"Sun, Moon, Dust" is a 2017 fantasy short story by Ursula Vernon. It was first published in Uncanny Magazine .
Allpa's grandmother bequeaths him a magical sword which, when drawn, invokes three warrior spirits — Sun, Moon, and Dust — who are sworn to aid him in combat. However, Allpa is a potato farmer, and has no need of warriors.
"Sun, Moon, Dust" was a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. [1]
Apex Magazine called it "sweet [and] quiet", noting that it is "about growth of all kinds". [2] Tangent Online considered it to be a "delight", lauding Vernon's "seamless" exposition, but questioned whether the story's resolution was compatible with the nature of the sword's enchantment. [3] Amal el-Mohtar, who subsequently read the story for Uncanny's podcast, stated that it was "kind (and) charming", and about "the right to not be a warrior". [4]
Kelly Link is an American editor and writer. Mainly known as an author of short stories, she published her first novel The Book of Love in 2024. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.
Mary Robinette Kowal is an American author, translator, art director, and puppeteer. She has worked on puppetry for shows including Jim Henson Productions and the children's show LazyTown. As an author, she is a four-time Hugo Award winner, and served as the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 2019-2021.
Nora Keita Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim. She has won several awards for her work, including the Locus Award. The three books of her Broken Earth series made her the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. She won a fourth Hugo Award, for Best Novelette, in 2020 for Emergency Skin, and a fifth Hugo Award, for Best Graphic Story, in 2022 for Far Sector. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020.
Lynne M. Thomas is an American librarian, podcaster and editor. She has won eleven Hugo Awards for editing and podcasting in the science fiction genre. She is perhaps best known as the co-publisher and co-editor-in-chief of the Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine with her husband, Michael Damian Thomas. With her eleven Hugo Award wins, Thomas is tied with Connie Willis for most wins among women, and sixth all time for most wins amongst all Hugo Award winners.
Max Gladstone is an American fantasy author. He is best known for his 2012 debut novel Three Parts Dead, which is part of The Craft Sequence, his urban fantasy serial Bookburners, and for co-writing This Is How You Lose the Time War.
Ann Leckie is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Her 2013 debut novel Ancillary Justice, which features artificial consciousness and gender-blindness, won the 2014 Hugo Award for "Best Novel", as well as the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the BSFA Award. The sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, each won the Locus Award and were nominated for the Nebula Award. Provenance, published in 2017, and Translation State, published in 2023, are also set in the Imperial Radch universe. Leckie's first fantasy novel, The Raven Tower, was published in February 2019.
This is a list of the published works of Aliette de Bodard.
Amal El-Mohtar is a Canadian poet and writer of speculative fiction. She has published short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews, and has edited the fantastic poetry quarterly magazine Goblin Fruit since 2006.
Uncanny Magazine is an American science fiction and fantasy online magazine, edited and published by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, based in Urbana, Illinois. Its mascot is a space unicorn.
"The Tomato Thief" is a 2016 fantasy novelette by Ursula Vernon. It was first published in Apex Magazine and has been reprinted in the collection Jackalope Wives and Other Stories.
"Seasons of Glass and Iron" is a 2016 fantasy story by Canadian writer Amal El-Mohtar. It was first published in the anthology The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales.
"And Then There Were (N-One)" is a 2017 science fiction/murder mystery novella by Sarah Pinsker. It was first published in Uncanny Magazine. It was republished in the collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea.
"Fandom for Robots" is a 2017 science fiction short story by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. It was first published in Uncanny Magazine.
Jeannette Ng is a British fantasy writer best known for her 2017 novel Under the Pendulum Sun, for which she won the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer at the 2018 British Fantasy Awards. For that work, she was also the winner of the 2019 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which, largely due to her acceptance speech, was shortly thereafter renamed to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. In 2020, she won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work for that acceptance speech.
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is a 2016 fantasy novella by American writer Kij Johnson, revisiting H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath from the viewpoint of a woman. It was first published in trade paperback and ebook format by Tor.com.
Rivers Solomon is an American author of speculative and literary fiction. In 2018, they received the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award in Fiction for their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and in 2020 their second novel, The Deep, won the Lambda Literary Award. Their third novel, Sorrowland, was published in May 2021, and won the Otherwise Award.
Rebecca Roanhorse is an American science fiction and fantasy writer from New Mexico. She has written short stories and science fiction novels featuring Navajo characters. Her work has received Hugo and Nebula awards, among others.
How Long 'til Black Future Month? is a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories by American novelist N. K. Jemisin. The book was published in November 2018 by Orbit Books, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. The name of the collection comes from an Afrofuturism essay that Jemisin wrote in 2013. Four of the 22 stories included in the book had not been previously published; the others, written between 2004 and 2017, had been originally published in speculative fiction magazines and other short story collections. The settings for three of the stories were developed into full-length novels after their original publication: The Killing Moon, The Fifth Season, and The City We Became.
"The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat" is a fantasy story by Brooke Bolander. It was first published in Uncanny Magazine, in 2018.
Michael Damian Thomas is an American magazine editor and podcaster. Thomas has won eight Hugo Awards, a British Fantasy Award, and a Parsec Award as co-publisher and co-editor-in-chief of Uncanny Magazine with his wife, Lynne M. Thomas. He has also been active as an advocate for disabled children in Illinois.