Spotlight

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Sizemore is the founder of Apex Pub­lications, which publishes books and also produced Hugo Award finalist Apex Maga­zine (formerly Apex Digest) from 2005-2019, when the journal went on hiatus. The magazine has now been reborn, and Sizemore talked to us a bit about the history and future of the project.

After going on hiatus in 2019, Apex is coming back. Tell us about why you shut down, and why ...Read More

Fantasy Magazine, which shut down in 2012, has reopened under the editorship of Arley Sorg & Christie Yant, with the first issue of the new incarnation out this month. We asked the new editors to give us a little history and tell us their plans for the magazine. For more: <www.fantasy-magazine.com>.

After going on hiatus in 2012, Fantasy Magazine has been reborn! Tell us about why it’s coming back and ...Read More

Francesca Myman is the design editor at Locus, where she has worked for 13 years. At Locus she’s been responsible for cover art and interior interview designs since 2011, as well as spot and ad graphics, convention coverage and photography, ad hoc interviews, event planning, and art book acquisitions and wrangling for the Recommended Reading List, and more. She is a Clarion West graduate and a graduate of Yale University, ...Read More

Born in London, England, Ho Che Anderson was named after the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutionaries Ho Chi Minh and Che Gue­vara. Anderson began his career as the author of nu­merous graphic novels, including King, a biography of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.; the horror thriller Sand & Fury; and the science fiction action-adventure Godhead. Anderson wrote and directed his first feature in 2018, the supernatural ...Read More

Tell us about your debut novel Scarlet Odyssey. What’s it about, and what inspired you to write it?

Scarlet Odyssey follows a young man whose bookish nature and affinity for magic puts him at odds with the rest of his society, in which the path of books and magic is considered feminine, while the art of warfare is seen as the worthiest masculine pursuit. As the first-born son of a ...Read More

Your newly released novel Fate of the Fallen is the start of a new series. Tell us about the book, the world, and your plans for the series.

Fate of the Fallen is a story about the internal conflicts that humans, as a species, experience. It begins with the basic balance between civilization and nature then turns inward toward the struggles of the heart. It confronts the value of survival ...Read More

The Ruin of Kings launched the Chorus of Dragons series, and book two, The Name of All Things, is out soon. Tell us about the series.

Fortunately for me, A Chorus of Dragons really IS about dragons. Also: gods, demons, prophecies, so much magic, and the poor fools caught in the middle of that whirlwind. But dig a little deeper and the series is about the way massive systems corrupt ...Read More

Your first novel Magic for Liars is forthcoming from Tor in June (exciting!) and combines detective story and magic school tropes. Tell us a bit about the book. What appeals to you about those particular tropes? Did working with both create extra challenges or just give you more elements to play with?

Magic for Liars follows Ivy Gamble, P.I., as she investigates the murder of a faculty member at a ...Read More

DAVID BALDACCI published his first novel, Absolute Power, in 1996. The feature film adaptation followed, with Clint Eastwood as its director and star. Baldacci has published 37 novels for adults; all have been national and international bestsellers, and several have been adapted for film and television. His novels are published in over 45 languages and in more than 80 countries, with over 130 million worldwide sales. Baldacci has also ...Read More

Cynthia Sheppard has been creating artwork for books and games since the mid-2000s. Her illustrations are inspired by a late 19th-century realist painting and modern fantasy art, with a focus on emotional resonance and visual storytelling. She’s currently a senior art director at Wizards of the Coast, where she create worlds and has commissioned over 2,000 illustrations for the card game Magic: The Gathering.

She told us, “If I’ve ever ...Read More

Greg Ruth is a New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Boy and NDEH (with Ethan Hawke) and has worked making books and comics since 1993. He has published work through The New York Times, DC Com­ics, Fantagraphics Books, Mondo, Dark Horse, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hyperion, Simon and Schuster, the Criterion Collection, Slate, CNN, Penguin, Hachette, and Tor. He has created two music videos for Prince and Rob Thomas, and ...Read More

Having created illustrations for many publish­ers, including Simon & Schuster, Random House and Hyperion/Disney, Omar Rayyan’s primary market was geared towards children’s and young adult’s magazine and books, doing cover and interior illustrations. He also illustrated several children’s picture books.

Other genres he has worked in include the gam­ing market, most notably for Magic: The Gathering, where he has done card art and concept work. Omar was also among the ...Read More

Victo Ngai is a Los Angeles based illustrator from Hong Kong, graduated from Rhode Island School of Design. “Victo” is not a boy nor a typo, but a nickname derived from Victoria – a leftover from the British colonization.

Ngai’s work appears in advertising, packaging, magazines, books, newspapers and animation, her clients include The New York Times, The New Yorker, Apple, Prophecy Wines, Johnnie Walker, American Express, Lufthansa Airline, General ...Read More

Israel, I am informed, seems to be having an SF moment. Or, from the unexpectedly enthusiastic early reviews of the anthology I co-edited with Emanuel Lottem, Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, SF may be having an Israel moment.

As well it should. After all, the Jewish State drew inspiration from a knock-off of Edward Bellamy’s late 19th-century utopian romance, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, notably, Zionist ideologue ...Read More

Jason Kirk is a senior editor for Amazon Publishing’s 47North and Skyscape imprints. Books edited by Kirk have won the Arthur C. Clarke, British Science Fiction Association, and UTOPiA Book of the Year Awards, and have been finalists for the Philip K. Dick and Bram Stoker Awards. Prior to joining Amazon Publishing in 2014, Kirk worked in magazine publishing and music journalism for 15 years. Aside from his interest in ...Read More

Sarah Pinsker’s first professional sale was “20 Ways the Desert Could Kill You” in 2012. She followed that with the Sturgeon Award-winning “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind”, also her first Nebula Award-nominated story. She has since won the Nebula Award for novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her 40+ stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. Her first collection, ...Read More

Michelle Sagara was born in, and has spent all her life living in, what is now called Toronto. Her long-suffering husband and two children have learned that there’s nothing terribly mystical or magical about being a writer, although the experience of watching their mother has made imposter syn­drome and lack of critical objectivity about one’s work seem completely normal.

Reading is one of her life-long passions, and she is sometimes ...Read More

Tricia Reeks lives in the bear-infested mountains of Asheville, North Carolina with her mountaineer husband and her two ferocious French bulldogs. She is the founder of Meerkat Press, the co-editor of Behind the Mask: An Anthology of Heroic Proportions (a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2017) and Love Hurts: A Speculative Fiction Anthology.

Tell us about how your press was founded. Why did you decide to get into ...Read More

Andy Weir was first hired as a program­mer for a national laboratory at age 15 and has been work­ing as a software en­gineer ever since. He is also a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of sub­jects like relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. First novel The Martian was a bestseller and was adapted as a popular feature film. New novel Artemis is out this ...Read More