A sprawling story of government officials, academic experts and, eventually, actual witches banding together to alter the present by time traveling into the past, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is so deliciously entertaining that the reader is instantly swept up into its sense of adventure, no matter how outlandish the plot may seem. The fact that this 700-page book was a collaboration between two authors makes it an even more extraordinary feat.

We spoke with historical fiction author Nicole Galland and sci-fi icon Neal Stephenson (Seveneves, The System of the World) about the importance of spreadsheets, sympathetic villains and pseudo-science. 

First things first—how did the two of you meet, and when did you decide to write a book together?
Nicole Galland: We have the same agent (Liz Darhansoff) and editor (Jennifer Brehl, at HarperCollins), and Neal kindly blurbed my debut novel, The Fool’s Tale. Several years later he invited me to join the heretofore-all-male tribe of writers creating The Mongoliad. (The story as I heard—Neal showed some early chapters to a female friend, who said there was too much testosterone and ordered him to include a female writer of historical fiction. This might be apocryphal, however. I defer to Neal’s version of events, as he was the initiator.)

Neal Stephenson: I have forgotten. The gender skewage on Mongoliad was so obvious, I’m not sure if a female was needed to point it out to me, but in any case Nicki was the obvious best person for that job.

NG: When I came out to Seattle for the final Mongoliad launch event, he told me the premise for D.O.D.O. and asked if I might be interested in writing it with him. I think I said yes while he was still asking the question.

At what point did you realize how complicated D.O.D.O. was going to be? And how did you even begin to keep everything straight plot-wise?
NG: I would say by its nature it was complicated straight out of the gate, but it got much more so as it went along. We began with an 11-page, single-spaced synopsis, most of which I could keep straight in my head, somehow. Then Neal generated an online chronology, which both allowed and guaranteed that it would all get more complicated.

NS: D.O.D.O. is an example of coherent universe fiction, where the story and the world need to hang together in an internally consistent way. We had, and still have, ambitions of trying to do more with this world, supposing people like the book. A first step in that is making sure that the timeline hangs together, and that gets a little more complicated in a time-travel story. So, spreadsheets.

Neal, do you think we will ever get to a point technologically where time travel is possible?
NG: I am so glad this question is directed to Neal.

NS: No. Not even in the book does it happen through technology. . . but that’s a spoiler.

Did you ever disagree about something while writing together? And if so, how did you resolve it?
NG: I’m sure we did but I don’t remember specifics. As a broad generalization, I think we have different approaches to problem-solving. My take is that Neal thinks like an engineer or a scientist or a coder—if something isn’t working, he calmly and methodically works on debugging the program, so to speak. I react more like a theater person—my impulse is to say, “That’s not working! We gotta try a different approach!”

NS: There were not any disagreements big enough for me to remember them. There were problems to be solved and we solved them.

How did you both pick which time periods to set it in? Were any of the periods completely new territory for either of you?
NG: Neal knew he wanted a medieval crusade because it would involve an encounter between different cultures (including military cultures). I suggested the Fourth Crusade since I already knew about it from writing my novel Crossed. The crucible of the Fourth Crusade was Constantinople, which happily turned out to be useful for other things in the book.

NS: Normandy, circa the Norman Conquest, was new for me. The specific times and places kind of fell out naturally from what we were trying to do from a narrative standpoint.

D.O.D.O. has such a huge and fascinating cast of characters! Who was your favorite character to write, and who was the easiest character to write?
NG: I especially enjoyed writing in Grainne’s voice. (Also, I loved depicting Erszebet. Witches with attitude FTW.) Mel was easiest. I tried to imagine myself pluckier, smarter and more grounded than I actually am, and most of the time that did the trick.

NS: The less attractive the character, the more I enjoyed writing them. Officious bureaucrats and PowerPoint weasels are where it’s at for me.

When it comes to the science in the book, at what point did you find yourself moving from established facts into the realm of, shall we say, informed speculation?
NG: I’ll let Neal answer this since it’s his wheelhouse. 😉

NS: It should be said that the overall tone of this book is lighthearted romantic adventure with satirical bits, and so burying the reader under heavy science wasn’t really on the program. There are a few parts of it where characters pretend to talk science. I hope that real scientists will read those with a sense of humor.

