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Phoebe Barton

Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Analog, Lightspeed, and Kaleidotrope, and she wrote the interactive fiction game The Luminous Underground for Choice of Games. She serves as an Associate Editor at Escape Pod, is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and lives with a robot in the sky above Toronto.

Author Spotlight: P.A. Cornell

I have an interest in history, be it major world events or simply pop culture history, and I wanted to include things like my love of ’40s music, pop art, vintage food, the moon landing, and yes, even Star Wars, in a single story, but I didn’t know how to pull it off. This story finally came about in an almost accidental way. I’m a life-long insomniac, and I woke up in the middle of the night, so as I sometimes do, I got up to write. The opening line just came to me, and I started free-writing from there, the first draft flowing out of my exhausted mind.

Author Spotlight: Margaret Jordan

My climate anxiety was at an all-time high. I couldn’t bear to write about reality, but I also couldn’t bear to leave it completely behind, so I built this world where disasters bruise themselves into the people who survive them, leaving wild magic behind.

Author Spotlight: Anya Ow

I prefer to write stories where the main character has direct agency, so as the narrative progressed, there had to be a climactic moment where the story became more about her and her struggles than about the titular character, yet it also had to work out in a meaningful and believable way.

Author Spotlight: Effie Seiberg

I think that, for me, there’s been a huge uptick in antisemitism lately, which has made me lean into my culture and religion a bit more. I hadn’t seen a ton of Jewish speculative media prior to 2020, when I started writing this story, and I wanted to put something out there. A golem is both very Jewish, and also a thing you can directly create and act upon.

Author Spotlight: Aigner Loren Wilson

The idea of “The Black and White” has been kicking around in my head for a really long time and was spurred by a terrible thought. I used to have this great fear that I would lose contact with my sister and the only thing that would reunite us would be our father’s death. Over time, that fear or anxiety started to change shape into something more fantastical, like many of my fears.

Author Spotlight: K.S. Walker

I’ve had a Mami Wata story lurking in my bones for a minute. When I started writing I didn’t know this would be the one. though. The first working title was ‘something, something, sea-witch’ actually, and at first I was thinking it would be an Ursula-type figure that the main character beseeched. But as the tone of the story solidified, I realized it needed to be a benevolent figure, and Mami Wata fell into place naturally.

Author Spotlight: P H Lee

This story is “hidden lore” inside the aforementioned novel’s text—the society of algorithms hides its historical connections to Judaism, in much the same way that Christian society obfuscates and oppresses Jewish narratives. So this is a Jewish story, but at the same time, the algorithms have retold it in a way that makes sense to them.

Author Spotlight: Sabrina Vourvoulias

It’s always intrigued me that insects—creatures we rarely think about except when we are hellbent on exterminating them—are the repository of so much folk belief. They’re divine messengers, symbols of soul or scourge, portends of death and new beginnings. It’s no coincidence that, in our day and age, immigrants are represented by the monarch butterfly, which flies as far as 3,000 miles across the continental Americas to reach home.

Author Spotlight: Fatima Taqvi

When I use storytelling, I don’t want to shy away from the harshness. To some extent, it is an unfortunate inheritance I have to deal with. The person I am, I will have to bring to life stories containing pain. At the same time I also want to explore the logical end of a world that has grown tired of cruelty and builds itself anew in unexpected, interesting ways, with more imaginative and hopeful hearts.

Author Spotlight: K. J. Chien

I had the scene of a mother and a mermaid daughter pop into my brain a while ago. I set it aside for a few years, but when I started talking with my friends who were becoming new moms and hearing what the adjustment was like for them, the scene started bubbling up again. But it wasn’t until I took a writing class with Ploi Pirapokin, who encouraged us to follow your first idea, that I finally buckled up and banged out a working draft. By then, I think my brain had enough time to stew about postpartum mental health, how shame operates in East Asian communities, and how community support can be healing.