Women in SF&F Month: Shay Kauwe
Apr
08
2026

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Shay Kauwe! The Killing Spell, her upcoming novel that follows a young Hawaiian woman in a future with language magic, will be released on April 14 in the US and April 23 in the UK. Her book has received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, which called it a “smart and satisfying urban fantasy debut [that] combines gripping mystery, tantalizing romance, and sharp cultural critique.” I’m delighted she’s here today to discuss a link she shares with her novel’s protagonist in “The Kuleana of Being an Eldest Daughter.”

US Cover of The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe UK Cover of The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe

About The Killing Spell:

In this spellbinding fantasy debut set in a future where language magic reigns, a young Hawaiian woman must solve a murder to clear her name.

Kea Petrova is dealing with more than her fair share of trouble.

At just twenty-five years old, she’s the youngest of five Hawaiian clan leaders living on the Homestead in outer Los Angeles. Nearly 200 years ago, when a catastrophic flood submerged the Hawaiian islands and unleashed magic into the world, these clans forged a treaty with the city, establishing a new Hawaiian homeland. But that treaty is about to expire.

Kea struggles to keep her small clan afloat, scraping together rent each month through odd jobs and selling her own crafted Hawaiian language spells. While her talent for language magic is her saving grace, she feels like a shadow of those who came before her. Just when she thinks things can’t get any more complicated, the murder of Angelo Reyes—LA’s most prominent Filipino activist—turns her world upside-down.

Angelo was killed by a death spell—something that, due to the properties of each school of language magic, can only exist in Hawaiian. With independent spellsmithing being technically illegal, Kea quickly becomes the prime suspect, known for her spellwork on the Homestead. To clear her name, she must unravel the mystery behind Angelo’s murder and confront LA’s most powerful (and dangerous) players, each wielding their own type of magic. The clock is ticking—can Kea save herself, her clan, and the Homestead before it’s too late?

The Kuleana of Being an Eldest Daughter
By Shay Kauwe

A quick Hawaiian-to-English dictionary search will define kuleana as “responsibility,” but like most translations, this is incomplete. Kuleana is a responsibility, but it’s also a right, a privilege, a title, a reason, a cause, and a liability. In short, it’s complicated. Yet, when I think of my experiences as an eldest daughter, there is no better word to encompass the full weight of that role.

I am the firstborn in my family, not only to four siblings, but also nineteen first cousins. (Yes, nineteen.) We all grew up in a small town in Hawaiʻi, and by the time I was a preteen, I was an expert at feeding, changing, and burping babies. At twelve, I could help three kids with homework and carry a toddler at the hip while stirring a giant pot of chili. Big sisters, by virtue of our births, become the unofficial and unacknowledged heirs of our families. We’re tasked with taking on both masculine and feminine roles in a household—all without acknowledgement or appreciation. It isn’t just a responsibility, but an expectation.

It’s therefore unsurprising that being an eldest daughter has gained some infamy as a kind of curse. Eldest daughters are told to quit complaining, encouraged instead to cut their demanding families out of their lives if they have an issue with the weight of their title. However, I can’t help but feel that this perspective is very white. The Western solution to relationship problems often assumes that a person is better off alone than inconvenienced. And while that may be true for some, the vast majority of folks desire community. They want, need, and love their families.

However, the false belief that people can go at it alone has seeped deep into a gamut of cultural norms, and Science Fiction/Fantasy is no exception. The Hero’s Journey, for example, is held up as THE blueprint for storytelling, but it’s an unequivocally masculine tale. In his story, a Hero overcomes the odds by facing trials alone and triumphs by relying on his individual awesomeness.

Daughters don’t even enter the equation.

I took issue with this. So, when I wrote The Killing Spell, I explored different routes and was drawn to idea of the Heroine’s Journey. After reading Gail Carriger’s book by the same name, I was shocked at how different a Heroine’s trajectory was. She relied on others, she built communities, she succeeded with others. The defining quality of a Heroine was teamwork because she was surrounded by people.