Nicole, you’ve written a book about one of the most famous villains in history, Shakespeare’s Iago, from his perspective. Without giving too much about D.O.D.O. away, what do you think makes for an engaging, sympathetic antagonist?
NG: If a character is engaging and sympathetic, you will enjoy them in any circumstance—especially if they have a believable motivation for their actions. “Being evil” doesn’t cut it; the more relatable the motivation, the better. For instance, Iago is not innately evil—he does bad things in response to bad things being done to him. (BTW I’m always happy to get into this over a drink with anyone who wants to argue about Othello.)

Similarly in D.O.D.O., certain characters evolve into antagonists in response to things that interfere with their well-being.

And for the record, I’m talking about antagonists who are center stage. Ancillary characters who cause problems by being irritating, narcissistic, complacent, knee-jerkingly greedy or vicious—that’s a different story.

There are so many more stories you could tell in this world. Any chance of a sequel?
NG: Stay tuned. . . 

NS: Thinking about it. . .

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O..

Galland author photo credit Eli Dagostino. Stephenson author photo credit Brady Hall.

In Naomi Alderman’s The Power, girls all over the world develop the power to transmit electricity from their fingertips. What starts out as a trick soon becomes a means of self-defense and then a way to inflict pain, maim and even kill. Already the winner of the U.K.’s prestigious Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Power is an inventive, destabilizing work of fiction that has the pace of a thriller and the depth of social commentary.

This is a novel about the progression of one singular idea: What would happen if women developed a physical strength that could easily overpower men? Where did the initial idea for this premise come from?
Novels have lots of different starting points, so there are many different answers to this question. One is: A few years ago I heard a man I very much admire answer the interview question, “Why does the patriarchy exist?” He answered that he thinks that men are jealous of women’s ability to give birth. I heard this and thought: Oh honey, no, it’s because they can. Men are physically more powerful than women, on average, stronger and taller and more muscular. So more men can physically overpower women than the other way around. And you don’t need all men—or even most men, or even more than one in 100 men—to ever, ever do that for all women to be afraid all the time.

That was my thought, anyway. But a novel for me can be a series of explorations and thought experiments. I worked out a power I could give women—based on what electric eels do—that would tip the playing field in the other direction. And then I didn’t really know what would happen. I wanted to see how far I could convince myself that things would change.

The novel begins and ends with an exchange of letters between two writers, a man and a woman. What do you think the frame adds to the story?
It’s hard to say too much without revealing a little twist in there. But I did want to have a little bit of conversation about the kinds of things one hears these days—as in the recent Google memo—sexist stories dressed up as evolutionary psychology “science,” history altered and erased to make it fit with our sexist ideas today. And they made me laugh, those letters. I felt like maybe my readers could do with a laugh after some of the book.

Gender violence, restrictive regimes, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump—what was it like to write this novel during this particular time, and how do you think current politics have shaped the critical reaction to the novel?
The novel was all finished by the start of 2016. That is, before Brexit, before Donald Trump was elected. It was published in the U.K. a couple of weeks before U.S. election day last year. So it’s been a slow unfolding horror of, “Oh shit, I didn’t actually want to be this right.” The critical response has been lovely from the start, which is great, and the U.K. reviews were in before Trump was elected, although I’m sure these events have given the book a new feeling of urgency for readers.

But you know. I’m a woman who works in video games. We’ve been the canary in the coal mine for years. In 2012 Anita Sarkeesian started receiving rape and death threats because she wanted to make a series of videos exploring a feminist perspective on video games. So it’s horrible that the violent, misogynist forces that have always existed in the world are currently so much in the ascendancy—but it’s not a tremendous shocker if one has been paying attention, I think.

You worked with Margaret Atwood through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. What was that experience like, and how to you think it impacted your work as a novelist?
It’s been a huge and unexpected blessing. Margaret has been tremendously kind to me. I’ve travelled with her to Cuba, to Panama, to the Arctic. We’ve talked about the natural world, about religion and history, science and the inner workings of people. She has made me braver about taking a big idea and running with it. She’s also given me a good schooling in the vital importance of saying “no.” That is: The world will always have more demands than one can meet. To make mental space for one’s writing, one must learn how to say no to a million wonderful good-natured worthwhile projects in order to meet the blank page every morning.

