NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Zachary Jernigan! – Sarah Chorn

Zachary Jernigan is a 34-year-old, typically shaven-headed writer and narrator from Northern Arizona. He’s lived in AZ since 1990, with relatively short stints in Utah, Oregon, Maine, and Chile. His first novel, No Return, is a science fiction/fantasy tale filled with sex, violence, looming middle-age angst, and muscular people in weird skintight costumes (including one capricious god). It came out from Night Shade Books in March of 2013 in hardcover and July of 2014 in paperback. The still-in-progress sequel, Shower of Stones, is forthcoming in 2015, also from Night Shade Books. His short fiction runs the gamut of sf and fantasy and has appeared in a variety of places, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Escape Pod, as well as anthologies such as Manifesto UF and Daughters of Icarus . He’s been nominated for the Pushcart a couple times and shortlisted once for the Spectrum Award.
He recently released his first short story collection, The Bottom Of The Sea independently at the end of 2013. You can learn more about Zachary by visiting his website.

by Zachary Jernigan

I’m really kind of a problematic sort. There are a lot of things that bother me. (I’ll give a pause here so that the folks who know me can roll their eyes and go, “Really, Zack? I never knew that!”) For all my interest in people and my enthusiasm for making friends, I’m functionally kind of a sociopath. Okay, not a sociopath, but often kind of a butt. I can get a bit ranty.

All that’s just my way of segueing into my actual opening, which is kind of negative (it uses the word hate, in fact!)…
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Mur Lafferty! – Sarah Chorn

Insightful, witty, and passionate, Mur Lafferty is a pioneer in podcasting and an exciting new voice in urban fantasy. After making her podcasting debut in 2004, she has become a respected contributor to podcasting and the speculative fiction genre. In January 2014, Mur graduated from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine with an MFA in popular fiction. In 2013, Mur won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her first professionally published novel, The Shambling Guide to New York City, debuted with Orbit Books in 2013. The sequel, Ghost Train to New Orleans was published in March 2014. Mur currently lives in Durham, NC with her family. She enjoys running, martial arts, board games, video games, and cooking. You can learn more about Mur by visiting her website.

by Mur Lafferty

Commonly, supernatural creatures are drawn as stronger, better, and with more opportunities than mere humans. Vampires can do anything from fly to shapechange to hypnotize to sparkle, depending on the story involved. Zombies kill/infect with just a scratch, and their strength lies in numbers. And being really gross. Even in the urban fantasy stories that place these monsters in our contemporary lives, these creatures manage to be a lot better settled within life than humans.

Ever notice how all vampires of a certain age (like 100+ years) are wealthy and sophisticated? No one is like your skeevy Uncle Larry who’s always coming around for a loan. I suppose Uncle Larry would be an easy target for someone like Buffy, but I do wonder why there aren’t more vampires who are very good at getting by, but very bad at investing.
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds first appeared on my site Bookworm Blues a few years ago. I thought it was a very powerful piece and I wanted to give it more exposure. I asked Anon if I could use it again on SF Signal. Anon was nice enough to say yes, they just wanted to edit it a bit first. Here is the new, updated, and still intensely powerful piece. – Sarah Chorn

‘Anon’ hails from a far and distant land, but has found a cozy spot in the English-speaking SFF community. ‘Anon’ enjoys everything dark and weird in every medium possible. Occasional reviewer and a writer of SFF fiction, ‘Anon’ currently dips toes in the world of editing and personal branding and marketing.

I’m probably the poster child for the argument of fiction as an escape, which I find a bit funny since you’ve no idea who I am. What drew me to fiction – epic fantasy and sword & sorcery in particular – was the effortless ability to dissolve into the mindscape of someone else. Not be present in my life, which during my formative years brought nothing worthwhile – only verbal abuse, negligence and expectations that I conform with ideas of normalcy.
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Jaye Wells! – Sarah Chorn

Jaye Wells is a USA Today-bestselling author of urban fantasy and speculative crime fiction. Raised by booksellers, she loved reading books from a very young age. That gateway drug eventually led to a full-blown writing addiction. When she’s not chasing the word dragon, she loves to travel, drink good bourbon and do things that scare her so she can put them in her books. Jaye lives in Texas. You can learn more about Jaye and her books by visiting her on her website. The first book in the Prospero’s War series, Dirty Magic, was released on January 21, 2014. Cursed Magic is to be released on August 12, 2014.

by Jaye Wells

“Everyone has a hole in their center. A gaping shadow that demands to be filled. Some people fill it with faith and God. Others with money or fame. Then there are those who fill it with food, alcohol, nicotine or, yeah, potions.” – Dirty Magic

In my new Prospero’s War series, the central conceit is that magic is addictive. The main character, Kate Prospero, is a beat cop who gets promoted to a special task force charged with breaking up the dirty magic covens that sell illegal dirty magic on the streets of fictional Babylon, Ohio.

