Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  About the Authors

  Basma Abdel Aziz is an award-winning writer, sculptor, and psychiatrist. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the author of several works of non-fiction books and a columnist for Al-Shorouk. In 2016 she was named one of Foreign Policy’s Global Thinkers for her debut novel The Queue, which was also nominated in 2017 in the long list of BTBA. She lives in Cairo.

  Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit. His 2012 fantasy novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, and Salon. He is currently writing Black Bolt for Marvel Comics and Abbott for Boom! Studios.

  William Alexander is a National Book Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of fantasy and science fiction for kids. He is also a second generation Cuban-American immigrant to the United States. He studied theater and folklore at Oberlin College, English at the University of Vermont, and creative writing at Clarion. He now teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Find him online at goblinsecrets.com.

  Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus, and Crawford Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in Wired Magazine, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere, and her story, “Six Months Three Days,” won a Hugo Award. She runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco and used to spout off on io9.com. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

  K. Tempest Bradford is a speculative fiction writer by night, a media critic and writing instructor by day, and a podcaster in the interstices. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines including Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede, Diverse Energies, In the Shadow of the Towers, and many more. She’s the host of ORIGINality, a podcast about the roots of creative genius, and contributes to several more. Her media criticism and reviews can be found on NPR, io9, and in books about Time Lords. When not writing, she teaches classes on writing inclusive fiction through LitReactor and WritingtheOther.com. Visit her blog at KtempestBradford.com and her Patreon at patreon.com/ktempestbradford.

  Jennifer Marie Brissett is the author of the novel Elysium (Aqueduct Press), winner of the Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation. Her short fiction has appeared in Fantastic Stories, Morpheus Tales, The Future Fire, FIYAH Magazine, Terraform, Thaumatrope, Uncanny Magazine, and Halfway Down the Stairs, and she has contributed to the anthology, Warrior Wisewoman 2 (Norilana Books). She holds a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine.

  A community organizer and teacher, Maurice Broaddus’s work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Weird Tales, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, Cemetery Dance, Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs (Rosarium Publishing). His books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court, and the (upcoming) middle grade detective novel, The Usual Suspects. His latest novella is Buffalo Soldier (Tor.com). As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Dark Faith: Invocations, Streets of Shadows, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror, and Apex Magazine. Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.

  Christopher Brown is the author of Tropic of Kansas, a novel published in 2017 by Harper Voyager. He was a World Fantasy Award nominee for Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, an anthology he co-edited. His short fiction and criticism has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, The Baffler, and Reckoning.

  Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in, three of which have been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have been included in volumes of The Year’s Best Horror (Datlow), The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (Guran) and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction; in venues such as Nightmare, Fantasy, The Dark, and ChiZine; and in anthologies such as She Walks in Shadows (winner of the World Fantasy Award) and Aickman’s Heirs (winner of the Shirley Jackson Award). She spent her childhood in Indonesia with a Javanese father and an American mother, then relocated to Nebraska. She now has a B.A. in political science, an M.A. in international affairs, and lives in Washington, D.C.

  Chesya Burke is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She has written and published nearly a hundred fiction and articles within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, noir, and horror. Her story collection, Let’s Play White, is being taught in universities around the country and her novel, The Strange Crimes of Little Africa, debuted in December 2015. Poet Nikki Giovanni compared her writing to that of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison, and Samuel Delany called her “a formidable new master of the macabre.” Chesya received her Master’s degree in African American Studies from Georgia State University.

  Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Their fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing the Future. Joyce also co-edited The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (Rosarium Publishing) with Jaymee Goh. Their recent space opera novels deal with wolf clans and vineyards. Occasionally, they wrangle article editing at Strange Horizons and Umbel & Panicle. Their alter ego, J. Damask, writes about werewolves in Singapore. You can find them at http://awolfstale.wordpress.com and @jolantru.

  John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com among other venues. His translations have been published or is forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF, and other venues. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

  Argentinian Claudia De Bella was an author, English teacher, rock singer, and award-winning translator. Her short stories have appeared in Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. She passed away in April 2018.

