Tordotcom Publishing is thrilled to announce that Christie Yant has acquired World English rights to Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters by Aimee Ogden, a debut science fiction novella.
One woman will travel to the stars and beyond to save her beloved in this lyrical space opera that reimagines The Little Mermaid.
Gene-edited human clans have scattered throughout the galaxy, adapting themselves to environments as severe as the desert and the sea. Atuale, the daughter of a Sea-Clan lord, sparked a war by choosing her land-dwelling love and rejecting her place among her people. Now her husband and his clan are dying of an incurable plague, and Atuale’s sole hope for finding a cure is to travel off-planet. The one person she can turn to for help is the black-market mercenary known as the World Witch—and Atuale’s former lover. Time, politics, bureaucracy, and her own conflicted desires stand between Atuale and the hope for her adopted clan.
Said the author Aimee Ogden:
One of my great joys in writing is to take the stories I loved as a child and break them open. That way, I can put the pieces back together in a way that leaves plenty of room for queerness, friendship, community—and, of course, spaceships. In Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters, I took some of the broad arcs and character strokes from retellings of The Little Mermaid to ask: what happens if, long after the heroine has gotten what she wants, and after she has realized what she’s lost in the getting, she should have to turn to the sea-witch for help one more time? Thank you to Christie and Tordotcom for finding something to love in my wrestling with the complexity of motherhood and the challenges of relationships that endure past the happily-ever-after.
Said the editor Christie Yant:
Aimee Ogden’s galaxy-spanning science fictional take on the aftermath of a beloved fairy tale is exactly the kind of the story I’m always hoping to find. The reader joins Atuale on her journey from the sea to the stars and back again as she tries to find the answer to an eternal question: What is enough? I’m confident that for Atuale and Aimee both, this is only the beginning.
Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts, angry princesses, and dead gods. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Analog, Fireside Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, and she co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction.
Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters will be available from Tordotcom Publishing in 2021.
