This is the home page of Aliette de Bodard, writer of fantasy and science fiction (and the very occasional horror piece).

She is a finalist for the 2009 Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a 2006 Writers of the Future winner. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of venues, such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

She lives in Paris, France, in a flat with more computers than she really needs, and uses her spare time to indulge in her love of mythology and history.

As a half-French, half-Vietnamese, Aliette has a strong interest in non-Western cultures, particularly the Aztecs and Ancient China, and will gladly use any excuse to shoehorn those into her short or long fiction.

A more extensive biography is available here, and a list of her fiction can be found here.

In the resources section, you will also find lists of research books for Pre-Columbian America and Ancient China.


Here is a random excerpt from Aliette’s free online fiction (click on quote to refresh):

I was baking flatbreads on the hearthstone when I saw my sister walk out of the forest.

I paused, disbelieving. She had left us, many years ago, to become a hermit. She had abandoned both my husband Nayen and me, and we had never heard from her afterwards. We had thought her safely ensconced within the forest, weathering monsoon after monsoon in some crude hut, serenely meditating on the gods of the Triad. And now she was walking towards me, as if she still belonged in my house.

She had changed. Her hair was white, her face gaunt and pinched, as if she had not eaten for moons. She wore rough, blackened clothes of bark, nothing like the red cotton sari she had put on before entering the forest.

I had half-risen, my hands still covered in spiced dough; she saw me. “Isalaya?” she asked, and swayed.

“Menmathe,” I said, and was there to catch her as she fell.

Read more.



from Memories of My Sister, Expanded Horizons


From the Blog

Midweek Update

July 2, 2009

Last few days to vote for the Hugos: deadline is July 3rd, 23:59 Eastern Daylight Time. (and, should you be still undecided as to which Campbell Award candidate you’re voting for, there’s still time to read the material in my short fiction sampler ).

I’m also told that the anthology Fantastical Visions IV, which contains my sort-of-Greek novelette “Healing Hands” and fellow Codexian David Walton’s “Dragonfly Savior”, is available for pre-order. Everything’s gorgeously illustrated by Stephanie Pui-Muin Law.

In other non-shameless self-promotional news, it’s summer in Paris and the weather is awesomely nice. I’m planning the rest of my holidays in a [...]


Original Picture Credits
Pyramid: rawhead (distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)
Portrait: Ines de Bodard