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This is the home page of Aliette de Bodard, writer of fantasy and science fiction (and the very occasional horror piece), Campbell Award Finalist, and Writers of the Future Winner.
Her debut novel, Servant of the Underworld, an Aztec mystery-fantasy, is out now from Angry Robot (UK/Australia) and forthcoming September 2010 (US/Rest of the World).
Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of venues, such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, 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):
Huan Ho sealed the last window, leaving only a crack in the shutter. Tonight, he thought, his eye on the empty streets, the neighbours’ barred shutters. Tonight he had to pass the door on the hill, or let the sickness take his mother.
She had been watching him from her bed. “They ride tonight,” she said, when he was done.
“Yes,” Huan Ho said. As on every year, the three horsemen would scour the city of Fei Weng, taking what and whom they pleased. “I’ve closed the house.”
His mother smiled, wanly. “We have nothing worth their notice.”
No riches, Huan Ho thought. The only room of the house was bare: a bed, a table and two chairs were its sole furniture. He had sold everything of value to the pawnbroker, to pay the apothecary. Not that the drugs had done more than dull her pain. The apothecary himself had admitted defeat, had jokingly said only the Dragon’s Tears could help her now. Huan Ho had not laughed. He had taken the drugs, and waited until year’s end, for the return of the riders, praying every day that his mother would remain alive until then.
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from "The Dragon's Tears", Electric Velocipede
More Angel snark…
Up to midpoint of season 2. Still a bunch of consistency issues, the worse ones being the ones around breath–if your vampire has no need to breathe to exist, and no way to exercise their lungs, they shouldn’t be able to gasp out; or, when held dangling by way of another vampire’s hand wrapped around their neck, to look as though they’re being strangled. [1]
And Gunn… OK, I’m the first for ethnic and class diversity in series, and the show’s record so far was pretty abysmal (all White apart from the occasional skimpy-clad Chinese demonness who doubles as martial arts specialist *sigh*). But really, did the one Black person on the show need to come from the street, have dodgy connections, and spout off “brother” every two lines? Do the words “bad stereotypes ” even register here?
[1]Also, how are they talking without lungs again? Or, for that matter, bleeding without a beating heart?
Original Picture Credits
Portrait: Ines de Bodard
