In the stunning finale of Becky Chamber’s Wayfarer Series, The Galaxy, And The Ground Within, three strangers do their best to help those at the fringes of the Galactic Commons after a freak technological failure brings all traffic to a halt, while in Stark Holborn’s Ten Low an ex-con ventures on a breakneck race to escape across an alien moon thriving with aliens and criminals.

Two telling tales to remind us that we are not alone in space!

About the event:

Chaired by Laura Lam

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

About the authors:

Becky Chambers is a science fiction author based in Northern California. She is best known for her Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series. She has two new works coming out in 2021: The Galaxy, and The Ground Within (the fourth and final Wayfarers novel), and A Psalm for the Wild-Built (the first of her Monk and Robot novellas). Becky has a background in performing arts, and grew up in a family heavily involved in space science. She spends her free time playing video games, tabletop RPGs, and looking through her telescope. Having hopped around the world a bit, she’s now back in her home state, where she lives with her wife. She hopes to see Earth from orbit one day.

Stark Holborn is a novelist, games writer, film reviewer, and the author of Nunslinger and Triggernometry and has worked on games and interactive fiction such as Shadow of Doubt (Colepowered Games) and Mars 2020 (BBC). Stark lives in the South West UK.

Unfortunately Marian Womack is not longer able to participate in this event. It will go ahead with Jael Richardson in conversation with Patrice Lawrence.

Jael Richardson’s Gutter Child and Marian Womack’s The Swimmers both chronicle one young woman’s journey through a fractured dystopian world of heartbreaking disadvantages and shocking social environmental and social injustices.

Can they defy the systems that shapes their worlds?

About the event:

Chaired by Patrice Lawrence

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

About the authors:

Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. The Stone Thrower was adapted into a children’s book in 2016 and was shortlisted for a Canadian picture book award. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC’s q. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and serves as the Executive Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutter Child is a dystopian story of courage and resilience and arrived in January 2021 with HarperCollins Canada.

Marian Womack is a bilingual writer, born by the Atlantic Ocean in a small Andalusian town, and educated in the UK. Her writing is concerned with nature and it features strange landscapes, ghostly encounters, and uncanny transformations through a variety of genres – experimental and hybrid fiction, speculative fiction, gothic and ghostly fiction, and fiction of the Anthropocene. The Swimmers is her latest releae. She is interested in the intersection of storytelling and other forms of narrative, and has participated in art installations, video games, and activist campaigns.

Marian is on Twitter and Instagram.

What makes a place a home? And how far would you go to protect yours?

In Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker, Norah and Arthur are learning how to co-exist in their new little world. Though they hardly know each other, everything seems to be going perfectly - from the home they're building together to the ring on Norah's finger. But survival in this world is a tricky thing, and the earth is becoming increasingly hostile to live in. Fortunately, Easton Grove is here for that in the form of a perfect little bundle to take home and harvest. You can live for as long as you keep it - or her – close.

Set within the high walls of the Western Protectorate, Aliya Whiteley's Skyward Inn, is a place of safety, where people come together peacefully to tell stories of the time before the war with Qita. But when a visitor comes to the Inn asking for help, they bring reminders of an unnerving past, questioning the true outcome of the war, and Earth's future.

About the event:

Chaired by Cat Hellisen

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

About the authors:

Aliya Whiteley writes across many different genres and lengths. Her first published full-length novels, Three Things About Me and Light Reading, were comic crime adventures. Her 2014 SF-horror novella The Beauty was shortlisted for the James Tiptree and Shirley Jackson awards. The following historical-SF novella, The Arrival of Missives, was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, and her noir novel The Loosening Skin was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. Her latest publication is Skyward Inn.

Aliyah is on Twitter.

Caroline Hardaker lives in the north east of England and writes quite a lot of things. She earned her BA (English Literature) and MA (Cultural and Heritage Studies) from Newcastle University, and her main problem is limiting herself to one idea at once, or maybe two ideas, or three…. Caroline’s debut novel, Composite Creatures, will be published by Angry Robot in April 2021.

Caroline is on Twitter.

Stephen Hawking once said that the development of AI could spell the end of the human race. In the new books by Akemi Dawn Bowman and Ben Oliver, we certainly don't have the best of times going up against them. 

In Akemi Dawn Bowman's The Infinity Courts, eighteen-year-old Nami Miyamoto discovers that the afterlife has been taken over by an AI bent on destroying humanity. Meanwhile, in Ben Oliver's The Block, the sequel to his debut The Loop, Luka goes to war against an all-powerful AI called Happy – once he gets out of prison that is.

