Freelance scribbler exploring worlds real and imagined
“What genre do you write?” On the surface that seems like a pretty straightforward question, but anyone who’s spent some time in the literary world knows it can get weirdly complicated—especially for those of us who write in the styles often shoehorned under “genre” (AKA anything that’s not literary realism).
Gwendolyn Kiste 250 pages Trepidatio Publishing (2018)
Read this if you like: Atmospheric horror, Rust Belt narratives, sympathetic monsters
tl;dr summary: The girls of Denton Street rusted in the summer of 1980 and survivor Phoebe Shaw is back 30 years later to find out why.
The impetus for this post was a panel at this year’s Chicon/Worldcon. The focus of that panel was a bit broader, looking at cats across sci-fi and fantasy—not anthropomorphized, humanoid felines, which are their own unique subset of fictional races, and not other felines like lions and panthers, but Standard Issue Cats in human-dominated worlds.
There were a lot of great questions raised at that panel, like how storytellers use cats in their narratives, the difference between an animal and human character, and the broader role of pets and animals in general in human-centric sci-fi worlds. So I decided to take a closer look at some of my favorite space cats to see how their creators answered those questions.
Kerstin Hall 436 pages Tor (2021)
Read this if you like: Unique magic systems, religious dystopias tl;dr summary: Young Acolyte living on a floating city is caught up in the intrigue of her cannibalistic magic sisterhood.
Read the full summary on Bookshop
One piece of advice new writers hear a lot is to avoid the passive voice. It’s right there in Strunk & White, rule number 14: “Use the active voice.” What many citers of this rule ignore is that they go on to say that, while the active voice is more “direct and vigorous” than passive:
This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.
So when can you use passive voice, when should you use active voice, and why does it matter? Let’s start with the basics.
Chapbook-length manuscripts are admittedly more common for poetry than for fiction, but that certainly doesn’t mean they’re off-limits for prose writers. This length of around 20-40 pages is ideal for collections of micro-fiction and micro-essays, as well as stand alone short stories and essays that aren’t quite big enough to be novellas (if you write things that straddle that length divide, you can check out my list of long short story and novella publishers to find more places to send them).
Since this length and style of book has been considered the domain of poets for so long, though, searching for fiction chapbook publishers can be frustrating. They’re definitely out there—it can just take creative search terms and time spent scouring press guidelines to find them.
Chris Tarry 128 pages Red Hen Press (2015)
Read this if you like: Kelly Link, Raymond Carver, Haruki Murakami tl;dr summary: Quirky merger of cryptids and fantasy with real-world settings and emotions.
Read the full summary on Bookshop
One of my favorite things about Jordan Peele’s movies as a whole is that they don’t fit neatly into any genre box. A big reason for this is Peele’s worldbuilding style and prowess. His films take place in worlds that are just slant of reality: normal on the surface, but with one strange, horrifying difference lurking below—quite literally, in the case of Us, and metaphorically in his debut Get Out. It’s a similar thought experiment model that underpins many episodes of Twilight Zone, and it makes sense that Peele is at the helm of that reboot.
(Note: Thar be spoilers past this point. If you haven’t seen Nope and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now.)
Monica Byrne 608 pages Harper Voyager (2021)
Read this if you like: Maya civilization, anarchist utopias, long-view fiction tl;dr summary: A story across three timelines spanning 2,000 years, from a dying dynasty in the Maya empire to a nomadic far-future civilization and a teenager on vacation in Belize in the middle.
Read the full summary on Bookshop
One of my favorite things about the Star Trek franchise is the way they never let a good piece of worldbuilding go to waste. There are tons of examples I could cite from the latest slew of series, but the one I’m most tickled by is the resurrection of Captain Pike.
(Note: Thar be spoilers in this post, so if you haven’t watched Discovery or Strange New Worlds and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now).