For Tor.com, she’s blogged about Orphan Black, Sense8, and B. R. Sanders’ Ariah. She’s contributed criticism to Aidan Moher’s award-winning A Dribble of Ink—which is already much missed—since April 2013. Her incisive writing has been showcased once, twice, thrice in each of the three annual of editions of Speculative Fiction: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. And in the age of literary innocence, back before a bunch of puppies in various emotional states made mischief with their slates, she was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer for her own site, Shattersnipe.
She’s written a couple of books, too: see Solace and Grief and The Key to Starveldt. And now she has a couple of others coming, starting with An Accident of Stars, which Angry Robot Books plan to publish in the summer of 2016.
I sincerely hope I don’t need to introduce you to Foz Meadows, folks.
“After years of quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) obsessing over magic portals, feminism and adventuring ladies, I’m delighted to announce that Angry Robot has decided to enable me in these endeavours,” Meadows said to The Bookseller:
An Accident of Stars is the book I desperately wanted to read, but couldn’t possibly have written, at sixteen—and, as you may have guessed, it features (among a great many other things) magic portals, feminism and adventuring ladies. I’m immensely excited to share it with you, and I look forward to collaborating in its production with our glorious Robot Overlords, who only asked in exchange a very small blood sacrifice and part ownership of my soul.
A small price to pay, eh?
Here’s a bit more about the book:
When Saffron Coulter stumbles through a hole in reality, she finds herself trapped in Kena, a magical realm on the brink of civil war.
There, her fate becomes intertwined with that of three very different women: Zech, the fast-thinking acolyte of a cunning, powerful exile; Viya, the spoiled, runaway consort of the empire-building ruler, Vex Leoden; and Gwen, an Earth-born worldwalker whose greatest regret is putting Leoden on the throne. But Leoden has allies, too, chief among them the Vex’Mara Kadeja, a dangerous ex-priestess who shares his dreams of conquest.
Pursued by Leoden and aided by the Shavaktiin, a secretive order of storytellers and mystics, the rebels flee to Veksh, a neighboring matriarchy ruled by the fearsome Council of Queens. Saffron is out of her world and out of her depth, but the further she travels, the more she finds herself bound to her friends with ties of blood and magic.
Can one girl—an accidental worldwalker—really be the key to saving Kena? Or will she just die trying?
An Accident of Stars is said to be the first in a series, so I’m going to go out on a limb today and say that the second of the two books Angry Robot’s consulting editor Phil Jourdan bought the world rights to release is likely to be a sequel.
Niall Alexander is an extra-curricular English teacher who reads and writes about all things weird and wonderful for The Speculative Scotsman, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. He lives with about a bazillion books, his better half and a certain sleekit wee beastie in the central belt of bonnie Scotland.