Clearly, role-reversal is not the way to achieve gender equality. Any ideas about how to move in that direction?
I’m hoping that thinking, talking, debating, writing, persuading will do it. They’re what’s done it so far. People sometimes say to me after reading the novel, “So do you think violence is the only answer?” And I say, “Well no, otherwise I wouldn’t have written a novel.” I believe in the power of reasoned debate to—eventually, in the long run—change hearts and minds. I hope my book is part of that long conversation and process, revealing where some of the roots of the gender divide come from, and asking how we feel about allowing the potential for violence to determine our life trajectories. Let’s never forget that women were given the vote all over the world by democratic votes by houses of representatives entirely composed of men. The feminist revolution has been the most successful bloodless revolution of modern times. I am proud to be part of it. We have to not lose hope in the power of rational argument and conversation.

What makes you feel powerful?
I felt pretty bloody powerful writing this book, let me tell you. Some days I felt like I could punch a hole through reality and turn it inside out. I hope it gives women who read it that same taste of feeling powerful.

Your first novel (Disobedience) is being made into a movie with Rachel Weisz and Rachel MacAdams. Has there been similar interest in The Power?
Even more! We had more than a dozen TV and movie offers for The Power before it was published in the U.K.—and more keep coming! We’ve sold the option to Sister Pictures, whose CEO Jane Featherstone is incredibly experienced, talented and skillful in making great TV. I’m on as lead writer, and we’re working on the pilot now. I really want it to be one of those high-production-value transatlantic shows: Ten episodes a season, several seasons, is what I’m hoping for. There’s so much more world to explore and so many more stories to tell than I had room for in the book.

You co-created a smartphone fitness app called Zombies, Run!, as well as other online games. How did that come about, and how (if at all) does that work influence your novels?
I’ve been working in video games for about as long as I’ve been seriously writing novels. My first game, Perplex City, began to be released in 2005, and my first novel was published in 2006. I’d always been a games-player—although sometimes an isolated one, without a gaming community I felt comfortable in. Zombies, Run! came about from a conversation with my friend Adrian Hon, who runs a small London games company, Six to Start. He’s a very keen runner, and wanted to make a game that would make running more fun. I am a reluctant exerciser—I know I need to exercise but I never do have that feeling that I want to. So we came up with the idea of a game where you’d be the hero in a zombie apocalypse story—and you have to keep running to collect supplies, spy on your enemies and of course get away from the zombies. I don’t think I knew on the afternoon that we had the idea that it’d be a hit—but here we are, about to embark on season seven of this game!

For one thing, it’s taught me is how to leave room for your reader and your player in your work. Room for them to co-create meaning in the story with you, room for their interpretations and ideas. I’ve a little tendency to want to stand over the reader’s shoulder and tell them what they should be thinking at every point in the story. So I think the explicit “there must be a space for the player in this story” discipline of games writing has been good for me.

What other speculative or science-fiction writers do you like?
Ah, so many. Iain M. Banks, Zen Cho, Samuel Delaney, Marge Piercy, Ted Chiang, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Douglas Adams, John Wyndham. And the writers of children’s books who never get listed as speculative fiction writers but they really are: Lucy Boston, Susan Cooper, Joan Aiken, Margaret Storey, Elizabeth Goudge, Madeleine L’Engle, Diana Wynne-Jones.

But if you want one thing to start with that you can read in the next hour and it might change your life, read the short story “The Matter of Seggri” by Ursula Le Guin. You can thank me later.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Power.

Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.

How would you describe your relationship with social media, and how did it influence your storyline for Followers?
It seems funny now to say that I didn’t think that much about it as I worked on the book. I was convinced that I was fully in the world of these characters and driven only by the way they used technology. But now, when I look back, it’s so clear to me that my relationship with social media really was there in my head, subconsciously setting that skeptical tone.

And the nature of that relationship is . . . exactly what makes sense for a 35-year-old, I think. It’s ambivalent, like really precisely ambivalent, because I lived about half my life without technology and half with it. There’s a lot I love about it, but I can remember how I was before it, too, and sometimes I wish things had never changed. Sharing doesn’t come naturally to me, and I don’t take selfies. I just don’t. I never developed that muscle.