I began to see this pattern in all of my favorite stories: The Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik, where El’s friendships are what help her escape the deadly academy in one piece; the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews, where Kate builds a literal pack of people who love and support her; and even childhood classics like Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, where Sophie Hatter defies every fairy-tale trope with her sisters and found family. It was revolutionary for me, as a young writer, to see familial relationships as the source of womens’ strength, rather than a ball-and-chain.

Drawing on these tales as a new compass, my Heroine took shape—and I knew she had to be an eldest child. Keaalaokaleo Petrova, or Kea for short, is the Heroine of The Killing Spell, and my not-so-silent wish for all daughters: success, community, and the feeling of being at ease in your own skin. Though Kea actively struggles with self-doubt, in the end, she’s able to protect the people she loves by building networks of support to lift herself, and everyone else, up. I placed Kea in a familiar role, as the eldest daughter of a struggling clan. I knew that in this position she would be overwhelmed (Aren’t we always?), but I also knew that she’d succeed because of her family—not in spite of them.

It’s my hope that The Killing Spell resonates with eldest daughters everywhere, because while it’s true that we may feel an inflated sense of responsibility, or struggle to set boundaries, I don’t believe that the solution is to walk away. Girls shouldn’t need to cut off their families to be happy—we just need some goddamn help!

Because the truth is that we love being big sisters.

I know how that sounds. Why would anyone want that weight? That kuleana? The answer lies in the layers of that word. Kuleana is more than just a burden. It’s a privilege. An honor. And in the end, the responsibility of being the eldest is worth it for the simple fact that we love our siblings. Call it corny, call it cliché—or call it what it is. Powerful. I, for one, continue to believe that love is always the most radical choice a person can make.

Photo of Shay Kauwe Shay Kauwe is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) author from Hawaiʻi. She grew up on the Homestead in Waimānalo but moved to Russia because she fell in love with a boy. They now live in Oʻahu. Shay holds an M.Ed in Education and was named an NCTE Early Educator of Color in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded an Empowering ʻŌiwi Leadership Award by the Hawaiian Council, for her work in storytelling and literacy. Her debut urban fantasy THE KILLING SPELL is forthcoming from Saga/Solaris Books and will be the first traditionally published adult fantasy novel by a Hawaiian author.
Women in SF&F Month: Samantha Mills
Apr
06
2026

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Women in SF&F Month continues today with a guest post by Samantha Mills, plus a chance to win a copy of her upcoming book (whether you live in the US or not)! She is the author of the science fantasy novel The Wings Upon Her Back, a Compton Crook Award winner and World Fantasy Award finalist—as well as one of my own favorite books published in 2024 for its uniqueness and exploration of a variety of subjects, particularly its protagonist’s relationship with her mentor and the complications of walking away from her life’s work. Rabbit Test and Other Stories, her collection coming out on April 21, contains both fantasy and science fiction, including the eponymous winner of the Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon Awards. I’m thrilled she is here today sharing about her experiences going from writing novel-length fiction to these stories with “Epic Worldbuilding in Short Fiction.”

Enter Fantasy Cafe’s Rabbit Test Giveaway

Cover of Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills

About Rabbit Test and Other Stories:

This subversive debut short-fiction collection comes from one of the hottest talents in speculative fiction: 2025 Compton Crook Award and Pushcart Prize nominee Samantha Mills (The Wings Upon Her Back). The central story of the collection is Mills’s pivotal Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon Award–winning story “Rabbit Test,” which interrogates the past, present, and future of abortion rights in America.

A time-traveling fisherwoman keeps landing on the right shore, but at the wrong time. A pair of witches fight over the gate between life and death. A new consciousness, intent upon seeing all the wonders of the universe, visits a floating library. A rock-and-roll legend squares off against a town full of devils. Humanity makes first contact but falters when put in charge of selecting the world’s representatives.

These riveting stories run the gamut of the genre, transitioning from fantasy to contemporary, and then into the farthest reaches of space. They take place in strange and emotional worlds, with stakes ranging from the epic to the personal, with ample room for humor and hope amid tragedy.

