Ursula

If any of you are looking for a last-minute thing to do in NYC, I'm reading at the KGB bar tonight!

North Continent Ribbon is on Esquire's list of best sci-fi of 2024!

It's a really interesting list overall--is there anything you're particularly curious about?

North Continent Ribbon comes out on August 20!

I'm doing a Zoom release event at 7 PM Eastern time on August 22 with Argo Bookshop in Montreal and a bunch of writer friends. We're going to knit/embroider/craft and talk about the connections between prose and other ways of making things.

My essay on food and worldbuilding in space opera, A Depth of Taste, is posted over at Frivolous Comma.

The cover for my short story collection North Continent Ribbon is live now on yhlee's newsletter!

North Continent Ribbon, my collection of interwoven short stories about the fictional society of Nakharat, is coming out from Neon Hemlock Press next year! Here is the link to the official Twitter announcement.

My bisexual assassin/starship princess story "Closer than your kidneys" is going to be in Frivolous Comma this summer!

I wrote a little bit about the story's title and the Secret History of the Mongols for my newsletter.

The May/June issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, including my novelette "The Last Tutor," is officially out! Shout if you see it in the wild--I think it may be a while before my contributor copies and I are in the same place.

My story "The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers" is now for sale, as part of the January issue of Cossmass Infinities. The story involves unions, sex work, murder, ride-shares, elaborate descriptions of hair ribbons, exuberant bisexuality, and a planet that isn't ours.

( Here are some of the ideas braided into the writing... )

( I made two big changes... )

She stomped on the pedals. Her velokab lurched forward, straight toward a tourist hugging an overstuffed duffel. The tourist dropped their bag. I started to scream. But the velokab’s sensors cut in and jerked sideways, sliding the kab into traffic a hand’s-breadth behind a fat gray truck.

I watched the kab drive away, bobbing and turning through the traffic like a candy wrapper floating down the river. I made myself relax my toes and my fingertips. I thought about breezes on water. But my breath was still knotted up like a Company contract. I had almost stolen somebody’s life, because she hurt my feelings.

You’re shaking your head. You wouldn’t hold me to account. The judges wouldn’t either, no matter how smug they are, in their snow-white wigs. That’s what kab drivers are for: to be responsible. A velokab can more or less pilot itself. But machines can’t make moral choices. Or strategic ones either, supposedly. That’s why, if a kab ever crashes, its driver is supposed to pay the price.

When people talk about humans taking responsibility, they always seem to mean somebody else.

This story isn't actively about math, but it is about work. One of the characters has taken a job that keeps her away from her family for long stretches of time. One of the places I thought about, while writing that character, was Alberta. That's a place I've been for work. It's a place my dad worked in, too--he lived in a hotel for weeks at a time, doing engineering design for oil pipelines, in a year the US economy was struggling. We had dinner together once, when I was flying into Edmonton from one state and he was flying out to another, and traded paperbacks. I thought about the wide-open Edmonton sky, writing this story.