Orla and Floss meet as roommates in New York in 2015 and plot their way to stardom as reality TV stars. Their entire relationship is based on fake substance and a simple goal to become massively popular. That being said, it’s hard not to take sides. Are you Team Floss or Team Orla?
I feel like I should have phone cases printed up! Should I do it? This might seem insane to anyone who’s read the book, but if I had to be on one of these teams, I’d pick Team Floss. As bizarre and ruthless as she is, she also has zero pretense. What annoys me about Orla is that she really wants the same thing as Floss, in many ways, but she can be a real snob. She thinks the version of fame she wants—literary fame—is inherently better and more sophisticated, but I don’t see it that way.

“She thinks the version of fame she wants—literary fame—is inherently better and more sophisticated, but I don’t see it that way.”

One of the best parts of the novel is discovering through Marlow how the world has changed in 2051. What made you decide that 2051 was far enough in the future for this story to work?
Oh, that’s such a good question, and something I haven’t thought about in a long time. I’ve said this often about the book: The kernel that started it all was cursive and thinking about someone discovering something in cursive and genuinely not being able to read it. So I worked out how far in the future, reasonably speaking, that could happen, while someone older would still be writing in it. 2051 felt right to me, and I filled in everything around that small detail.

What inspired the extremely futuristic community of Constellation in California, where government-appointed reality stars are filmed 24/7 for the rest of the country to watch?
The vision was an Instagram filter come to life—I wanted the town to have saturated colors and totally managed fake trees and flowers, and I wanted it to be filled with people who were just walking brands, whose every sneaker and braid and coffee and whatever would be designed to appeal to their audience. All the time, always, like an Instagram picture where nothing’s ever off-frame. Everything’s just like this, composed and pretty and targeted.

There’s a lot about privacy in the book, and to me, this is another layer. I mean, I always assume that influencers have one beautiful, clean corner of a room where they shoot their books and smoothies next to like, a big frond in a mason jar, and that the rest of their house is a mess, like us. But in Constellation, almost every square inch and every waking second is on camera, so there’s no room for clothes on the floor or an off-day outfit, the old Uggs and the stained sweatshirt. It’s rigorous, mandatory, constant perfection.

A lot has changed from 2015 to 2051, including how babies are designed in labs. However, Orla, Floss and Marlow all struggle with their choices around motherhood and the limitations and opportunities those choices impose. Is this to say that some things will always be the same?
If anything’s always going to be the same, I think, it’s probably that. I also just felt like I hadn’t read a ton of stories about the future that go deep into motherhood, and the ones that I have read—like Red Clocks by Leni Zumas or Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich—really affected me. This book spans 35 years, and if time is passing in big chunks like that, you’re obviously going to have some women somewhere making choices about whether or not to procreate. Technology doesn’t necessarily make those choices easier. I liked the idea of taking something kind of sci-fi—the way babies are composed, gene-by-gene, in the book—and boiling it down to the human implications of like, the family brawl it could cause if you decided, hmm, maybe not Aunt Cindy’s genes for my baby.

How challenging was it to keep race, religion and politics from taking over the story?
There were early drafts of the book that went really deep into all of those things, so I wouldn’t say I met that challenge, originally. I mean, there were drafts that were just out of control, with big sprawling cross-country trips and other characters dealing with the fallout of how those things were dealt with in the future. And like—I think the book you have in your hands now definitely has enough stuff in it. So it’s good that those things fell out. But it was almost like I had to get those ideas out of my system so I knew what the country looked like, even if I couldn’t pass along every detail.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Followers.

On that note, I couldn’t help but wonder what you think the rest of the world looks like in 2051. Has the entire human race given up on the internet as we know it today?
My brain just isn’t big enough to take on the whole world, but I pictured a really fragmented America, when it came to the internet and everything else. The new internet I describe in the book, to me, never reaches the all-powerful status our current internet does. Some people remain kind of permanently disenchanted with technology. I don’t want to spoil things for people who haven’t read the book, but obviously we see some communities in 2051 that are founded on sharing a specific belief, and in my mind, those are everywhere across America in 2051. Separate communities for liberals and conservatives and religious people and atheists and people who love guns and people who don’t like drinking, and even people who have more sinister, damaging beliefs. Bubbles that are openly marketed this way, that sort of replace varied towns or call the naturally unvaried ones what they are.

