I’m delighted to announce I’ve sold a story to Twelfth Planet Press for their forthcoming anthology Mother of Invention. The book will be edited by Rivqa Rafael and Tansy Rayner Roberts and contains stories about gender, AI and robots.
From their pitch on Kickstarter:
From Pygmalion and Galatea to Frankenstein, Ex Machina and Person of Interest, the fictional landscape so often frames cisgender men as the creators of artificial life, leading to the same kinds of stories being told over and over. We want to bring some genuine revolution to the way that artificial intelligence stories are told, and how they intersect with gender identity, parenthood, sexuality, war, and the future of our species. How can we interrogate the gendered assumptions around the making of robots compared with the making of babies? Can computers learn to speak in a code beyond the (gender) binary?
If necessity is the mother of invention, what exciting AI might come to exist in the hands of a more diverse range of innovators?
We are excited to already have a team of fantastic, innovative SFF writers from around the world lined up to write stories for us:
Jo Anderton, John Chu, Kameron Hurley, Rosaleen Love, Sandra McDonald, Seanan McGuire, E.C. Myers, Justina Robson, Nisi Shawl, Cat Sparks, Bogi Takacs and Kaaron Warren.
Mother of Invention will also feature an essay about an Indigenous women’s perspective on artificial intelligence by Ambelin Kwaymullina.
New Berth is a steampunk space story about a mother who has to come to terms with the fact her daughter has become an adult. It was picked up during the open submission period, along with stories from several other fantastic writers:
- Arguing with People on the Internet – E.H. Mann
- A Robot Like Me – Lee Cope
- Junkyard Kraken – D.K. Mok
- Knitting Day – Jen White
- Rini’s God – Soumya Sundar Mukherjee
- Sugar Ricochets to Other Forms – Octavia Cade
- The Ghost Helmet – Lev Mirov
- The Goose Hair of One Thousand Miles – Stephanie Lai
- Tide Falling, Falling Tide – Meryl Stenhouse
Needless to say, I’m ecstatic. Being in such amazing company is a dream come true.