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Rob Cameron is an ESL teacher in Brooklyn. When he’s not writing stories, planning events for the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, or producing the Kaleidocast, he finds time to climb large objects, race dragon boats, fight ninjas, and pity fools. His e-mail address is [email protected], and he blogs at http://rob-cameron.com.
Cameron tells us he wrote “Squeeze” while road-tripping from New York City to Burlington, Massachusetts, on the way to Readercon.
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A.C. Wise’s short fiction can be found in publications such as Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Uncanny, and Clockwork Phoenix 4, among other places. Her debut collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published by Lethe Press in October 2015. In addition to her fiction, she coedits Unlikely Story and contributes a monthly “Women to Read: Where to Start” column to SF Signal. Find her online at http://www.acwise.net.
She writes that “‘A Guide to Birds by Song (After Death)’ started with the image of whale bones in the desert. There really are whale bones in the desert—Wadi al-Hitan (the Valley of the Whales) was first discovered in the Egyptian Sahara Desert in 1902. Of course, the whale bones in my story look nothing like the real thing, and my story has nothing to do with Egypt, because that’s the way writer brains work, right? We fix on an irresistible image or idea, and twist it around and make it our own. Birds tend to show up in my fiction quite a bit; there’s something eerie about them, maybe because they never forgot how it felt when they were dinosaurs. Somehow it seemed natural to pair birds with the themes of love, loss, and death, and that’s how this story came to be.”
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Gray Rinehart is the only person to have commanded an Air Force tracking station, written speeches for Presidential appointees, had music on “The Dr. Demento Show,” and been nominated for a literary award.
Gray’s fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and elsewhere. His story, “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium,” was a finalist for the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. He is also a singer/songwriter with two albums of mostly science-fiction-and-fantasy-inspired songs.
Before becoming a Contributing Editor (the “Slushmaster General”) for Baen Books, Gray fought rocket propellant fires, refurbished space launch facilities, commanded the Air Force’s largest satellite tracking station, and did other interesting things during his rather odd United States Air Force career. Gray’s alter ego is the Gray Man, one of several famed ghosts of South Carolina’s Grand Strand, and his website is http://www.graymanwrites.com.
About “The Sorcerer of Etah,” he writes, “I walked some of the frozen terrain in this story when I was stationed at Thule Air Base in Greenland. It is stark, forbidding, but often beautiful, and the Inuit who live in the local towns and villages are friendly, resourceful, and imaginative. I hope I did them, their language, and their legends justice, and that readers find it hard to tell where my fiction ends and the struggle for life on the edge of the ice cap begins.”
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Sam Fleming is a writer and scientist living in northeast Scotland with an artistic spouse and the correct number of bicycles, that being more than most people think sensible and still not enough. Her work has appeared in Black Static, the Dagan Books anthology Fish, the NewCon Press anthology Looking Landwards, and most recently in Apex magazine and the Best of Apex Volume 1. Find her at http://ravenbait.com and http://ravenfamily.org/sam.
About “The Prime Importance of a Happy Number,” she had this to share: “I had a dream about a fragile but extraordinarily strong woman hurling objects across a table at a powerful young man who wanted to rule the world, trying to make him see her. The young man forced himself to be polite to the old man with her, only because the people he wanted to join were always polite, not because he understood why, or had any intention of remaining polite once he had what he wanted, which interested me. I see that a lot: women’s roles undervalued, and politeness used as a disguise in order to get something, rather than out of respect for others as human beings. It’s irksome. Incidentally, I laughed like a drain on discovering shrinking the Eiffel Tower by that prime number resulted in an approximation of pi, and matching word count to prime number tables wasn't as hard as I expected. I like Audrey. I hope to see more of her.”
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Sunil Patel is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his fiction has appeared in Fireside Magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Flash Fiction Online, The Book Smugglers, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, among others. Plus he reviews books for Lightspeed and is Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta. His favorite things to consume include nachos, milkshakes, and narrative. Find out more at http://ghostwritingcow.com, where you can watch his plays, or follow him at @ghostwritingcow. His Twitter has been described as “engaging,” “exclamatory,” and “crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery.”
About “Social Visiting,” he shared that “growing up, I rarely enjoyed social visiting, the tedious and repetitive process of visiting various aunties and uncles. Yes, it was an important part of keeping in touch with my extended family—which, in Indian culture, is as close as direct family—but let’s face it, it was boring. What if it wasn’t, though? What if there was something secretly magical about it all? This story was my attempt to inject some beautiful strangeness into a common Indian teen experience.”
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By day, Carlos Hernandez is a CUNY Associate Professor of English, with appointments at BMCC and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of over thirty short stories, mostly SF/F, as well as SF/F drama and poetry. His first collection of short stories, The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, was published in January 2016. Find out more at http://quantumsanteria.com.