While I can’t wait for self-driving cars and robot butlers to be a common reality, I do get nostalgic about things that we are losing to technical advancements. Which three things (beside cursive writing, of course) do you wish we carry forth as humans in this increasingly tech-savvy world?
It’s obviously very cheap of me to say books and independent bookstores, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I don’t think I’m going to win this one, and it’s really sentimental, but I can’t fully let go of linear TV. I like streaming and all that stuff, but I still love event television. I miss the feeling of certain shows being for a certain night, like when “Community” and “The Office” and “Parks and Rec” and “30 Rock” were all stacked on a Thursday—heaven. I still like some immediacy with certain TV. I will not watch a debate or an awards show on buffer, and don’t even get me started on sports. People who can record a basketball game and watch it two days later, when everyone knows what happened and the players have already like, showered and moved on with their lives—this is deeply strange to me. So, yeah. I hope we bring a little event TV.

And here’s another one I’m not going to win! I’d like to officially make the case for reviving landlines. It never bothered me not to have one until I had kids, but now there are so many reasons I want one back. You can’t teach kids to dial 911 on your phone without also giving them to code to your phone, and I . . . don’t want to do that. Also, since there’s no “home phone,” my cell phone—and email—just becomes a little tech extension of my emotional labor as a parent. Now I’m the keeper of all the info. You know? So, yeah, you heard it here first: The landline deserves a comeback. First I convince my husband, then the world!

Author photo by Alison Conklin

Alix E. Harrow follows up her engaging debut, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, with a sprawling saga that adds magic to history. The Once and Future Witches binds fairy-tale elements with the history of the women’s suffrage movement, and is a tribute to women’s stories in all their complexity. Harrow discusses her new book, her place in the literary world and the power and challenges of feminine archetypes.

The Once and Future Witches is structured very differently from your debut. It’s much longer, has three main characters and arguably enough story to extend across multiple books. How did you plan the book’s structure?
I would like to officially blame human history for the length of this book. The pitch—suffragists, but witches—sounded so slick and obvious, but the actual history of the suffrage movement spans several centuries and at least two continents. If you broaden your definition of suffrage to include the vastness of women’s struggles for political rights and social power, it gets bigger; if you add the history of witchcraft and folklore, you have five books and a spinoff series.

I tried very hard to whittle it down. The first draft was rushed and claustrophobic; it felt like a mattress somehow shoved into a pillowcase. My edit letter was full of questions and tangents and sentences that began with let us see _____. During the rewrite, I pictured myself slashing the seams of the pillowcase: I added backstories and side characters and entire folktales. I also accidentally (or at least subconsciously) turned off the word count on Scrivener, for which I would like to apologize to my agent.

“I wrote the first draft of this book with a newborn strapped to my chest and my first gray hairs frazzling around my face, feeling simultaneously old and young and neither.”

You do a marvelous job of weaving witchcraft into the real history of the women’s suffrage movement, in all its complexity (including infighting over strategy and the reluctance to include nonwhite women). Likewise, the way you imagine race having an effect on witchcraft is grounded in the African American experience. Can you talk about these and other ways your experience as an academic and an instructor of African and African American history influenced this book?
Witchcraft is a fantasy of power. It’s most often envisioned as a gendered, feminist power fantasy, and it is, but you just can’t think about power in American history without thinking about race. That’s all I ever hoped my students left the classroom with, really—the sense that race is not a regrettable footnote to the American story; it is the American story.

The suffrage movement is one of the starkest places to see this. It’s told as a triumphal march toward victory, but whose victory? We say we won the vote in 1920, but who is we? If you were a Chinese American woman, you couldn’t vote until 1943. If you were a black woman in the South, you couldn’t really vote until 1965. If you’re a woman convicted of a felony in Kentucky, you still can’t vote today.

