Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling author. His novels and more than 50 short stories have been translated into 17 languages, and he has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction author, the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Prometheus. He currently lives in Ohio.

  Indrapramit Das is a writer and artist from Kolkata, India. His fiction has appeared in publications, including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Redstone Science Fiction, as well as the anthologies Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana and Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars. He has work forthcoming in such anthologies as Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection. He has written reviews of film, books, comics, and television for Strange Horizons and Slant Magazine. He is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop, which he attended as a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia and is currently in Vancouver working as a freelance writer, artist, editor, critic, game tester, tutor, would-be novelist, and aspirant to adulthood. You can follow him on Twitter via @indrapramitdas.

  Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Minister Faust is the Kindred Award-winning author of Shrinking the Heroes (formerly titled From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain), the cult hit The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and the novel The Alchemists of Kush. For twenty-three years he was Canada’s leading Africentric community broadcaster as host of Africentric Radio (formerly The Terrordome). He taught high school and junior high for ten years and continues to teach creative writing to youth and adults, through such venues as Shared Worlds in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Clarion West in Seattle. He has lectured on his work at the Science Fiction Research Association conference in Detroit and at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. He describes his subgenre of Afrofuturism as “Imhotep-Hop,” an Africentric literature referencing ancient African civilizations while aiming at a Pan-African technological future. His story “The Belly of the Crocodile” ties into The Alchemists of Kush. His website is www.ministerfaust.com, the portal to his novels, ebooks, videos, and more.

  Jaymee Goh is a steampunk postcolonialist who hails from Nusantaran country in Malaysia. She currently resides in North America, mostly for academia, in a state of instability, wondering what will happen when she actually grows up. She has written about harnessing the steampunk aesthetic for postcolonial purposes on her blog, Silver Goggles, and her work has appeared in Steampunk Reloaded, tor.com, Racialicious, and the Apex Books Company Blog. She writes speculative fiction and essays on topics including anti-racism and multiculturalism.

  Kawika Guillermo is currently finishing his doctorate at the University of Washington, where he also teaches literature. His work has appeared in (or is forthcoming in) The Medulla Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Annalemma, The Monarch Review and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. He is the assistant prose editor at decomP, and a programming director for The Seattle Asian American Film Festival. He can be found online via kawikaguillermo.com and @kawikaguillermo.

  Carlos Hernandez roots his writing in his Latino heritage, except when he doesn’t. He is the author of more than a score of short stories, recently in such places as Interzone and the latest incarnation of the Exotic Gothic anthologies. He is currently hard at work on his first solo novel.

  Ernest Hogan is a born-in-East-L.A. Chicano who accidentally shares his name with the father of ragtime. He has been selling science fiction since 1982. His work has appeared in Amazing Stories, Analog, Science Fiction Age, and many other magazines, as well as anthologies. His novels, Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues are at last available as ebooks. He writes the Chicanonautica column for labloga.blogspot.com and blogs atmondoernesto.com.

  Thaddeus Howze is a technology consultant, speculative fiction author, and science enthusiast. His collection of short stories, Hayward’s Reach, was published in 2011. His writings, both fiction and nonfiction, revolve around environmental themes, and he questions the nature and value of humanity in a world enamored of its technological cleverness. You can read more of his speculative fiction at hubcityblues.com.

  Darius James is the author of the novel Negrophobia. He also published That’s Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss ’Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury). Many believe that book is about the seventies’ era of black film. To escape debt-slavery in the United States, and following the lead of notable black ex-patriots such as political cartoonist Ollie Harrington, a black commie if there ever was on, James lived in Berlin, Germany, for many years. Now freed from the shackles of Manhattan media’s ghettoizing, he has appeared on television, hosted radio, sung on records, produced live theater performances, and collaborated on film. Unfortunately, his father’s death brought him back to the United States, where he was promptly shackled once again with debt. His tombstone will read, “Whitey’s a bitch! Then you die!”

  N.K. Jemisin is a Brooklyn author whose short fiction and novels have been multiply nominated for the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and the Nebula; have been shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree; and have won the Locus Award. Her latest novel, The Shadowed Sun, was published in June 2012 by Orbit Books. Her website is nkjemisin.com.