About the event:

Chaired by Linda Strachan

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

About the authors:

Akemi Dawn Bowman is a critically acclaimed author who writes across genres. Her novels - including her most recent The Infinity Courts - have received multiple accolades and award nominations, and her debut novel, Starfish, was a William C. Morris Award Finalist. She has a BA in social sciences from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and currently lives in Scotland with her husband and two children. She overthinks everything, including this bio.

Akemi Dawn is on Twitter and Instagram.

Ben Oliver began writing creatively at age seven and was promptly placed into the lowest reading and writing group at school. Frustrated by his lack of immediate success, Ben chose to step down from the world of writing. Three years later, he came out of retirement to write a 'What I Did During My Summer Holiday' assignment, where he claimed he saved the world from the apocalypse. Encouraged by an enthusiastic teacher, Ben returned, triumphantly, to writing - The Block is his latest publication.

Ben is on Twitter.

As his time-travel novel The Recollection celebrates its tenth anniversary, and not a year goes by without a prize shortlist/win, we chat to Gareth L. Powell about his writing and his writing career.

Gareth L. Powell is an award-winning British science fiction author. He is best known for his Embers of War and Ack-Ack Macaque trilogies, but he has also written numerous short stories, novellas, and even turned his hand to screenwriting and comic scripts. Recently, Stampede Ventures and wiip have partnered to adapt his Embers of War novels for television, and he will act as Co-Executive Producer for the series.

He was born in Bristol and still lives nearby. He began writing at school and university and was fortunate to count Diana Wynne Jones and Helen Dunmore as early mentors.

His books have twice won the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award for Best Novel and have been finalists for the Locus, British Fantasy, and Seiun awards.

Gareth’s other passions include screenwriting, photography (the results of which you can see on his Instagram page), and digital art, of which he has recently sold a number of pieces.

In 2013, he realised a life-long ambition when a five-page strip he’d written appeared in the British comic 2000 AD.

Gareth spends a lot of time on Twitter, where he is known for the advice and encouragement he offers to fledgling writers. He has also included a lot of that advice in On Writing, a handbook for aspiring authors.

About the event:

Chaired by Marco Rinaldi and Tariq Ashkanani from The Page One Podcast

Running time: 30 minutes

The event premiered on YouTube

After the premiere, the event will be hosted on the Member Area of the Cymera website.

This event is followed by a live Kaffeeklatsch. More info here

The looming global climate crisis and its linked ecological catastrophes have long been featured in amazing works of (eco-)fiction: Lauren James’ Green Rising, Bijal Vachharajani’s A Cloud Called Bhura, Clara Hume’s Birdsong and James Bradley’s Ghost Species splendidly interwave reality and fantasy to reveal the truth about our climate and what it means to be human in the 21st century.

This event is organized in collaboration with the Climate Fiction Writers League. Founded by Lauren James and bringing together over 100 writers from all over the world, the Climate Fiction Writers League aims to raise awareness of climate change, and encourage action at the individual, corporate and government levels.

Visit the website to meet the writers and discover a whole host of brilliant writing and resources.

Running time: 60 minutes

The event premiered for free on YouTube.

After the premiere, the event will be hosted on the Member Area of the Cymera website.

Zookeeper: What Does it Mean to be Alone in this world? is the first volume of the story of John, a botanist who has emerged after a year long experiment, into a world devoid of humans. But he is not alone. Never have we been alone.

John has to journey through a new world fraught with many dangers and discoveries to unearth the truth. But the truth can break more than just one man. It can break us all.

To sacrifice one for the many? Isn’t that what being human is all about?

Created by Benjamin Morgan and drawn by Wolf Chi, Zookeeper has been 15 years in the making, and for Cymera, they chat to graphic novel guru Joe Gordon about their publishing journey.

Zookeeper is independently published and you can buy your copy here

About the event:

Chaired by Ann Landmann

Running time: 60 minutes

The event premiered on YouTube.

After the premiere, the event will be hosted on the Member Area of the Cymera website.

From record sleeve design to graphic novels, picture books to fonts, Rian Hughes is one of Britain’s most prolific creators - you probably own a piece of his work, though you may not know it.

His latest work, XX, is his first novel, incorporating NASA transcripts, newspaper and magazine articles, fictitious Wikipedia pages, undeciphered alphabets, and 'Ascension', a forgotten novelette by 1960s counterculture guru Herschel Teague that mysteriously foreshadows events.