  Mame Bougouma Diene is a Franco–Senegalese American humanitarian living in Brooklyn, New York, and the US/Francophone spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society (http://www.africansfs.com/), with a fondness for progressive metal, tattoos, and policy analysis. You can find his work in Brittle Paper, Omenana, Galaxies Magazine (French), Edilivres (French), Fiyah! Magazine, Truancy Magazine, and Strange Horizons, and in anthologies such as AfroSFv2 (Storytime), Myriad Lands (Guardbridge Books), You Left Your Biscuit Behind (Fox Spirit Books), and This Book Ain’t Nuttin to Fuck Wit (New English Press). Follow him @mame_bougouma on Twitter.

  Hal Duncan is the author of Vellum and Ink, more recently Testament, and numerous short stories, poems, essays, even some musicals. Homophobic hatemail once dubbed him “THE….Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” (sic), and you can find him online at http://www.halduncan.com or at his Patreon for readings, revelling in that role.

  Corinne Duyvis is the award-winning author of critically acclaimed young adult novels, Otherbound (2014) and On the Edge of Gone (2016), as well as the superhero prose novel, Guardians of the Galaxy: Collect Them All (2017). Corinne was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where she still resides.

  Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (2017), The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (2014), and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011); and in her own collection, The Honey Month (201
0). Her articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Books and on Tor.com. She became the Otherworldly columnist at the New York Times in February 2018.

  Born in 1976 in Dunkerque, Mélanie Fazi splits her time between writing and translating authors such as Graham Joyce, Lisa Tuttle, or Brandon Sanderson into French. She has published two novels (Trois pépins du fruit des morts and Arlis des forains) and three collections of stories (Serpentine, Notre-Dame-aux-Ecailles, Le Jardin des silences) and was published in Kadath, an homage to the village created by HP Lovecraft.

  Tang Fei is a speculative fiction writer whose fiction has been featured (under various pen names) in magazines in China such as Science Fiction World, Jiuzhou Fantasy, and Fantasy Old and New. She has written fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, and wuxia (martial arts fantasy), but prefers to write in a way that straddles or stretches genre boundaries. She is also a genre critic, and her critical essays have been published in The Economic Observer. She lives in Beijing and considers herself a foodie with a particular appreciation for dark chocolate, cleverer, and single malt Scotch Whisky.

  Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and The Twilight Pariah. 2018 will see the publication of a new novel, Ahab’s Return or The Last Voyage, from Morrow/Harper Collins. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. Ford’s short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. Ford is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Hayakawa Award, and Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives in Ohio in a 100 plus-year-old farm house surrounded by corn and soybean fields and teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.

  Clifton Gachagua is the winner of the Sillerman Prize for African Poetry, 2013. He has recently published a volume of poetry, Madman at Kilifi (University of Nebraska Press), and appears in a chapbook box set, Seven New Generation African Poets (University of Nebraska Press). He was recently selected for Africa39, Clifton works at Kwani? as an assistant editor.

  Sergio Gaut vel Hartman is an Argentine writer and editor. Among others, he published the following books: Cuerpos descartables (1985), Las Cruzadas (2006), El universo de la ciencia ficción (2006), Espejos en fuga (2009), Sociedades secretas de la historia argentina (2010), Historia de la Segunda Guerra Mundial (2011), Vuelos (2011) Avatares de un escarabajo pelotero (2017), Otro camino (2017), La quinta fase de la Luna (2018) and El juego del tiempo (2018). He has compiled more than twenty anthologies and was a finalist in the Minotauro and U.P.C. awards.

  Hiromi Goto is an emigrant from Japan who gratefully resides on the Unceded Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil Waututh Territories. Her first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book, Canada and Caribbean Region, and co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her second novel, The Kappa Child, was awarded the 2001 James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. Her first YA novel, Half World, won The Sunburst Award and the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. Hiromi is a mentor in The Writer’s Studio Program at Simon Fraser University, and a mentor for The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. www.hiromigoto.com

  Margrét Helgadóttir was born in Ethiopia to Norwegian and Icelandic parents. She currently lives in Oslo, Norway. Her stories have appeared in a number of both magazines and print anthologies such as Gone Lawn, Luna Station Quarterly, and Girl at the End of the World. Her debut book, The Stars Seem So Far Away, was shortlisted to British Fantasy Awards 2016. Margrét is editor of the anthology Winter Tales (2016) and the book series, Fox Spirit Books of Monsters. African Monsters and Asian Monsters were both shortlisted to British Fantasy Awards as Best Anthology (2016 and 2017). Margrét is also a charter member of the African Speculative Fiction Society.