Epic Worldbuilding in Short Fiction
Samantha Mills

I learned how to write novels long before I learned how to write short stories. Book structure was imprinted on my brain after decades of reading, so while my first attempts were clumsy, at least the results were recognizably book-shaped! My first attempts at short stories, on the other hand, were complete failures. They were too long, they were too loaded with dialogue, and they didn’t have enough story. I was writing scenes that I would write for a book, with no chance of getting anywhere good before I ran out of pages.

It was worldbuilding in particular tripping me up, because I love fantasy. I love immersive settings, I love exploring the ramifications of speculative elements, I love big endings. So how do you get the feel of an epic without the length of an epic? In novels, you get however much room you need to fit however much plot you desire. A book can be 250 pages or 1,000. A story can span one book or a dozen. It doesn’t make them easy, but it does make them flexible.

In fact, I’d posit that one of the strongest tricks a novel has is sheer time spent reading. If you can entice a reader to follow your characters for several hundred pages, then even a simple ending can land with the weight of a long journey behind it. People spend hours, days, weeks immersed in the world of a book. They can spend literal years of their lives anticipating and engaging with a series. There’s room to breathe there. There’s room to indulge in detailed character studies, lengthy conversations, blossoming and evolving relationships, dazzling action set pieces or long, beautiful ruminations on anything really.

Whereas a short story is trying to evoke big feelings in ten to twenty pages, give or take. (Don’t ask me how flash fiction writers do it—they’re wizards!)

To write short fantasy, I had to learn how to be extremely judicious in my choice of detail. I had to learn to write montages and how to ruthlessly skip time. To my surprise, I realized that the brevity of a short story is exactly what gives it the potential to be read expansively. You can dive straight into the climax of a bigger story, and if you sprinkle in tidbits of backstory and worldbuilding in just the right way, readers will fill in the gaps on their own. Some authors have done that literally—the climax of Seth Dickinson’s debut novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, was first published as a short story, “The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds.” It’s a great example of how the same epic story can be told in long form versus short form.

All of my study of short fiction came via reading. I discovered the online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which specializes in high fantasy with a literary bent. A goldmine of research and great fun! I discovered short story collections by authors like Catherynne Valente and Kij Johnson, and was dazzled by their structural experimentation and the beauty of their prose. Short stories were finally beginning to make sense to me as an art form almost wholly separate from that of the novel.

My big craft breakthrough was with a story called “Anchorage.” I had a good-sized cast of characters, a space crew visiting an anchoress walled up inside a floating library. To give it a more expansive feel, I wrote an extremely enthusiastic narrator who could gush about the many wonders they’d seen so far, sketching out a vibrant universe without ever leaving their small ship. I was learning to pack my sentences with detail and letting nothing go to waste.

Emboldened by that success, I wrote “Strange Waters.” It is about a fisherwoman who is lost in time, struggling to get home to her children. The story follows her many attempts to return to her original era. She haunts the same stretch of coastline for more than a decade, jumping forward and back, witnessing more than a thousand years of her city’s history. It’s a world that could fill a novel, but by keeping the narrative tightly tied to the main character’s quest, I could explore that world in a series of brief snapshots that, collectively, built up something bigger.

After that, I was fairly mad with power. I got more experimental with “The Limits of Magic,” a story about a women’s revolution in a fantasy world, in which the first half of the plot unspools in reverse, each brief scene going back in time through the main character’s life, until the thread snaps and the story moves forward again. I mashed science fiction and fantasy together with wild abandon in “Spindles,” in which a fairytale princess and her faithful bear fight an alien invasion. In “Rabbit Test,” I applied all of my techniques to the real world in another story spanning thousands of years, this time through the lens of abortion rights and pregnancy testing. And in “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care For the End of Days,” I wrote a love letter to my husband which spirals out into all sorts of potentially catastrophic timelines when you’re living under a doomsday cult. (Clearly, I like to play with the element of time.)

I finally understood that if you have a hinge upon which to hang the story, some central throughline—a character arc, an emotion, a personal revelation, a point—then you can sketch as big a world around it as you want, purely through off-hand narrating. In the battle of show versus tell, you can get away with telling a whole hell of a lot as long as the parts you are showing are precise enough, evocative enough—as long as they make you feel something.