Rian Hughes is a graphic designer, illustrator, comic artist, author, and typographer. From his studio, Device, he has produced watches for Swatch, Hawaiian shirts, logo designs for Batman and Spiderman, an iconoclastic revamp of British comic hero Dan Dare, and collaborated on a set of six children’s books with Geri Halliwell. A retrospective monograph, “Art, Commercial” was published in 2001. Recent books include “Logo-a-gogo”, “Custom Lettering of the ’20s and ’30s”, and his book of burlesque art, “Soho Dives, Soho Divas”. His comic strips have been collected in “Yesterdays Tomorrows”, which was launched at the ICA, London. He has an extensive collection of Thunderbirds memorabilia, a fridge full of vodka, and a stack of easy listening albums which he plays very quietly.

“One of the most successful and prolific designer/illustrators of the past 20 years” – Roger Sabin, Eye magazine.

About the event:

Chaired by David Bishop

Running time: 30 minutes

The event premiered on YouTube.

After the premiere, the event will be hosted on the Member Area of the Cymera website.

This event is followed by a Kaffeeklatsch. More info here

This event starts with a Brave New Words reading from Jim Alexander

Fantastic(al) worldbuilding is at the heart of the work of Shona Kinsella and Alex Pheby.

In Shona Kinsella’s novella The Flame and The Flood, one child in a hundred is born with an affinity: a magical link to an element, able to shape and use it as they choose. If they are lucky they will become a master craftsman, able to command high prices; if they are unlucky, the factories always demand new wielders, kept as slaves and worked to exhaustion.

Alex Pheby’s Mordew is a city built on the dead body of a god, where strange creatures are born out of the mud. In the slums of the sea-battered city a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud. Until one day his desperate mother sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew. The Master derives his magical power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength - and it is greater than the Master has ever known.

About the event:

Chaired by ABS

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

This event includes a Brave New Words reading from Jim Alexander

About the authors:

Alex Pheby was born in Essex and moved to Worcester in his early childhood. He currently lives with his wife and children in London, where he teaches at the University of Greenwich. Alex’s second novel, Playthings, published by Galley Beggar Press in 2015, was shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize. His third novel, Lucia, published in 2018, went on to be the joint winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Alex’s fourth novel, Mordew - the first in an epic fantasy trilogy - was published by Galley Beggar in August 2020.

Alex is on Twitter.

Shona Kinsella is an author of speculative fiction who lives in the West of Scotland, near picturesque Loch Lomond. She has a degree in Law and has worked in varied jobs, from acting to the civil service. Shona is an avid reader with a love for language and is most often to be found with her nose in a book. Shona lives with her husband and three children. When she's not writing, doing laundry or wrangling the children, she enjoys cooking, geocaching and nature walks with her family.

Shona is on Twitter and Instagram.

This event starts with a Brave New Words reading from Lorraine Wilson

From the ashes of the old world, a new one rises.

In Claire North’s Notes From the Burning Age. destruction gave way to an era of peace, humanity finding harmony with nature and each other, as new cities rose from the ruins of the old.
Ven used to be a holy man, a guardian of ancient archives. Sorting secrets from sacrilege, he studied the past so that we might never repeat it. But some ideas never fade, and as a new war brews, fuelled by old knowledge and older ambitions, Ven must decide how far he's willing to go to save this new world, and how much he is willing to lose.

And in Radio Life by Derek B. Miller, The Commonwealth, a post-apocalyptic society on the rise, is locked in a clash of ideas.

About the event:

Chaired by Heather Parry

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

This event includes a Brave New Words reading from Lorraine Wilson

Catherine’s first novel, Mirror Dreams, was completed when she was 14 years old. The book was published in 2002 and garnered comparisons with Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman. She went on to publish a further seven young adult novels under her own name, earning her extensive critical acclaim and two Carnegie nominations. While studying International History at the London School of Economics, she wrote an urban fantasy series for adults, writing as Kate Griffin. On graduating LSE she went to the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts to study Technical Theatre and Stage Management. Throughout her training, she continued to write, and while working as a lighting technician at the Royal National Theatre wrote her first Claire North novel, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which became a word-of-mouth bestseller and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Catherine currently works as a live music lighting designer, teaches women’s self-defence, and is a fan of big cities, long walks, Thai food and graffiti-spotting. She lives in London.

