A Round of Applause for These Award-Winning Authors

Alaya won a Nebula for this book back in 2015. An ordinary girl with a great life named Emily Bird wakes up in the hospital with no memory of the last several days after a chance meeting with a government agent and finds herself in the middle of a deadly flu pandemic. Emily knows there’s more than meets the eye–and research scientist parents are probably involved, too. But the only person who believes her is the small-time drug dealer from a neighboring prep school. You should also check out The Summer Prince, which was nominated for a Nebula and shortlisted for the National Book Award.

Alaya’s website is very worth visiting, too!

Between climate change and nuclear disasters, Earth is basically uninhabitable by the year 2172, with the wealthy and lucky having escaped to floating colonies. In Nigeria, soldiers must be augmented if they want to survive and battles are conducted with massive mecha. Onyii and Ify are twin sisters who dream of a life beyond the ongoing civil war… and they’re willing to fight to find that future. Also check out Goliath, which is up for pre-order.

Honestly, Tochi has a ton of great stuff on his website, so you should check it out.

A collection of short stories, from the mystical to the mimetic, with a dash of magical realism to go with it, some written in standard American broadcast dialect and some in Caribbean dialect. Celeste’s prose is, as always, gorgeous.

Also swing by Celeste’s website to see her other numerous short stories, some of which are for sale as Kindle editions!

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer are basically a power couple for literary science fiction. Ann’s been an editor for years with a wide range of tastes and a bent for the weird; Jeff is more known as an author, but obviously he works with his wife to edit the crap out of some big books. This one is the companion volume to the book that won this year.

For a couple more of their anthologies to check out, cast your eyeballs on Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology and The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

And of course Jeff is known on his own as a writer, mostly in the new weird field subgenre. His most recent is, if memory serves, Hummingbird Salamander.

It’s a little more difficult to find more work by Aoko Matsuda right now. She has short stories that have appeared in the magazine Monkey Business, including Volume 6 and Volume 7, and Strangers Press in the UK has published her novella The Girl Who Is Getting Married, a dizzying journey through an apartment building and memories of a friend.