If you’ve recently read and raved about Space Opera, watch out for more from author Catherynne M. Valente next year! Jonathan Strahan has acquired her new novella, Green Like Dying, for Tor.com Publishing. The novella returns to Garbagetown, the world of her Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning novelette “The Future Is Blue,” and an outcast girl named Tetley.
Said the author:
Two years and a bit of pocket change ago, Jonathan Strahan asked me to contribute a story to his new anthology of climate change stories, Drowned Worlds. I was tremendously excited—one of my favorite things as an artist is to be asked to create something far outside my wheelhouse. I had no plans to write about rising sea levels, I don’t write much dystopian fiction, it’s just not what I do. Which thrilled me! Some stories would exist no matter what; some come to be by luck and chance, and “The Future Is Blue” is definitely the latter.
The thing that brought together all the disparate ideas I had about how to attack the story was Tetley’s voice. For a long time, the first line was all I had. And then her wry, cheerful, undefeatable voice began to thread its way through a story. I was in love with her, with the contrast between the horror of her life and the joy of her personality, the strangeness and familiarity of her culture. Throughout writing her tale, a line from Jonathan’s précis for the anthology stuck with me— “…to explore who we will become, and the stories we will tell” in that drowned world. Because of course we will be the same, as we always are after catastrophe. We will tell the stories we have always told, with new sets, because the sets are all that ever change.
I had the notion in the back of my head from early on that I wouldn’t really want to let Tetley go in a few thousand words. I wanted to do more with her voice, her life, her world. I’m so excited and grateful to have the chance to do that with this new novella, to return to Garbagetown and see how Tetley is getting on.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it), and Space Opera. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
Green Like Dying will be available from Tor.com Publishing in 2019.