That’s the beauty of the short story, for me. It is different than a novel, where the journey is the point, and the destination is the reward for tagging along. A short story is the destination. It can be a dissection of a single moment in time, or it can be a whirlwind through all known history, but either way you are stepping in at the culmination point. Short stories are a beautiful collaboration between creator and audience, in which the author has a scant number of sentences to make their case, and the reader is asked to imagine the rest.

Between us, we dream up entire worlds.

Photo of Samantha Mills Samantha Mills’s critically acclaimed first novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, won the Compton Crook Award for the year’s best debut and is a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. In 2023, she received the Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards for her short story “Rabbit Test.” Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and others and was included in The New Voices of Science Fiction from Tachyon Publications and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023. She is a librarian and trained archivist specializing in primary documents. Mills grew up in Southern California, where she still lives with her family and cats.

Book Giveaway

Courtesy of Tachyon Publications, I have two copies of Rabbit Test and Other Stories to give away: one trade paperback copy for a reader in the US and one ebook for a reader outside the US!

Giveaway Rules: To be entered in the giveaway, fill out Fantasy Cafe’s Rabbit Test Giveaway Google form, linked below. One entry per household and the winner will be randomly selected. The giveaway will be open until the end of the day on Monday, April 20. Each winner has 24 hours to respond once contacted via email, and if I don’t hear from them after 24 hours has passed, a new winner will be chosen (who will also have 24 hours to respond until someone gets back to me with a place to send the book).

Please note email addresses will only be used for the purpose of contacting the winners. Once the giveaway is over all the emails will be deleted.

Enter Fantasy Cafe’s Rabbit Test Giveaway
Women in SF&F Month: Week 2 Schedule & Week in Review
Apr
05
2026

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The fifteenth annual Women in SF&F Month continues with three new guest posts this week, starting tomorrow with an essay and book giveaway (with one print copy for a US reader and one digital copy for someone outside the US). Thank you so much to last week’s guests for a wonderful start to the month!

The new guest posts will be going up on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, but before announcing the upcoming schedule, here are last week’s essays in case you missed any of them.

All guest posts from April 2026 can be found here, and last week’s guest posts were:

And there are most guest posts coming up, starting with one accompanied by a book giveaway tomorrow! This week’s essays are by:

Women in SF&F Month 2026 Schedule Graphic

April 6: Samantha Mills (Rabbit Test and Other Stories, The Wings Upon Her Back)
April 8: Shay Kauwe (The Killing Spell)
April 10: Veronica G. Henry (The People’s Library, Bacchanal)

Women in SF&F Month: Elaine Ho
Apr
03
2026

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is artist and author Elaine Ho! Her illustrations, which can be found on her website and Instagram, include “Bones to the Wind” from the eponymous book cover jacket, “Harmony” from the Gen Con 2024 program cover, “Wall of Roses” from Uncanny Magazine Issue 46, and scenes from her debut novel. Her dark political fantasy book released late last year, Cry, Voidbringer, explores “how identity is reshaped under empire” and the question “Why do post-colonial societies perpetuate the same crimes as their oppressors?” I’m excited she’s here today, where she is discussing the latter of these topics.

Cover of Cry, Voidbringer by Elaine Ho

About Cry, Voidbringer:

In a broken system, do you save yourself or fight for the people you love?

With the godspower waning, the queen of Ashvi has had to find another way to bolster her fight against her imperialist oppressors. The solution: wrenching children of other cultures from their homes and conscripting them into service.

Hammer was one of those children. Now, she’s a jaded soldier waging Ashvi’s perpetual war, thinking only of her own survival. But when she accidentally rescues Viridian, a child with rare and potentially devastating powers, her priorities shift. The girl appears to be the answer to the queen’s prayers—the perfect weapon to restore her kingdom’s ancient borders, even if the colonized cities they reconquer don’t want her version of liberation. Can Hammer protect Viridian from the system that broke her . . . before the girl’s power is unleashed on the world?

Cry, Voidbringer is a gripping saga of how far one will go for freedom and control—and how easily it can all be taken away.