  Sabrina Li-Chun Huang is a Chinese writer born in Taipei in 1979. She studied philosophy at the National Chengchi University and after graduation, went on to work in media. She has published three collections of short stories: Fallen Xiao Luren (2001) and Eight Flowers Blossom, Nine Seams Split (2005), which were published under the pseudonym Jiu Jiu, and Welcome to the Dollhouse (2012). Huang’s short fiction has won every major short story prize in Taiwan, including the China Times Literary Award and the United Daily Literary Award. In 2012, she was named by Unitas Magazine as one of the 20 best Sinophone writers under 40.

  N.K. Jemisin is a Hugo- and Locus-Award-winning Brooklyn author. Her short fiction and novels have also been multiply nominated for the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award and shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West workshops. In her spare time she is a biker, an adventurer, and a gamer; by profession she is a counselor; and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from KING OZZYMANDIAS, her ginger cat. Her essays and fiction excerpts are available at nkjemisin.com.

  Csilla Kleinheincz is a Hungarian-Vietnamese writer. She has three fantasy novels published in Hungarian as well as a short story collection. Her stories in English have been published by Interfictions, Expanded Horizons, and the Apex Book of World SF 2. Currently, she works as an editor for the Hungarian publishing house, Gabo, and translates fiction by Peter S. Beagle, Ann Leckie, Ursula K. Le Guin, Catherynne M. Valente, and others.

  Tessa Kum once started a social justice movement by accident, and if she learned anything from the experience, it is that she does not wish to lead the revolution. Ever. She lives in Melbourne with one old dog and one angry bird, and she studies plants. Other publications of her work can be found at the Review of Australian Fiction and the forthcoming anthology, Mechanical Animals.

  Clara Kumagai writes fiction, non-fiction, and plays for young people and for grown-ups. She has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Cicada, and The Irish Times. She is currently based in Tokyo, where she is writing a young adult novel. Clara is from Canada, Japan, and Ireland.

  Victor LaValle is the author of a story collection, four novels, and two novellas. His 2016 novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, won a Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards. His most recent novel is The Changeling, which has won a Dragon Award. He is also the writer and creator of a comic book, Victor LaValle’s Destroyer. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Award, among other honors. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City with his wife and two kids.

  Rose Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Their fiction and poetry have appeared in Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other venues. Rose’s work has been a finalist for the Nebula, Rhysling, Crawford, and other awards. Their poetry collection, Marginalia to Stone Bird, is available from Aqueduct Press (2016). For a full bibliography, please visit http://roselemberg.net.

  Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel, Warchild, won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild and her third novel, Cagebird, were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English and the Spectrum Award also in 2006. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Nalo Hopkinson, John Joseph Adams, Jonathan Strahan, and Ann VanderMeer. Her fantasy novel, The Gaslight Dogs, was published through Orbit Books USA. She can be found on twitter @karinlow.

  Kuzhali Manickavel is an Indian writer who writes in English. She was born in Winni
peg, Canada, and moved to India when she was thirteen. She currently lives in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. Her first book, Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings, was published by Blaft Publications in 2008. The Guardian named the book as one of the best independently published ebooks in the weird fiction genre, calling it “just very, very beautiful.” Manickavel’s short stories have also appeared in print magazines like Shimmer Magazine, Versal, AGNI, PANK, FRiGG, and Tehelka, and in anthologies such as Best American Fantasy 3 and Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana. A second book, Things We Found During the Autopsy, was released in 2014.

  Juan Martinez is the author of Best Worst American. He lives in Chicago, where he’s an assistant professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts, and elsewhere. Visit and say hi at http://fulmerford.com.

  Brandon Mc Ivor is a Trinidadian author living in Ehime, Japan. With his sister, he is the co-founder of People’s Republic of Writing, and has had his fiction published in The Caribbean Writer, Existere, The Corner Club Press, Buffalo Almanack, and elsewhere. In 2016, he was shortlisted for the Small Axe Short Fiction Literary Prize.

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the critically-acclaimed author of Signal to Noise—winner of a Copper Cylinder Award, finalist of the British Fantasy, Locus, Sunburst and Aurora awards—and Certain Dark Things, selected as one of NPR’s best books of 2016. Her latest novel is The Beautiful Ones, a fantasy of manners. She won a World Fantasy Award for her work as an editor.