Lettie Prell loves short fiction, from flash through the novella. Her work has appeared in Analog, Apex, Clarkesworld, Tordotcom, WIRED magazine, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere, and been translated into Chinese, Japanese and French. Following are some highlights.
Her first pro sale was to Apex Magazine in 2013, and that story, The Performance Artist, was selected for a Best of Apex Magazine anthology. Her novelette, The Three Lives of Sonata James (Tordotcom 2016), was reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Neil Clarke. Her other Tordotcom story, The Need for Air, was reprinted in The New Voices of Science Fiction (Tachyon 2019). Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities (Clarkesworld 2017) was selected for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, the same year that Emergency Protocol (Analog 2017) was reprinted in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy.
Her novella, Uploading Angela (Analog 2021), was a finalist for an Analog Analytical Laboratory award. Another novella, Live Update, was published in Clarkesworld in 2022. She has a new novelette out in the July/August issue of Analog—Conversations with Callie, or the Synthesis of Disdain and Love—which is set at the fictional PHI Center in Houston, the same world as her novellas.
Lettie had a long-standing career as a researcher in the Iowa justice system. She was a serious amateur photographer till she lost her darkroom in a divorce, which propelled her deeper into the fiction writing she’d always loved. She lives in Des Moines in a 101-year-old house with her three cats and an old upright piano she still plays from time to time.