reviews

Sharp and Sugar Tooth, edited by Octavia Cade. Strange Horizons, Dec 2019.

The intersections of food, femininity, and speculative fiction form a tangled, complex territory. Too vast and too complex to do justice in a single anthology, you might think, let alone ten—but Sharp and Sugar Tooth does just that, its constituent stories selected with the same care a professional chef gives to balancing flavors in a dish.

Realm of Ash, by Tasha Suri. Strange Horizons, April 2020.

Like its predecessor, Empire, this book is an ode to not-belonging, and it will be gently, terribly, heart-warmingly familiar to anyone who’s been caught between two worlds—whether biracial, immigrant, diaspora, or otherwise. Suri fills her books with complicated women who work in, around, and against each other, drawing on real history to paint a picture of the ways in which women exercise power and exert influence within the confines of a patriarchal world.

The Luminous Dead, by Caitlin Starling. Strange Horizons, Sept 2019.

Starling plays masterfully with the murky edges of consent and bodily autonomy while carefully inlaying trauma, compassion, loneliness, and a human hunger for connection.

Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri. Strange Horizons, Feb 2019.

[T]he entirety of Empire of Sand is an exploration of consent. It’s an exploration of trauma: what it means to be a survivor, what violence can take from us, and the inalienable parts of us that it can never touch.

ESSays

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Excellence.” Uncanny, Nov 2020.

But sometimes, in the dead of night, I find myself wishing for just a moment—just the briefest respite—of the bliss of being mediocre. But I don’t dare voice that wish, because to do so would be a betrayal of my luck, and a betrayal of all those who weren’t as lucky as me.

So I’ll be excellent, even though I’m exhausted. I’ll be excellent, endlessly.

Guest post @ The Big Idea: Awards Showcases. The Big Idea, Nov 2020.

SFF will look to the future or it will perish. You might think that true of every field of human endeavor, but it’s especially pertinent to SFF, the genre of projecting our imaginations forward and sideways. All art is political; SFF especially so.

“The Art of Restraint.” Tor Nightfire, Oct 2020.

I love a good creature feature or slasher movie as much as the next person, but the horror that gets under my skin and nests there tends to be the kind that’s sparse and restrained. I fear the strange noises out past the campfire’s light more than I do the monster I can see close and clear enough to count its limbs and teeth.

“The H-Word: It’s Alive!” Nightmare, March 2019.

The womb is a scary place, you see. A place full of secrets, a liminal place that's neither here nor there. A haunted house where so, so many of our cultural anxieties come home to roost.

“I Am Known: Representation in Videogames.” The Book Smugglers, Nov 2018.

My mirror is someone else’s window. I need to see myself just as much as you need to see me. I need to know I’m not alone, and you need to know I exist. In a medium that might just be the future of storytelling, or at least a kind of storytelling we’ve never seen before, I hope you have to see my hands on your screen and see the world through my eyes. I hope my stories get inside your head.