Ask Sarah Smith about AI tools and audiobooks.
She’s the internationally bestselling author of six novels. She’s also a “pioneer of hypertext” for King of Space (Eastgate Systems, 1991, apparently the first SF hypertext; now available at kingofspace.org). Her novels include (series) The Vanished Child (Ballantine, 1992, NY Times Notable, Waterstone’s Book of the Year), The Knowledge of Water (Ballantine, 1996, NY Times Notable), A Citizen of the Country (Ballantine, 2000, Entertainment Weekly Editor's Choice), and Crimes and Survivors (Max Light Books, 2020), a multicultural mystery set aboard Titanic.
Samuel R. Delany has called her Chasing Shakespeares (Atria, 2003) “the best novel about the Bard since Nothing like the Sun.” Her YA paranormal thriller, The Other Side of Dark (Atheneum, 2009) won the Agatha Award and Massachusetts Book Award.
The Future Boston series, which she co-imagined with other members of the Cambridge Speculative Fiction Workshop, is being republished by Fantastic Books in 2024. Watch for Jon Burrowes’s Vubre the Great—amazing!
Her mostly imaginary publishing house, Max Light Books, has published editions of The Paine of Pleasure, the real possibly-Shakespearean poem behind Chasing Shakespeares (A New Shakespearean Poem?, 2022) and Total Amnesia, the edited and annotated text of Thomas Disch’s hypertext Amnesia (2022).
Her stories appear in Bloodroot (Crime Spell Books, 2021), Conspiracy! (Easton and Klein-Dial, eds.); Decopunk (Easton and Klein-Dial, eds.); Impossible Futures (with Justus Perry; Easton and Klein-Dial, eds.), Death's Excellent Vacation (Harris and Kelner, eds.), Best New Horror 5 (Jones and Campbell, eds.), Christmas Forever (Hartwell, ed.), Future Boston (D.A. Smith, ed.), Tekka, and F&SF.
Her current lead project is a big fat fantasy set in 19C Brazil. (It has revolution! It has doomed love! It has giant eagles who talk Latin! It’s almost done!) She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her family and not enough cats.