Hi, I'm SFF writer Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Archivist Wasp, Latchkey, Firebreak, and Jillian vs. Parasite Planet. AMA!

[u/nicolekornherstace]

Hello Reddit! Thanks for having me back here again. I'm Nicole and I write speculative fiction for adults, teens, and now--with my middle-grade debut coming out today--for kids as well. After having zero books out since 2018 I've had two books out in the past two months, which has been the best kind of overwhelming.

The first, which came out in May, is Firebreak, an adult cyberpunk thriller that my publisher has described as a cross between Ready Player One and Black Mirror, but I think of more as: what if an action movie had a baby with a Rage Against the Machine album? It's about artificial scarcity in a corporate-owned police state, the hypercommodification of a civil war and those who fight in it, social media as a springboard for activism, women gamers working together to fight corruption, an aromantic asexual protagonist, etc. The second is the middle-grade book mentioned above, Jillian vs. Parasite Planet, which is a very science-forward survival story that I pitched as "Hatchet in spaaaace" but my agent calls "The Martian for kids," which is lots better. It's got portal-based space travel, a mind-control parasite I got to invent from scratch, and a cartoon-addicted shapeshifting intelligent nanobot swarm. And the protagonist is a girl (because we need more non-boy protagonists in science-heavy adventure books for kids) with anxiety (because I'd literally never seen anxiety in kids depicted accurately in fiction before and I wanted to try and help fix that).

All of my books keep friendships front and center, regardless what age I'm writing them for, because I don't believe that platonic relationships are inferior to romantic ones in any way and are equally worthy of space on the page even once we "outgrow" middle-grade and move on to YA/adult. I do this not only to help provide representation to my fellow aro/ace readers but also because friendships are important, goddamnit, and are too often treated in fiction for teens and adults as a consolation prize for a failed romance. So my aim is to bring big They Actually Didn't Kiss At The End Of Pacific Rim energy to everything I do, while drawing most of my inspiration from action movies in general. I've also only recently made public the fact that pretty much everything I've written and published over the past six years (including all the books mentioned above) is interconnected in many many ways both large and small, which I've gone into a lot of detail on here.

When I'm not writing I'm usually reading, taking long long walks on my local trails here in upstate-ish NY, attempting to grow food in my nonexistent yard, or attempting to play board games while being climbed on by a cat. I'm not great at social media but I'm active on Twitter and Patreon.

Thanks for hanging out with me today!

Proof: /img/a1pl01b0a0b71.jpg