C.S.E. Cooney lives and writes in a well-appointed Rhode Island garret, across from a Victorian strolling park. She is an audiobook narrator for Tantor Media, a performance poet, and the singer-songwriter Brimstone Rhine. Her poetry collection How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, her Dark Breaker series, and her novellas Jack o’ the Hills and The Witch in the Almond Tree are available on Amazon. In 2011, she won the Rhysling Award for her story-poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her first short fiction collection Bone Swans (Mythic Delirium 2015) has garnered starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Keep up with Claire at http://csecooney.com.
Together they had this to say about “The Book of May”: “We have entered a new Golden Age of epistolaries. In the age of the telephone, many lamented the lost art of letter writing. But now it’s back: e-mail, texting, voice-to-text, e-invites, Facebook status updates, Tweets. We are, as a culture, rediscovering our textual selves. Some of us still write snail mail, too. We read Flaubert’s letters at an influential age, and all we ever want to do is send our friends miniature novels in stamped and sealed envelopes. We know they’re our friends, of course, if they take time to decipher our execrable handwriting. That said, whether scribbling our innermost thoughts in peacock-blue ink on illuminated vellum or knocking off an e-mail at forty-five words a minute, there is something so intimate, so revealing in a letter unique to that medium. The people we are when we write are both idealized and inadvertently exhibitionist. After all, we can edit, rewrite, delete, and trash—we can try again. But at the same time, writing reveals how unaware we can be, how casually and blithely we expose our ugliest prejudices to the world. And the insights, hopes, terrors, raptures, and kindnesses we didn’t even know we had. Like wrapping up an exposed nerve still singing and stinging and raw from its contact with the ravages of the world and posting it in trust to the person at the other end of the line/signal/private message box/USPS delivery service. That’s what’s stra
ngest about writing, finally, how ghost-laden it is, how queerly capable concatenated strings of ink or pixels are at rendering the human mind. And the ghost is, in the end, all that remains of us. —CAPH, CSEC”
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Holly Heisey launched her writing career in sixth grade when she wrote her class play, a medieval fantasy. It was love at first dragon. Since then, her short fiction has appeared in Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show and Escape Pod, and she is a multiple finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest. A freelance designer by day, Holly lives in Pennsylvania with Larry and Moe, her two pet cacti, and she is currently at work on a science fantasy epic. You can find her online at http://hollyheisey.com.
About “The Tiger’s Silent Roar,” she writes, “I have never known a line between science fiction and fantasy. I grew up on Madeleine L’Engle’s genre-bending Time Quintet, and in my teenage years devoured Dune. For me, the beauty of speculative fiction is that there are no lines, no limits to the possibilities of what you can do with story.
“With ‘The Tiger’s Silent Roar,’ I wanted to explore a world that held both the familiar—corruption, passion, and self-sacrificing love—and the wondrous. Today we outsource our companies; is it so implausible that one day we might outsource our happiness? As for myself, I want to embrace the world with my senses wide open. I want to experience the trees and birds and insects as the grand system they are, and view the people around me with a whole new level of wonder. There might be tragedy and tyranny in the world, but if there’s one thing I learned from those Madeleine L’Engle books growing up, it’s that love and beauty will always win in the end.”
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Barbara Krasnoff’s short fiction can be found in a wide variety of anthologies, most notably (of course) Clockwork Phoenix 2 and Clockwork Phoenix 4. Others (many with very long names) include Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction, Fat Girls in a Strange Land, Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring ’20s, Such a Pretty Face: Tales of Power and Abundance, and Memories and Visions: Women’s Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Her work has also appeared in a number of online and print magazines, including Mythic Delirium, Triptych Tales, Crossed Genres, Perihelion, Space and Time, Abyss & Apex, Electric Velocipede, Apex, Weird Tales, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Amazing Stories. She is a member of the Tabula Rasa writers group and attended the 2015 Starry Coast workshop.
When not writing fiction, Barbara works as Sr. Reviews Editor for the tech publication Computerworld. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her partner Jim Freund and lots of toy penguins. Her website can be found at http://brooklynwriter.com.
She writes that “the origin of ‘Sabbath Wine’ stems from a variety of inspirations. They include three books: Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition by Marni Davis, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent, and Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America, from the collection of James Allen and John Littlefield. And, not least, stories from my family—especially my mother, who as a little girl would sit outside a storefront church and listen to the gospel music.”
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Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and in various anthologies including The Humanity of Monsters, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, and Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.