Arguably we live in a post-colonial world. The cruelty of the colonial era is well documented—Amritsar, Mỹ Trạch, the Banda Islands. But those who have unburdened ourselves of European power have a dichotomy of shame and pride when discussing our colonialist past.

There is an anger reflecting on this part of our history. It’s a deeply human part of us: a need to make sense of our suffering, and if there isn’t, then it is unjust. We’ve invented entire religions to exact revenge. We comfort ourselves that criminals will get their due on a spiritual plane beyond human sight.

This anger is wholly justified: a rape of one’s homeland, an invader stealing all and leaving little for us, being relegated to a second-class citizen of the very land we were born in. We learn these horrors and we find community who share this grief with us. We collectively go “never again”, and a national identity is birthed from the spume of this national humiliation.

But shame is a funny thing. It’s an admittance of weakness, and in a post-colonial world where we’re already poor and vulnerable, weakness is an open invitation for further subjugation. To protect ourselves, we erase this part of our history. We pretend this colonial past didn’t happen. We go back to “the good ol’ days”, whatever that is, and one can arbitrarily pick any point in history and romanticize it. Oh, let’s pick 600AD, because that was the era where we were in power before the Europeans came. A great, glorious time, when we had all this land and all these countries, and we were the kings that oppressed others.

What results is a refusal to acknowledge that colonization has affected people, in the way they view themselves in relation to each other, and their relationship to the land they live on. The narrative doesn’t allow for that. It ruins the fantasy that the oppression never existed. To keep this lie alive, we wind up using the tools of our oppressors to construct a memory of a past that most likely never existed. This dream must discard the true cost of war. After all, if your romanticized history meant your country won every single battle, then fighting shouldn’t be too hard, right?

We’ve lost institutional memory in this post-colonial world. War has spawned countless pieces of literature documenting the savagery and fruitlessness of it, and yet we never learn. I see genocide after genocide, war after war, fought over the same reasons as a thousand years ago, but now with better guns and better bombs. We joke that time is a flat circle. It’s true. We fall into the same mistakes over and over again for a simple human reason: we cannot look weak, because someone, somewhere, will hurt us again.

Is there a solution to this? I don’t know.

I’m not holding out hope for it.

Photo of Elaine Ho Elaine Ho is an award-winning Asian American illustrator and author. She bounces between the US and Singapore, belonging to both and neither. Ho’s work primarily explores themes of identity and home, while also being drawn to the broken and the beautiful. She originally received a degree in psychology before pivoting into art full-time. Find her work at artofelaineho.com.
Women in SF&F Month: Lorraine Wilson
Apr
01
2026

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Women in SF&F Month 2026 officially starts today with a guest post by Lorraine Wilson! Her short fiction includes “Bathymetry” (winner of the British Fantasy Award) and “Mhairi Aird” (published in the British Fantasy Award–nominated anthology Nova Scotia: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, Volume 2). Her first novel, This Is Our Undoing, won the SCKA for Best Debut and was a finalist for the Kavya Prize as well as the British Fantasy Awards for Best Novel and Best Newcomer. Her latest novels are the science fantasy books We Are All Ghosts in the Forest and The Salt Oracle, the latter of which is a finalist for this year’s British Science Fiction Association Award and a Locus Recommended Reading List selection for Science Fiction. I’m thrilled she’s here today with her essay “Finding hope — writing in hard times, the ‘punk’, and envisioning better futures.”

Cover of We Are All Ghosts in the Forest by Lorraine Wilson Cover of The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson

About We Are All Ghosts in the Forest and The Salt Oracle:

The internet has collapsed, leaving the world haunted by digital ghosts that infect books, people and nature itself. Blending climate fiction, folklore, and a smidge of the spooky, these two critically acclaimed science fantasies are standalones in the same eerie future.

BSFA Longlisted WE ARE ALL GHOSTS IN THE FOREST follows a healer whose carefully solitary life on the edge of the woods is upturned when a scarred and silent teenage boy is left in her care, and a mysterious digital plague spreads unrest across the land.

Current BSFA finalist, THE SALT ORACLE, is a locked boat murder mystery with a dash of second chance romance and a post fall-of-civilisation dark academia. A giant floating college has been built around an uncanny girl who can commune with the digital ghosts of the sea, but is she a monster, or a victim?

