (artist), and Susan Langley (science). Tor was the spotlight publisher, represented by Claire Eddy. There were 1,469 registrations and over 1,000 attendees. The weekend included over 250 hours of programming with hundreds of panels, 40 readings, 69 gaming slots, ten ...Read More
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The 41st International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA 42) took place virtually March 17-20, 2021, with a theme of “Climate Change and the Anthropocene”. Academics, writers, publishers, editors, artists, students, independent scholars, and more participated, with a record 555 people registered (compared to 2019 with 480 attending), and about 340 either presenting a paper or appearing on a panel (up from 285 in 2019). Jeff VanderMeer was ...Read More
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Last summer, the pandemic was in its first wave and the nation was in chaos. A lack of federal leadership left each state to figure out how to interpret the science, and many states punted public health decisions to counties or cities or even smaller units, like universities.
Leaders, left to their own, often winged it, letting wishful thinking trump prudence in the drive to find ways to “reopen safely.” ...Read More
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Victoria Isabel Santiago Yap was born May 23, 1990 in Manila in the Philippines and grew up in Quezon City. She attended Ateneo de Manila University for her first two years of undergrad, then moved to the US, where she earned a BS in Marketing from Santa Clara University in 2013. That summer she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 she has served as secretary for the Clarion ...Read More
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“Nice try, but she should go read Tom Clancy to see how it’s done.”
That was a review on my first novel, Aurora: Darwin. I remember being a little stumped by this at the time because I hadn’t been trying to emulate Tom Clancy at all. I’ve never actually read any of his books, and as far as I’m aware he doesn’t write science fiction…. Perhaps it was the ...Read More
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Ursula Vernon was born May 28, 1977 in Japan to a military family. She lived in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and grew up mostly in Oregon, Arizona, California, and Minnesota, moving 18 times by age 20. She attended Macalester College in Saint Paul MN. Vernon has lived in North Carolina for the past 17 years.
An illustrator and author, Vernon has written extensively for children and also writes ...Read More
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In ancient Rome, they marked the new year in March, a time which has always made far more sense to me than a dark, frigid day in January. March is when we get the first breath of spring, when winter’s grasp begins to ease, and we realize that we have survived another miserly winter season.
After a very dark COVID-19 winter surge, I have emerged bleary-eyed into a new year ...Read More
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