She tells us that “‘The Trinitite Golem’ occurred to me first as a title in the summer of 2013. By the following February, I thought it was going to be a poem (http://www.strangehorizons.com/2014/20140224/poetry-a.shtml). A week-long writing blitz that concluded in early March disproved this notion. As with almost all of my historical fiction, I did a bibliography’s worth of research for a couple of thousand words. My primary biographical source for Oppenheimer was Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2006). My primary source for nuclear physics was Robert Serber’s The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992). Rabi is only a walk-on in this story, but I recommend John S. Rigden’s Rabi, Scientist & Citizen (2000) if you’re interested in him: at the 1954 hearing, he was the one person besides Kitty Oppenheimer who spoke out openly against the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Atomic Energy Commission. The epigraph is from his testimony. I did not know until I had finished the story that ‘Oppenheimer’ is a name associated with a branch of the descendants of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Mahara”l, the creator of the Golem of Prague, but that’s all right; I don’t imagine Oppie knew, either. This story appears with thanks to my father, Jaime Taaffe, who never thought I couldn’t do the math.”
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Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor, and historian. When not translating from Classical Armenian or researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, Alex writes stories, found in Clarkesworld Magazine, Phantasm Japan, Solaris Rising 3, Gigantic Worlds, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014. Alex is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014), and in 2015 joined Sofia Samatar as coeditor of nonfiction and poetry for Interfictions Online. Follow @foxvertebrae on Twitter for more.
About “Two Bright Venuses,” they write that the story “belongs to a framework set out in another story, ‘Pocket Atlas of Planets,’ published in Interfictions Online. It combines two of my favourite things: the wonders of space and the possibilities of gender beyond the binary. I wanted to expand on parts of that story in longer pieces, and this is the Venus section. When I originally wrote the short Venus section, I found (on Wikipedia) a translation of the ‘Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa’: a record of astronomical observations of Venus most likely made in the reign of King Ammisaduqa in the seventeenth century BCE. It describes the rising and setting of superior and inferior Venus, reflecting the different positions of Venus in Earth’s sky, which led some to believe that there were two separate stars. That was the seed for this story. I’m currently working on a novella set on an alternate Mars, bringing in a lot of the non-binary gender considerations I want to explore further (which ‘Two Bright Venuses’ doesn’t contain) as well as more space and alien life.”
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Shveta Thakrar is a writer of South Asian–flavored fantasy, social justice activist, and part-time nagini. Her work has appeared in Interfictions Online, Mythic Delirium, Uncanny, Faerie, Strange Horizons, Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, and Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. When not spinning stories about spider silk and shadows, magic and marauders, and courageous girls illuminated by dancing rainbow flames, Shveta crafts, devours books, daydreams, draws, travels, bakes, and occasionally even practices her harp. Find out more at http://shvetathakrar.com or follow her on Twitter at @ShvetaThakrar.
As for “By Thread of Night and Starlight Needle,” she had these thoughts to share: “Kill your darlings, they say, unless you can find a way to make them add to the story.
“What often goes unmentioned, however, is that sometimes a single line or paragraph, a glittering idea you really love, might come to you in your current manuscript but be destined for a different project. Then it’s not a question of wrong text so much as of the wrong time, of not killing your darling so much as cutting it out of the false home and stitching it into the true one.
“This happened to me; a bit I cut from my novel in progress helped spark a new story, the one you can read in this anthology. I began to play with structure and metanarr
ative and attachments literal and figurative, and quickly realized the snippet I’d set aside would fit right into the burgeoning tale. So in it went, and if you’ll forgive me the extended metaphor, I used my sharpest needle to sew it to the newer scraps of text.
“The result? A crazy quilt of witchy old ladies, bewildering beverages, and the question of just what, exactly, siblings owe each other. Oh, and seams. Lots and lots of seams.”
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Cassandra Khaw is a London-based writer with roots in Southeast Asia. She works as a business developer for Ysbryd Games, has published an e-novella with Abaddon Books, and writes a lot about fantastical creatures like old women with a sense of agency. When not otherwise doing all manner of other things, she practices Muay Thai and dance.
She writes that “‘The Games We Play’ came from a world I built when I was in college, about a dog-people and a bird-people who had, at some point in history, learned to coexist in a horrible way. The bird-people tithed about half their population to the dog-people, who gave them military support and whatnot in exchange. I never did anything with the world, but the idea of it stuck. And ‘The Games We Play’ kinda came about because of it, and because of thoughts about how we sometimes help continue systemic abuse without realizing it. But mostly, it comes from rage. Rage at people who will abuse the weak, who will manipulate them for the sake of simple, stupid games. Rage that may never find resolution, but a powerful rage all the same.”
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Keffy R. M. Kehrli is a science fiction and fantasy writer currently living on Long Island in New York. When he’s not writing, he’s busy working on his PhD, doing science, or editing GlitterShip (http://www.glittership.com). His own fiction has appeared in publications such as Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Clockwork Phoenix 5, among others.
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