Finding hope —
writing in hard times, the ‘punk’, and envisioning better futures
– Lorraine Wilson

This is a hard time to be a creative. The tech companies are stealing our work in order to burn the world faster while they line their pockets with economic lies. The publishing industry is starving its mid-list, investing in narrower and narrower genre-brackets, and stripping publishing houses for parts. And the world — oh the world — it is so full of darkness and hurt and injustice. How, amidst all that, do you sit at your computer and create beauty?

It feels frivolous to write about imaginary people having imaginary crises when there is just so much work to be done to fix everything that is broken, and we all (the non-politicians, non-millionaires) individually have so little ability to create that change. We are fiddling while Rome burns, or shouting our own name into an abyss filled with weeping. It feels self-indulgent if you are writing about anything other than world events, and futile if you are. And yet we have all seen the quotes from wiser women than me saying that in difficult times, writing matters.

‘Books are a form of political action,’ Toni Morrison said. ‘Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.’ Ursula Le Guin said, ‘Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words.’ She also said this: ‘I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.’

So who am I to disagree with such icons? And I don’t disagree, but I do think the gap between believing these statements to be true, and having the necessary creative energy to do the work is wide and hard to cross. Particularly for those of us writing around the socio-political issues that are so overwhelmingly in our news — far-right violence, the dismantling of democracy and human rights, the climate crisis — thus making our work not escapist, not something we can compartmentalise away from the real world. And it is particularly hard again for those of us who are struggling to stay afloat within publishing — financial hardship, insecurity and industry disinterest are not, funnily enough, conducive to creativity.

So how do we, as authors who are trying to speak to the hard times, and envisioning change, guard the flame of our creativity when the world seeks to blow it out?

I have always said to my daughter that whenever something terrible is happening, we must ask ourselves what is within our capacity to do, and then we must do it. Whether that’s donating, signing petitions, marching, uplifting other voices, or just being in community with others, there is almost always some small direct action we as normal citizens can do even for issues that are not on our doorstep. I think finding that small direct action frees up a lot of the mental energy consumed by powerlessness — it allows our brains to let out a breath of relief and say ‘right, I’ve done something, so now what else can I do?’ And it becomes easier for that next something to be art.

So then, once we come to the art, we can use that powerlessness we feel, along with the anger and the desperate hope, to fuel our writing. Having done something tangible, the intangibility of art-as-resistance feels more deeply nurtured and nurturing. With my most recent two books — We Are All Ghosts in the Forest, and The Salt Oracle — I was very consciously exploring the power of individual choices, and individual compassion. I was looking at community, and what it takes to build community and hold it together in the face of apocalyptic world events. That exploration was a way of reminding myself that I believe in community as the force that can resist the megalomaniac destructiveness we are surrounded by. I don’t believe in heroes or chosen ones, but I do believe in normal people – just look at the Twin Cities, and the awe-inspiring power of a community brought together against hate.

Recently though, I have taken a break from novel projects to focus on short fiction. Partly because publishing is brutal and I needed to step away from the fear of failure, but also partly because I wanted, with everything going on in the world, to take some time to focus on generating hope on the page. Not just hope within dystopian worlds, but actively hopeful futures.

Anger and catharsis for our fears are extremely important in our fiction, and I will die on the hill that we need those narratives just as much as we need escapism, hope or joy. But having written several books that contemplate those fears head on, I wanted to do something different. Genre-labels like ‘solar-punk’ and ‘hope-punk’ have been drifting around the SFF conversations for a while now, but intentionally diving into those narrative forms meant I had to have a good think about what they are really doing. The key word, to me, is the ‘punk’. We are fond of appending that word to pretty much anything that’s a bit edgy, but if this is me trying to do as the great Le Guin bid me — envisioning larger realities — then my stories need to be doing more than that.