A lot of people who have read the first book in the series, Dirty Magic, have commented on the use of magic as a metaphor for drugs. But when I decided to write this series, I didn’t want to just talk about magic as a metaphor for drugs. I wanted to talk about our society’s addictive nature. I wanted to talk about how we look externally for solutions to internal problems. I wanted to talk about our addiction to convenience and quick fixes. I also wanted to talk about how difficult it is to overcome our addictions in a world obsessed with fame, beauty, money, and power.
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Sharon Lynn Fisher! – Sarah Chorn

A Romance Writers of America RITA Award finalist and a three-time RWA Golden Heart Award finalist, Sharon Lynn Fisher lives in the Pacific Northwest. She writes books for the geeky at heart—sci-fi flavored stories full of adventure and romance—and battles writerly angst with baked goods, Irish tea, and champagne. Her works include Ghost Planet (2012), The Ophelia Prophecy (2014), and Echo 8 (2014). You can visit her online at SharonLynnFisher.com.

by Sharon Lynn Fisher

First of all, a huge thank you to Sarah for inviting me to be the first science fiction romance participant. I think this is a fascinating area of focus for a column.

I had a conversation with Sarah before writing this post, because none of the characters in my Tor book The Ophelia Prophecy have a disability in the conventional sense. Sarah pointed out that, in the broader sense of physical challenges, both the hero and heroine experience memory loss, and the hero undergoes some body modification for nebulous reasons. I realized there are some interesting bits to unpack there. I will try my best to do it without spoilers.
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Jim C. Hines! – Sarah Chorn

Jim C. Hines is best known as a fantasy novelist and the guy who did those gender-flipped SF/F cover poses. His first novel was Goblin Quest, the tale of a nearsighted goblin runt and his pet fire-spider. Actor and author Wil Wheaton described the book as “too f***ing cool for words,” which is pretty much the Best Blurb Ever. After completing the goblin trilogy, Jim went on to write the princess series, four books often described as a blend of Grimm’s Fairy Tales with Charlie’s Angels. He’s currently working on the Magic ex Libris books, which follow the adventures of a magic-wielding librarian from northern Michigan.

He’s also the author of more than forty published short stories. His first professional story sale was the award-winning “Blade of the Bunny,” which took first place in the 1998 Writers of the Future competition and was published in Writers of the Future XV.

Jim is an active blogger about topics ranging from sexism and harassment to zombie-themed Christmas carols, and won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2012.

He has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a Masters in English, and works for the State of Michigan. He lives with his wife and two children, who have always shown remarkable tolerance for his bizarre and obsessive writing habits. (The cats, on the other hand, have no tolerance whatsoever, and routinely walk across his desk when he’s trying to work.)

by Jim C. Hines

I get anxious every time one of my books comes out. Will this one sell as well as the last? Will people like it? Will Spielberg finally call me up and offer me an obscene amount of money to turn my books into blockbusters? Will this be the book that tanks and destroys my career, forcing me to live on the streets and hunt rats for food?
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Stephanie Saulter! – Sarah Chorn

Stephanie Saulter writes what she likes to think is literary science fiction. Born in Jamaica, she studied at MIT and spent fifteen years in the United States before moving to the United Kingdom in 2003. She is the author of the ®Evolution trilogy; her first novel,Gemsigns, was published in the UK & Commonwealth last year and will be released in the US next month. Its sequel, Binary, has just been published in the UK. Stephanie blogs unpredictably at stephaniesaulter.com and tweets only slightly more reliably as @scriptopus. She lives in London.

by Stephanie Saulter

Thank you, Sarah, for inviting me to contribute to Special Needs in Strange Worlds! I’ve been a reader of the series and a fan of the thinking behind it for some time now. I’m really pleased to be able to join the discussion.

I guess I’m qualified to do so on two fronts. I’m the author of the ®Evolution novels, which are set in a near future in which human beings have been altered, some extensively, by genetic modification. The books deal with ideas of diversity, prejudice, physical appearance, and how extraordinary abilities and/or disabilities affect people’s notions of what it means to be human.

My other qualification (which probably has a lot to do with why I’m interested in those issues in the first place) is one I share with many other contributors to Special Needs in Strange Worlds: intense personal knowledge of what it’s like to live with a disability. In my case that’s because of my brother, Astro Saulter. Astro has severe cerebral palsy; he has virtually no fine motor control and has never been able to walk, sit up straight, speak, or do much with his hands. Communication is either via a spoken alphabet system (he hates alphabet boards), or a specialised computer interface that he controls with a switch mounted on his wheelchair’s headrest – because his head is the only part of his body over which he has meaningful control. It’s painfully slow, but with it he can read, write, call me up on Skype (I talk, he uses the switch to type), surf the web…

And he can draw. Boy, can he draw.
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Alex Hughes! – Sarah Chorn

Alex Hughes has written since early childhood, and loves great stories in any form including scifi, fantasy, and mystery. Over the years, Alex has lived in many neighborhoods of the sprawling metro Atlanta area. Decatur, the neighborhood on which Clean is centered, was Alex’s college home.

On any given week you can find Alex in the kitchen cooking gourmet Italian food, watching hours of police procedural dramas, and typing madly. The latest book in Mindspace Investigations, Marked, was released on April 1, 2014.

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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Daryl Gregory! – Sarah Chorn

Daryl Gregory is an award-winning writer of genre-mixing novels, stories, and comics. His first novel, Pandemonium, won the Crawford Award and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His other novels include The Devil’s Alphabet (a Philip K. Dick award finalist), Raising Stony Mayhall (a Library Journal best SF book of the year), and the upcoming Afterparty. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories, which was named one of the best books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly. He lives in State College, PA. You can learn more about him and his books by visiting his website.

by Daryl Gregory

Let’s start on a down note, shall we?

My junior year of college, early in the spring semester, I walked into what I would later call the Black Tunnel. Suddenly I was exhausted all the time. I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, and sometimes stayed in the dorm room all day. When I did go to class, I couldn’t concentrate.

My memories of those days have the quality of tunnel vision. The edges of the world seemed to have closed in. When people spoke to me, they seemed to be talking from the far end of a rifle barrel.

What was happening to me felt physical, and externally imposed. I knew that my problems were only going to get worse the longer I slept, but I could no more “snap out of it” than I could decide to stop having the flu.

Then the tunnel opened. I don’t know why. One day I woke up with a little more energy, and started repairing the damage I’d done to my grade point average. I felt like I’d survived an attack from my own body.

Maybe that’s where my fascination with the mind/body problem began. I kept wondering why, even though I knew the depression wasn’t rational, that I couldn’t just pull my self out of it.
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from author Michael j. Sullivan! – Sarah Chorn

Michael J. Sullivan is the author of The Riyria Revelations, The Riyria Chronicles, and his recently released science fiction thriller, Hollow World. He’s been published in just about every way there is including, small presses, self, and the big-five. He spends part of his time trying to help aspiring authors learn the intricacies of publishing through a regular column on Amazing Stories, and soon he’ll be featuring author interviews on Adventures in Science Fiction Publishing. Michael has written twenty-three novels, published nine, and has been translated into fifteen foreign languages. His works have appeared on more than eighty-five “best of” or “most anticipated” lists including those compiled by Library Journal, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, and Audible.com.

by Michael J. Sullivan

I’ve been a big fan of Sarah Chorn for a really long time. Not just because of her amazing reviews, although that is reason enough, but because of her resiliency in weathering storms in her own life. Luckily for me, she’s a fan of my writing as well, and I’m grateful for her years of support. With the approaching release of Hollow World (April 15^th from Tachyon Publications and Recorded Books), she invited me to do a guest post. So here I am.

I guess I should start out by setting the stage. Hollow World tells the story of Ellis Rogers, who travels far into the future (much further than he intended) in search of a cure for a recently diagnosed terminal illness. What he finds a world where disease, war, and even death has been eliminated. It sounds like utopia, and for some people it very well may be, but there’s a cost…isn’t there always a cost? In the case of Hollow World, genetic engineering has advanced to the point where everyone is identical, and trying to establish individuality in such an environment breeds its own set of problems.
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NOTE: This installment of Special Needs In Strange Worlds features a guest post from the incredible Elizabeth Bear! – Sarah Chorn

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, the mispronunciation of common English words, and the writing of speculative fiction. She lives in Massachusetts with a Giant Ridiculous Dog. Her partner, acclaimed fantasy author Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. You can learn more about her books by visiting her website. On April 8, 2014 Elizabeth Bear released the third and final book in the Eternal Sky trilogy, Steles of the Sky.

by Elizabeth Bear

It’s kind of funny to realize as I write this that I originally wasn’t going to submit a piece to Sarah’s blog series, because I didn’t feel like I had much to say about writing disabled people in science fiction. But after the second colleague suggested that I would be a good fit for the series, I had to stop and consider why they would think so.

