“In this sterling collection of twenty-one fantastic tales, Sedia demonstrates the talents that have earned her a place on the Tiptree Honor List and a World Fantasy Award.”

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“Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Gina Guadagnino interviews her on the story.

The careful structures of the wasp and bee societies are integral to this story. Can you tell us if it was those structures that inspired the story, or if they happened to fit the story you wanted to tell?

I must have been aware on some level of that long tradition of writers and scientists, Virgil to Bernard Mandeville to James Gould, fascinated by the parallels between eusocial insects in general and bees in particular—the hive, the swarm, the nest—and human political realities. Maurice Maeterlinck wrote a beautiful little book called The Life of the Bee, which I first stumbled on in epitaphs to Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice many years ago, and bought; it is a short series of meditations and observations on the beehive and its inhabitants that frequently take flight into philosophical wonder. He writes of the swarm:

Where is the fatality here, save in the love of the race of today for the race of tomorrow? This fatality exists in the human species also, but its extent and power seem infinitely less. Among men it never gives rise to sacrifices as great, as unanimous, or as complete. What farseeing fatality, taking the place of this one, do we ourselves obey? We know not; as we know not the being who watches us as we watch the bees.

I had studied some entomology in high school; then in my sophomore year at Princeton a beekeeping club was formed, and I began attending classes and hanging around the hives. (We just caught a small swarm on campus last Wednesday.) Somehow all of these things combined with a graduate course on postcolonialism and the deadline for the Dell Awards to make a whole story.

These are guesses. I’m waffling. There are some stories that come to you by grace, or by a neutrino hitting your brain, whose origins are unfathomable. This was one of them.

More: Read the rest of the interview here!

“A Journey of Only Two Paces” by Tim Powers will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Molly Tanzer interviews him on the story.

I have a big, fluffy, orange and white cat. His life seems pretty all right, what with the chasing stuff, rolling around, getting petted, and doing whatever he wants all the time. It got me thinking about Kohler’s resistance to Jack’s plan … do you think there’s anyone out there who, having figured out the angle of the wake, would have chosen differently? Do you think you might ever choose differently?

Depending on what day you asked me, yes, I think I might have chosen the life of a cat in that nice old building! I often look at our cats — Uh-oh, you can imagine one of them thinking, it’s already ten-thirty and I’ve been sleeping on the windowsill! I’m supposed to be sleeping on the bookshelf now! — and envy their lives!

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here! 

“Widows in the World” by Gavin Grant will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Gina Guadagnino interviews him on the story.

You describe the Granny and her house as being friends, but the people in the house feel like a constant source of stress and pressure for her. The Granny connects more with the sentient house itself, rather than those in it. Can you describe that relationship more for us?

It’s sometimes easier to deal with other things instead of people and having the house be sentient adds a new layer to the Granny’s people avoidance behaviors. She has bent the house—and herself—out of shape and made it a part of her new narrative, something she couldn’t coerce a person into doing. So it’s not a healthy relationship.

More: Read the rest of the interview here!

“Choose Your Own Adventure” by Kat Howard will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Wendy Wagner interviews her on the story.

Each section of this story touches on a setting or situation really vital to the fantasy genre. It reads like an exploration of what fantasy really means to its readers. What pushed or inspired you to use these topics?

This story started, as many wonderful things do, via Twitter. I said that I was stuck on my current WIP, and so I was going to put on some music and dance around my office, and when I came back to my desk, someone would have written the next bit for me. When I looked back at the computer everyone had responded with “rocks fall, everyone dies.” (Okay, one person said “bombs fall,” but you get the point.) I laughed, and offered co-author credit for the brilliant endings, but then I started thinking about all the sort of things we know we’re not supposed to do in our writing, like end a story with “and then I woke up,” or write an Adam and Eve story, or start a work of fantasy in an inn, either because these elements have become overdone, or because they’re seen as cheating the reader. And I thought, what if you shoved all of those things in one story? How could you write it in a way that worked, and took them seriously?

I am still sad that I couldn’t actually make “rocks fall, everyone dies” work.

More: Read the rest of the interview here!