So I decided the existence of witching would change a lot about late 19th-century America, but not everything. It might exaggerate their victories. It might bridge the gap between what they had and what they needed. It might even reach across the lines between race and class—but it wouldn’t erase them.

Your writing has an old-fashioned feel that reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, E. Nesbit’s Psammead books and classic fairy tales, none of which were afraid to deal with the darker side of magic. The Once and Future Witches also recalls Naomi Alderman’s The Power in its exploration of challenging the male-female power dynamic. What books influenced you as a writer, and how do you think of your work’s place in the literary world?
This book is definitely what happens when a dreamy wistful kid grows up on fairy tales and classic children’s literature, encounters reality and spends the rest of her life grumpy about it. It’s the anger of someone who doesn’t believe in magic but wants to, who wishes for a world much better than the one she has. I don’t know where (or if!) my work fits in the literary world, but it’s surely somewhere in the vast space between Nesbit and Alderman, caught between fairy tales and fury.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Once and Future Witches.

Science fiction and fantasy is experiencing a critical and creative revival lately. To what do you attribute this? What draws you to the genre as a writer and reader?
It’s hard for me to imagine discovering sci-fi and fantasy—how do you discover the house you were born in? I grew up surrounded by Anne McCaffrey and C.J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold, Margaret Atwood and Octavia E. Butler, Nicola Griffith and Jane Yolen. I expected my houses to be haunted and my skies filled with dragons. It was mostly escapism for me as a kid, but the older I got, the more I saw the way fantasy revealed reality just as often as it obscured it. The best speculative fiction seemed to function both as a mirror, to show you the truth, and a door, to let you run from it. So I don’t know if the genre is having a revival or just a recognition of long-running excellence, but I’m thrilled either way.

The three female archetypes—Crone, Mother, Maiden—are pivotal to this story. They relate to the three Eastwood sisters and are relevant in other ways that shall remain unspoiled here! What did you take from historical portrayals? How do these archetypes still influence how women are seen today?
Intellectually, I hate the Maiden/Mother/Crone triad. It’s a rigid framework that reduces a woman’s identity and significance to the state of her uterus. It’s garbage. And yet, I feel the pull of it as a mythos. I like threes. I’m vulnerable to tradition. I wrote the first draft of this book with a newborn strapped to my chest and my first gray hairs frazzling around my face, feeling simultaneously old and young and neither. So I wanted to find a way to keep the power of feminine archetypes while getting rid of their simplicity, their cruelty. I wanted those words to matter exactly as much as we want them to, and not a bit more.

What do you most admire about each Eastwood sister?
It’s funny—in the beginning, I thought I loved them for their obvious strengths? Bella’s brains, Agnes’ independence, Juniper’s recklessness. But in the end I think I liked them more for the moments when they acted against their natures for the sake of others: when Bella took stupid risks, when Agnes needed others, when Juniper learned caution. It’s the sort of maturation I’m still waiting for in my own self.

Stories of female anger have a particular resonance these days. As one of your characters says, “History is a circle.” What similarities do you see between the suffrage movement and modern political movements?
Not enough and too many. Sometimes I see the better side of it—millions of women flooding the streets in the largest demonstration in American history. The survivors who lead the #MeToo movement. Elizabeth Warren, persisting nevertheless, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her white suit, an iron-jawed angel for the new century. But I also see the old failures and divides, especially along class and race lines: white women mourning the pay gap but failing to acknowledge that Latinas make 30% less than white women; cis women turning their backs on trans women; rich women advising poor women to simply “lean in.”

In those times I remember the 1913 women’s march on Washington, when Ida B. Wells was asked to march at the back so as not to offend the white southern participants, and I hope to god history doesn’t repeat itself.

Do you have a favorite book about witches?
We live in such a rich moment of witch books! I’ve recently loved Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching and Molly Ostertag’s graphic novel The Witch Boy. But the witch book I’ve read the most is almost certainly Julia Donaldson’s Room on the Broom.

What are you working on next?
I have a Sleeping Beauty novella coming out from Tor.com next year! The pitch was “I want to Spider-Verse a fairy tale,” which is a real thing that professional publishers let me do. It’s a bunch of Sleeping Beauties colliding into one another’s storylines, trying to bust out.

Author photo © Nick Stiner.