And I realized that it’s probably because I write a lot of disabled protagonists. From Jenny Casey and Genevieve Castaign in Hammered and the sequel books–an amputee with neurological damage and a girl with cystic fibrosis–to the aneurotypical Michelangelo in Carnival from Matthew Szczgielniak with his maimed hand and congenital adrenal hyperplasia sufferer Lily Wakeman in Whiskey and Water to Tristen and Perceval Conn in the Jacob’s Ladder books, one of whom has albinism and the other of whom has lost the power of flight–now that I actually stop and think about it, it seems like most of my protagonists are “imperfect” in some way.

I have written characters with forms of epilepsy and characters with bipolar disorder. I have written anxiety sufferers and paraplegics and I have helped invent entirely new, science fictional syndromes. I have written more than my share of characters with post-traumatic stress disorder. That last, frankly, is because I don’t know how to write people who don’t have PTSD.

I’ve been trying to learn, though. You all are so unpredictable.
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Being a teenager was awkward for me. It really wasn’t any fun and I hated just about every minute of it. I was a pretty pukey teen, though. Maybe it was more entertaining for other people, but I felt like an outsider. I had almost no friends. I had a hard time relating to anyone or feeling like I fit in. That’s probably why I have so actively avoided reading any young adult books. I want to avoid anything that makes me remember my horrible, hormone filled, confused years.

However, every year I challenge myself to read another area of the speculative fiction genre that I typically avoid, and this year I picked young adult books. This year I’ve read about ten young adult books, which is about ten more young adult books than I’ve read any other year. I am not an expert in all things young adult, and if I’m being honest with you, I should have had someone who reads more young adult than I do write this post, but I didn’t.

My foray into young adult speculative fiction has left me far more surprised than I ever expected to be. These books aren’t only (or always) filled with angsty love triangles, and teenagers who fall in soulmate love almost instantly. Most of the time, these books feel a lot more mature than I expected. These books are filled with young people dealing with very adult problems and situations. However, what has truly surprised me was just how much disability I’ve seen in young adult books.
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Our contributors are awesome.

Regular readers (and even irregular ones) will know that Sarah Chorn (also known as Bookworm Blues) does an awesome post series called Special Needs in Strange Worlds here at SF Signal and also on her blog. Through that series of posts, in which she examines disabled characters in speculative fiction, she has named many, many books that showcase such characters. A recent post of hers solicited suggestions from readers to add to A “Special Needs in Strange Worlds” Reading List.

Another SF Signal contributor (and proprietor of the wonderful SciFi Fan Letter), Jessica Strider, works in a bookstore and she decided to bring Sarah’s list into realspace. She did this by setting up a bookstore display showcasing some of the books on the list. Jessica talks about it here. Go read it and see how our contributors transform themselves from readers into superheroes.

Earlier this year I successfully finished, for the second (and hopefully last) time, a battle with cancer. I was diagnosed in October of 2010, and I got my full body scan and official “all clear” from my doctor in April of 2013. I made it out alive, and that’s a lot more than a lot of people can say. Oddly enough, cancer didn’t just change me, or teach me more about myself and my capabilities, but it taught me a lot about writing speculative fiction. Specifically how disabilities are handled in speculative fiction. Despite the fact that books are often told about fictional people, authors draw upon real life situations to create their characters, worlds, and cultures. There are interesting parallels between how we handle our own hardships, and how authors allow their characters to handle their hardships and the character growth and development that results from their hardships and struggles – the personal and interpersonal battles they fought and won (or didn’t win).
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In the last installment of Special Needs in Strange Worlds, I talked about Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension, and how powerfully, and realistically, she covers a myriad of disabilities in her debut book. This week I am pleased to bring you an interview with the author.

Jacqueline Koyanagi was born in Ohio to a Japanese-Southern-American family, eventually moved to Georgia, and earned a degree in anthropology with a minor in religion.  Her stories feature queer women of color, folks with disabilities, neuroatypical characters, and diverse relationship styles, because she grew tired of not seeing enough of herself and the people she loves reflected in genre fiction. She now resides in Colorado where she weaves all manner of things, including stories, chainmaille jewelry, and a life with her loved ones and dog.

Q: First things first. Tell readers a little about yourself. What do you typically do when you aren’t writing?
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Welcome to Special Needs in Strange Worlds, a column focusing on celebrating disabilities in SFF. This column will focus on book reviews, author interviews, and guest posts to highlight the beauty and importance of our flaws.
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