  After time well spent in alphabet cities—NYC, ATL, and DC—Tenea D. Johnson lives on the Gulf of Mexico, where she writes speculative fiction and creates compositions of prose to music. She is the author of a novel-in-stories, R/evolution, in which “The Taken” appears, and Smoketown, as well as the poetry collection Starting Friction. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. She is currently at work on a fiction album and the second book of the R/evolution sequence. She has also had the great pleasure of performing her compositions at the Knitting Factory and the Public Theater, among others. Her virtual home is teneadjohnson.com. Stop by anytime.

  Victor LaValle is author of four books, including Big Machine and The Devil in Silver. He has been the recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award, the American Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other prizes. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York with his wife and two kids.

  Rochita Loenen-Ruiz attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2009 as a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. A Filipina writer, Loenen-Ruiz currently lives and writes in the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print publications. When she is not engaged in frantic bouts of writing, she keeps house, tends to her children, gives piano lessons, and volunteers for a Filipino women’s organization. She has a website at rcloenenruiz.com and can be found via Twitter and Facebook.

  Carmen Maria Machado is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in AGNI, The American Reader, Tin House’s Open Bar blog, Five Chapters, Best Women’s Erotica 2012, VICE, The Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she was the winner of the 2011 Richard Yates Short Story Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.

  Anil Menon’s short fiction can be found in a variety of anthologies and speculative fiction magazines, such as Albedo One, Apex’s Digest, Chiaroscuro, Interzone, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Strange Horizons. His novel, The Beast With Nine
Billion Feet, was shortlisted for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword Book Award and the Carl Brandon Society’s Parallax Prize. With Vandana Singh, he edited Breaking the Bow, an anthology of speculative fiction stories inspired by the Ramayana. He can be reached via iam@anilmenon.com.

  Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination: Silvia Moreno-Garcia lives in beautiful British Columbia with her family and two cats. She writes speculative fiction (from magic realism to horror). Her short stories have appeared in such places as The Book of Cthulhu, Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. She has edited several anthologies, including Dead North and Future Lovecraft. Her first collection, This Strange Way of Dying, was published by Exile Editions in 2013. She is currently working on Young Blood, a Mexican vampire novel.

  Iranian-born writer Farnoosh Moshiri was a published playwright, translator, and fiction writer when she fled her country in 1983. This came after a massive arrest of secular intellectuals, feminists, and political activists, all of whom were executed by the Islamic regime in 1988. Moshiri lived in refugee camps in Afghanistan and India for four years before immigrating to the United States in 1987. Her novels and collections include At the Wall of Almighty, The Bathhouse, The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree, and Against Gravity. She is the recipient, among other prizes and fellowships, of two Barbara Deming Awards (for feminist writers whose work speaks of peace and social justice); two consecutive Black Heron Awards for Social Fiction, and a Valiente (courage) Award from Voices Breaking Boundaries, for artists who have taken risks to speak out and act as advocates. She has taught literature, playwriting, and creative writing at universities in Tehran, Kabul, Houston, and Syracuse. Currently she teaches creative writing at the University of Houston-Downtown.

  Daniel José Older is a Brooklyn-based writer, composer, and paramedic. Salsa Nocturna, Daniel’s debut ghost noir collection, was hailed as “striking and original” by Publishers Weekly. He has facilitated workshops on storytelling, music, and anti-oppression organizing at public schools, religious houses, universities, and prisons. His short stories have appeared at tor.com, PANK, Strange Horizons, and Crossed Genres, among other publications. He also co-edited the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. You can find his thoughts on writing, read his ridiculous ambulance adventures, and hear his music via ghoststar.net and @djolder.

  Chinelo Onwualu is CEO of Sylvia Fairchild and Associates, an editorial and administrative consultancy providing writing and editing services to individuals and organizations. She has a BA degree in English from Calvin College in Michigan and a master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Saraba, Sentinel Nigeria, and AfroSF, an anthology of African science fiction. Follow her on her blog at chineloonwualu.blogspot.com.

  Andaiye Reeves is a librarian, author, and poet currently residing in Georgia. She has written for Music Is Life Entertainment e-zine and Adonis Men’s Magazine. Her poetry can be found online at gspoetry.com under the alias Nilla Bean. “Othello Pop” is her first published fantasy work.

  Eden Robinson is a Haisla/Heiltsuk author who grew up in Haisla, British Columbia. Her first book, Traplines, a collection of short stories, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998. Monkey Beach, her first novel, was shortlisted for both the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2000 and won the BC Book Prize’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her most recent novel is Blood Sports.

  Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is rooted in eroticism, speculative events, women’s perspectives, and artistic freedom. She has been widely published and anthologized in such publications as the Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Colonize This! anthologies, as well as Essence, Utne Reader, and Ms. magazines. Her short story collection Ancient, Ancient—winner of the 2012 James Tiptree Jr. award—comprises sensual tales of the fantastic, the dark, and the magical. Her micro-essays on writing can be found at www.kiiniibura.com.

  Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria. She holds a PhD in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she specialized in twentieth-century Egyptian and Sudanese fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and Apex, among others. She is nonfiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and she blogs at sofiasamatar.blogspot.com.

  Charles R. Saunders was born in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. He has published four novels about Imaro, the sword-and-soul warrior-hero of an alternate Africa called Nyumbani, with a fifth on the way. He has also published two novels about a black woman-warrior named Dossouye, as well as Damballa, a new pulp novel set in 1930s Harlem. His short stories have appeared in such anthologies as Griots, Black Pulp, and The Sword and Sorcery Anthology. His website is charlessaunderswriter.com.

  Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was one of two winners of the 2009 James Tiptree Jr. Award. Her work has been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s, and in anthologies including Dark Matter, The Moment of Change, Dark Faith 2, and The Other Half of the Sky. Shawl was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor. She edited The WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity and Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, and she co-edited Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Feminism, and African American Voices with Rebecca Holden. With Cynthia Ward, Shawl co-authored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. She is a co-founder of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her website is www.nisishawl.com.

  Vandana Singh is an alien from the third world, currently living near Boston, where she teaches physics at a small state university and writes non-Euclidean tales of science fiction and fantasy. Her work has been published in numerous venues, including Strange Horizons and Lightspeed, and in seminal anthologies such as So Long Been Dreaming, and The Other Half of the Sky. Many of her stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies, and her novella, Distances, won the 2008 Carl Brandon Parallax Award. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed ALA Notable children’s book, Younguncle Comes to Town. Apart from writing and teaching, her passions include environmental issues, music, and mangoes.

  Born in Bangkok, S.P. Somtow (Somtow Sucharitkul) grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music, and in the 1970s he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Regional conditions in the arts at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, immigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist. His earliest novels were science fiction, but he soon began to cross into other genres. With his 1984 novel, Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre by (in the words of Psycho author Robert Bloch) “skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.” Vampire Junction was voted one of the 40 all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers Association, alongside such established classics as Frankenstein and Dracula. In the 1990s Somtow won the World Fantasy Award for his novella The Bird Catcher. His 53 books have sold roughly two million copies worldwide.

  C. Renee Stephens is an African historian and assistant professor of history at Bard High School Early College Newark. She holds a first-degree black belt in Uechi-ryu karate-do, a martial art that originated in Okinawa. Stephens’s science fiction is inspired by spiritual writings from across Africa and Asia, the historical encounters between Europeans and Africans, and technological advance and its impact on human society. “Culling the Herd,” her first published science fiction short story, appeared first in the 2013 edition of Metropolarity. She is currently working on a
science fiction trilogy titled The Amentetan Renaissance. Stephens and her partner have two amazing daughters and live in Philadelphia.

  Greg Tate is a writer and musician who lives in Harlem. He was a staff writer at The Village Voice (1987–2004). His books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk, Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience. In 1985 he helped co-found the Black Rock Coalition with Vernon Reid and several other firebrands of the era. Since 1999, he has led the conducted improv ensemble Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, who have released sixteen albums on their own Avant Groidd imprint. Tate has taught at Yale’s Graduate Art Program and Columbia University’s Jazz Studies module. He is currently a visiting professor at Brown University, where he teaches “The History of AfroFuturism and Black Science Fiction.”

  Tade Thompson’s roots are in western Nigeria and South London. His short stories have been published in small press editions, webzines and anthologies. Most recently, his story “Notes from Gethsemane” appeared in the AfroSF anthology, and “Shadow” appeared in The Apex Book of World SF 2. He lives and works in South England and is old enough to remember watching Captain Scarlet on TV. He works under a unified influence field comprising books, music, theater, comics, art, movies, gourmet coffee, and amala. He has been known to haunt coffee shops, jazz bars, bookshops, and libraries. He is an occasional visual artist and tortures his family with his attempts to play the guitar.

  Katherena Vermette is a Metis writer of poetry, fiction, and children’s literature. Her first full-length collection of poetry, North End Love Songs, was released in 2012, and her first children’s storybook series, The Seven Teaching Stories, is forthcoming from Portage and Main Press. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines and compilations, including Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water and The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama.