Stephen Cox Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds Small-town USA, entering the Seventies. When childless couple Gene and Molly adopt a strange, wounded child of the stars they call Cory, their life is forever changed. But Cory is the child of two worlds, and humanity needs Cory’s people to return to save the Earth – but if they take Molly’s son, it will break her heart.
In M.E. Rodman’s novella The Clockwork Princess, Aeon is a simulacra, a creation of flesh, clockwork and magic designed to protect their original humans from the deadly attacks of curse-workers. She is an identical copy of her original, Mara, eighth princess of the Tamyin Empire. When Mara dies of natural causes, Aeon expects to be killed. After a botched attempt to euthanise her, she is taken in by a family of rogue simulacra living in the city slums. When one of their number dies after injecting a dose of a serum that allows simulacra to change their bodies, Aeon is worried that someone is targeting rogues. A trail of discoveries unearths a deadly conspiracy, where friends and enemies are no longer what they seem.
Chaired by Nicole Brandon.
About the event
Running time: 60 minutes
Venue: Pleasance Upper Hall
Price: £10/£8 concession - In Person - or £6/£4 concession - Live Stream - (plus 50p booking fee)
This event takes place in person and is broadcast via live stream.
About the authors
Stephen Cox’s Our Child of the Stars began as a short story he wrote for Halloween in 2013. He is interested in strong, believable characters and their relationships and likes writing to have hope and humour and to recognise the dark and unfair side of life.
Follow Stephen Cox on Twitter @StephenWhq or visit his website.
M.E. Rodman writes LGBT+ fantasy with a dark edge and occasional stories of horror and the uncanny. Their short fiction has appeared in Anthologies; Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion, The Dark Half of the Year, Goddesses of the Sea and A Picture’s Worth and online at Expanded Horizonsand Zetetic, a Record of Unusual Inquiry. They have an MA in Creative Writing from Edinburgh Napier and are a current guest editor for Fantasia Divinity Publishing. They live near Glasgow, with their partner, child, a dog the size of a cat, and a cat the size of the dog.
Follow M.E. Rodman on Twitter @TheCantingBones.
Please note that Lucy Kissick was originally scheduled to appear on this panel. Unfortunately she is no longer able to join us at #Cymera2022. We still highly recommend her book though!
In Lucy Kissick’s debut novel Plutoshine, terraforming - the megascale-engineering of a planet's surface to one more Earth-like - is now commonplace across the Solar System, and Pluto's is set to be the most ambitious transformation yet. What nobody factored in was a saboteur - but who, and why? The answer may lie with nine-year-old Nou, but a horrifying incident on the base traumatised her into muteness. And Nou guards a secret, and what she has to say could stop the terraforming forever—and transform our place in the Universe.
Lucy Kissick is a nuclear chemist specialising in the management of the back-end of the fuel cycle, working at a national laboratory near the English Lake District. Until recently she was a planetary geochemist earning her PhD at the University of Oxford, where she researched how ancient Martian lakes once affected the planet's climate. Originally from the Victorian seaside town of Southport, she is a fourth-generation gardener’s daughter who grew up in a geographer's paradise of sand dunes and pine forests. Outside of research she hikes, wild-swims, vlogs for her Youtube channel The PhDiaries, and writes fiction.
Follow Lucy Kissick on Twitter @LeKissick or visit her website.