Mary Anne Mohanraj

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Excerpt

This is the opening to "The Night Air," from my novel-in-stories, The Stars Change.

Not fucking again. Literally fucking, which was the problem -- Kimmie's upstairs neighbors, the skinny brown human and the curvy gold female, were at it again. For what, the fourth time tonight? The management could claim however much it wanted that the walls were supposed to be sound-proofed, the truth was that this was a shitty apartment, it clearly wasn't up to code, and when two grown-ass adults decided to hurl their bodies together on a battered wooden bed, you could hear it. Not to mention that the girl was a screamer. You would think after getting the news that the war was finally on, they would have gone decently to sleep, but no. They were probably celebrating life or some such bullshit. Kimmie couldn't take it anymore. She shoved back the chair from her desk, grabbed a fur to wrap around herself, and headed out into the night.

She just wanted to walk, far and fast and until her brain stopped buzzing. Sometimes walking helped. The streets were more empty than usual -- everyone who had someone was probably at home, cuddling them up, waiting for the bombs to fall or the shooting to start or the diseases to spread or just for the chips in their heads to catch viruses, melt, and drip out of their brains. And yeah, the truth was that if she had someone, Kimmie would probably do the same thing. But she didn't, and that alone was enough to make it easy to glare at the people who were glaring at her, as they always did when they saw her walking around wrapped in a fur. Fucking holier-than-thou types. How did they know that it wasn't synthetic? It could totally be synthetic.

Bio

Mary Anne Mohanraj is the author of several books, including Bodies In Motion (HarperCollins, July 2005), an exploration of sexuality, marriage, and Sri Lankan/American immigrant concerns. Bodies In Motion was a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards, a USA Today Notable Book, and has been translated into six languages.

Mohanraj founded and served as editor-in-chief from 2000 through 2003 for Strange Horizons, a Hugo-nominated speculative fiction magazine. She was Guest of Honor at WisCon 2010 and serves as director of the Speculative Literature Foundation. She served as a juror for the Tiptree Award in 2003 and the Fountain Award in 2006. She was a founding member of and served on the advisory board of the Carl Brandon Society, an organization promoting ethnic/racial minorities in science fiction and fantasy. Mohanraj has received an Illinois Arts Council fellowship, a Neff fellowship in English, a Steffenson-Canon fellowship in the Humanities, and the Scowcroft Prize for Fiction; she's also recently received a Breaking Barriers Award from the Chicago Foundation for Women for her work in Asian American arts organizing.

Mohanraj received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah, specializing in post-colonial literature and creative writing. She attended Clarion West in 1997, has taught at the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop, and is now Clinical Assistant Professor of fiction and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Publications

Mary Anne Mohanraj has also written:

  • Silence And The Word
  • Torn Shapes of Desire
  • Kathryn in the City
  • The Classics Professor
  • A Taste of Serendie
  • The Poet's Journey

    • She has edited:

  • Aqua Erotica
  • Wet
  • The Best of Strange Horizons

    • and she has co-written with Nnedi Okorafor:

  • Without A Map (a WisCon Guest of Honor collection)

    • Recent science fiction and fantasy publications include:

  • "Talking to Elephants," Abyss & Apex
  • "Jump Space," Thoughtcrime Experiments
  • "Sanctuary," in Wild Cards' Fort Freak

    • Most of her published short fiction and nonfiction is available for free on her website under Stories.

    Poetry is under poetry. :-)

    Writing Description

    What would you do if the world were about to end? Many people would head straight to bed. A few might lie there with the covers pulled up over their heads, but many of us would choose something more distracting.

    On a planet far, far away, tensions are rising. Men against men, men against aliens: the players in this game are complex, and the average citizen doesn't really understand what's going on. They just want to go on with their lives: go to work, go home, make love to their wife. Or wives. Or husbands. Or indeterminate gender human and/or alien partners.

    War is breaking out and the whole world is going to hell, but people are still having sex. Lots of sex. And they are doing so in a set of interconnected stories, short and hot and sweet and sometimes a little sad. They are here from all over the galaxy, at the University of All Worlds. They're mostly human, or humanoid, although some of the aliens are pretty damn alien. You should see that thing with all the eyes.

    Writing Goals

    In October 2011, I ran a Kickstarter to fund a new book of erotic science fiction, The Stars Change. (Previously titled Demimonde, until someone else published a book this year with the same name!) The book was fully funded for $8,000. Now I have to write it. I'm done with Part I, but have quite a bit more to go before it's done. I promised to finish the book by September 1. I'm planning to have at least 40,000 words by the end of July. I have 12,611 right now.

    Click here for more kickstarter information.


    Website

    www.mamohanraj.com


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