Neurodiversity and Murder Mysteries — In Spaaaaace!

When I arrived back at my rooms, I found Mossa in her usual spot, slumped before the fire in my dressing gown, pondering so deeply that she only murmured indistinctly when I greeted her.

I did not press a conversation. I did not, in any case, feel fit for her style of interrogation at that moment.

     — Malka Older, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles (source link)

Welcome

Two of my favourite things to see in SFF books are intelligent ships and characters who don’t quite see the world the way others do. (Often, there’s a lot of overlap in those two things!)

In this month’s update, I’m centering a few books which feature neurodiverse characters.

The Neurodiversiverse

My story in the book, “The List-Making Habits of Heartbroken Ships,” is a sequel of sorts to “The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation,” which was published in Lightspeed in 2023. 

Just like that earlier story, this one follows Ship as they struggle to make their way through a disorienting and challenging situation. In this case, though, it’s not a distorted time field but something far more terrifying: meeting a potential new crew.

The story has a lot of social anxiety feels, and I can’t wait to share it—and the rest of the anthology—with the world. If you can afford it, I hope you’ll consider backing the Kickstarter and supporting a small publisher!

Megumi Hayashibara – Seiyū City Pop

For a change of pace from previous newsletters, I’m breaking out the city pop!

If you’re not familiar with city pop, the term is a vaguely defined way to refer to Japanese rock and pop from the 70s and 80s which embraced western styles and approaches to popular music.

Perhaps as a result, city pop songs tend to sound kind of nostalgic if you grew up with western 80s music, as well. (Or maybe that’s just all the anime I watched as a teenager…)

Megumi Hayashibara is a popular voice actress (声優, or seiyū), known mostly for her work in anime. As you can see from the image above, she’s played a lot of quintessential 80s and 90s anime roles—and this is just a very small snapshot of her acting work.

Hayashibara is also a talented singer. Classifying her as city pop is a little odd, but her work does have an upbeat, synth-heavy style with clean vocals—all fairly consistent characteristics of the pseudo-genre. Check out two of her songs below, both of which originally featured as anime character image songs.

『Just Be Conscious』

『I’ll Be There』 

A Tour of Jupiter with Mossa and Pleiti

I’m very glad I did! The Mimicking of Known Successes follows an academic and her one-time lover—now a sort of investigator, but with a focus on safety checks rather than enforcing criminal punishment—as they struggle to solve the case of a mysterious disappearance.

The book takes place on a series of platforms that ring an imagined future Jupiter, with one key twist: people live on the planet because Earth’s ecosystem completely collapsed several centuries earlier. Pleiti (the academic) studies a mixture of ecology and literature, mining ancient Earth books and media for references to animals and plants in the hopes of redesigning a successful ecosystem on Earth one day. Mossa (the investigator) comes looking for her when a well-known academic disappears from a remote platform, possibly stepping to his death, and possibly being pushed.

Although I was immediately hooked on Mimicking, one thing I especially came to appreciate about it is that Mossa is not like everyone else. She has a very succinct style of thinking and understanding the world which helps her in her work but makes maintaining personal relationships a little tricky. The great thing is that, as Pleiti comes to realize they both still have feelings for one another, she never thinks this means Mossa is broken or sick. She just accepts it as part of how her friend (and, eventually, her lover) is. And that’s a breath of fresh air (well, maybe a breath of recycled air, on the platforms that ring Jupiter?) in any book.

Both novellas are a pleasure to read, especially if you like cozy mysteries or sci-fi stories that focus on building community in adverse circumstances. But even if you don’t, there’s much joy to be found within these pages, as Mossa and Pleiti work on their relationships with one another—and overcome the obstacles their own approaches to life and love put in their way.

You can find The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles at a library near you (book 1, book 2), or at any major retailer.

Writing Update

I’m still hard at work on Gigantea: Age of Rot (my next title from Choice of Games), but I’ve got a few short fiction updates to share this month.

In fact, this summer is looking to be an embarrassment of riches!

Here’s what’s coming up:

• “Kuriko” (reprint) – Summer of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume 3 (Worldstone Publishing, June) – Now on Kickstarter
• “The List-Making Habits of Heartbroken Ships” – The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters (Thinking Ink Press, August) – Now on Kickstarter
• “White Lies Cast Dark Shadows” – Carpe Noctem (Tyche Press, August)
• “An Evening of Theatre on Floating World Station,” “Festival of Lights,” and “Ghosts of Maricourt Crater” – The Butterfly Disjunct: Stories (Interstellar Flight Press, August)

Those last three titles are the previously unpublished stories in my forthcoming short story collection, which I’m very excited about! 

I’m also working on a new piece of interactive fiction (IF) with some friends for this year’s IFComp. That also features an intelligent spaceship and it’s shaping up to be a lot of fun so far.

Look for more details on those projects in future newsletters, and as always: Thanks for reading!