Claire is on Twitter and Facebook.

Derek B. Miller is an American novelist and international affairs professional. He is the author of Norwegian by Night; The Girl in Green; American by Day; and the forthcoming Twilight Crimes. He is a full-time writer or tries to be. It really depends on the day. Here he is happy in Mallorca on a motorcycle trip (2018). Other times, he grows a goatee and mopes.

Derek is on Twitter.

Join Cian McCourt, commissioning editor at Verso Books,  and translators Polly Barton and Helen O'Horan as they discuss the challenge and joy of bringing the work of Japanese author Izumi Suzuki to the English-speaking world for the fist time.

Izumi Suzuki is described as a "legend of Japanese science fiction" and a countercultural icon. She worked as a model and an actor, and produced numerous essays, works of short fiction and novels, before taking her own life in 1986. 

Commenting on Terminal Boredom, McCourt said: "When a friend doing post-graduate work found a short snippet about Izumi Suzuki's fiction in a footnote and sent it my way, I was intrigued enough to do some digging. My early enthusiasm was bolstered when a reader's report arrived full of notes such as  'argumentative pyjama scenes abound' and 'the subtle wordplay suggests Gertrude Stein at her most playful'. This is a collection of seven pitch-black and punky pleasures, as charming as they are unsettling."

About the event:

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

May it be by outsmarting the enemy and outrunning the galaxy in an attempt to save the Earth during an intergalactic warfare - as in Charlie Jane Anders’ Victories Greater Than Death - or by hopping through the galaxies and returning treasures that have the power to stop (and start) wars - as in SM Wilson’s The Infinity Files, there are many ways to save the universe, sometimes from itself!

About the event:

Chaired by Sarah Barnard

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

About the authors

Charlie Jane Anders' latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She's also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Her story "Six Months, Three Days" won a Hugo Award, and her story "Don't Press Charges And I Won't Sue" won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

S.M. Wilson lives on the west coast of Scotland with her fiancé and two sons. Her day job is as a nurse in public health – and her dream job is writing fiction. Her love of YA fiction started as a teenager and has never stopped. She wrote The Extinction Trials to try and infect her sons with the same love of reading that she has – watch out, she’s hoping it’s contagious!

Future technologies are at the centre of three diverse dystopian tales:

In the short fictions collected in The Flicker Against The Light and Writing The Temporary Uncanny , author Jane Alexander investigates virtual reality, biotech, data surveillance and communications technology.

The sci-fi thriller Inscape by Louise Carey is set in a tech-driven dystopian future where warring corporations battle over the ruins of our world.

In The Actuality by Paul Braddon, Evie is a near-perfect bioengineered human in a future where her kind is outlawed. After the death of her “husband”, Evie must take her chances and figure out if and how to make a life of her own.

About the event:

Chaired by Nicole Brandon

Running time: 60 minutes

Tickets: £3 / £5 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

About the authors:

Jane Alexander is the author of The Last Treasure Hunt, which was selected as a Waterstones Debut of the Year in 2015, and A User’s Guide to Make-Believe. Her short stories have won awards and been widely published. In 2018, she completed a PhD in creative writing, exploring the contemporary uncanny in short fiction. Her forthcoming projects include a collection of unsettling short stories about every day and near-future technologies. She currently teaches at the University of Edinburgh.

Louise Carey is a fantasy and science-fiction author. Her debut trilogy of novels starts with Inscape: ‘A propulsive thriller… with great twists and reversals’ (4 stars – SFX). She has co-written two fantasy novels, The City of Silk and Steel and The House of War and Witness, as well as a graphic novel, Confessions of a Blabbermouth. She also writes for the Dungeons & Dragons blog Tabletop Tales, which she runs with her partner, Camden. When she’s not writing, Louise can usually be found playing board games, reading horror, or DMing for a group of rowdy but well-intentioned adventurers.

The writing bug first bit as a teenager when Paul Braddon entered a sixth-form essay competition and shocked himself by winning a runner-up's prize. Heady stuff! But the real surprise was how much fun telling a story could be when he wasn’t being directed what to write. Anyway, he was now sold on a career as a novelist and the only sensible step was to study English Literature at university, although unfortunately, after three years of Dickens and Wordsworth, he was no nearer to being published. He went on to spend years on a lovely story titled The English Witch over which his friends were generous. ​ After a few more attempts, each an improvement on the last, he came up with The Actuality.