Punk, to me, is a political stance. It is active movement against the status quo, a dismantling of hegemonic structures of power, ownership and personhood. And not just that — it isn’t enough to resist exploitative systems; to be truly envisioning freedom, we need to be creating something better. It is also not enough to be cosy or gentle or free from conflict — that is escapism, not hope, and it definitely isn’t punk. If I wanted to write ‘hope-punk’ then I needed to be saying ‘this is who we might be, this is how we’d get there, this is why it matters.’

This mini-project has taken me to speculative climate mitigation work, collective restoration and future folklores. It has been a powerful exercise in testing my storytelling skills, my imagination, and my capacity to dream better realities that are still tangibly linked to where we are now. But it has also done something unexpected — it’s made me better at looking for the light.

I thought I was already quite good at looking for the people doing the good work, at believing that there is always someone creating a light in any darkness. But in specifically seeking to create that light in my stories, I’ve found myself seeing it in more places than before. In some ways, that only adds to my general frustration at the people in power — the solutions are right there. It would, bluntly, be so damn easy to fix all of the horrors facing us, the only thing in our way is the greed of rich men.

But it has also been rejuvenating — this retraining to look for solutions rather than pending disaster. In remembering freedom, I have found it in more places than I thought, and I will be carrying that determined, eyes-wide-open hopefulness back into my novels. There is so much I cannot influence, but I can do this.

It is a hard time to be a creative. But we are creatures built on storytelling, and anyone who has hung on in publishing for any length of time is stubborn down to their bones. So we build community, we tell stories that shape hope out of ashes, and we don’t give up until that hope becomes truth.

Photo of Lorraine Wilson

A conservation scientist and third culture Scot, Lorraine lives by the sea writing stories influenced by folklore and the wilderness. She has a PhD from the University of St. Andrews and is the author of several books, most recently the connected science fantasies We Are All Ghosts In The Forest and The Salt Oracle. Winner of two British Fantasy Awards and the Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize, her books have also been finalists for the BSFA, BFA, Kavya and Saltire Awards, and twice winners of the SCKAwards. Lorraine has been stalked by wolves, caught the bubonic plague, and befriended pythons, but she now sticks to herding cats.
Introducing Women in SF&F Month 2026
Mar
30
2026

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This April will be the fifteenth annual Women in SF&F Month here at Fantasy Cafe, starting on the 1st! For the last several years, this month has been dedicated to highlighting some of the many women doing wonderful work in fantasy and science fiction, and the site will be featuring guest posts by some of these writers throughout April. There will be new posts appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout the month, and there will also be a book giveaway next week (with one print copy for a US reader and one digital copy for someone outside the US!).

As always, guests will be discussing a variety of topics—the stories and narratives that help them see the world around them more clearly, the ideas and types of characters they explore in their work, the questions and points they keep in mind when writing, the power of asking “What if?” when creating fiction, the ways they find hope and continue to get words on the page, and more. I’m excited to share their essays with you this month, and I hope that these both give you some things to think about and help you find some new authors and books to read.

The Women in SF&F Month Origin Story

In case you are unfamiliar with how April came to be Women in SF&F Month here: It started in 2012, following some discussions about review coverage of books by women and the lack of women blogging about books being suggested for Hugo Awards in fan categories that took place in March. Some of the responses to these—especially the claim that that women weren’t being reviewed and mentioned because there just weren’t that many women reading and writing SFF—made me want to spend a month highlighting women doing work in the genre to show that there are a lot of us, actually.

So I decided to see if I could pull together an April event focusing on women in science fiction and fantasy, and thanks to a great many authors and reviewers who wrote pieces for the event, it happened! I was—and continue to be—astounded by the fantastic guest posts that have been written for this series. And I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who has contributed to it.

If you’ve missed the series before and want to check out some of the previous posts, you can find some brief descriptions and links for the past few years on the following pages:

This Week’s Schedule

I’m looking forward to this year’s Women in SF&F series, which starts in a couple days! There will be guest posts on Wednesday and Friday with more to come on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout April. This week’s guests are as follows:

Women in SF&F Month 2026 Schedule Graphic

April 1: Lorraine Wilson (The Salt Oracle, We Are All Ghosts in the Forest)
April 3: Elaine Ho (Cry, Voidbringer; “Harmony” and More Artwork)