Sim Kern, in discussion with Avi Silver
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About the Authors
SIM KERN is a Gulf Coast author and environmental journalist writing about climate change, queer identity, and social justice. Their debut horror novella, DEPART, DEPART!, was selected for the Honor List for the 2020 Otherwise Award. Their short story collection, REAL SUGAR IS HARD TO FIND, was hailed in a starred review by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY as, “a searing, urgent, but still achingly tender work that will wow any reader of speculative fiction.” As a journalist, they report on petrochemical polluters and drag space billionaires. March 2023 will see publication of their YA scifi novel SEEDS FOR THE SWARM, and later in the year their novel THE FREE PEOPLE'S VILLAGE will be published with Levine Querido.
AVI SILVER is a speculative fiction author (Sãoni Cycle), the Co-Editor-in-Chief of AUGUR MAGAZINE, and a poet with an honorable mention from the Rhysling Awards. Find their short fiction in COMMON BONDS: AN AROMANTIC SPECULATIVE ANTHOLOGY and NOTHING WITHOUT US TOO. His poetry has been published in STRANGE HORIZONS and UNCANNY MAGAZINE. In 2018, they co-founded The Shale Project, an award-winning indie arts collective, and have not stopped worldbuilding since. PLURALITIES, their big trans slipstream-means-space-opera novella, will be out this October with Atthis Arts. For more information, visit mxavisilver.com. For lizard pictures, follow him on Twitter @thescreambean.
About SEEDS FOR THE SWARM
Rylla McCracken dreams of escaping her family’s trailer in the Dust States to go to college, but on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, her mother demands she drop out of school to work for Lockburn chemical refinery instead. When Rylla learns Lockburn is planning to dam the Guadalupe River—the last flowing water in Texas—she defies her mother to protest in the state capital. The protest ends in disaster, but her ensuing viral infamy gains Rylla an acceptance to the mysterious Wingates University.
At Wingates, Rylla befriends a diverse group of students, all working on new technologies to save the planet. Besides mountains of homework, Rylla struggles with guilt for leaving her brother behind in the Dust, where tensions with the Lush States are escalating towards civil war. Succeeding at Wingates seems like Rylla’s best chance to help her family, until she uncovers a terrible secret about the school’s billionaire backers. Now, Rylla and her friends are in a race against the rich to reclaim the world-altering technology they’ve developed—before it’s too late.
