cover reveal: Ursula Whitcher's NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON
I'm pleased to be hosting the cover reveal for Ursula Whitcher's science fiction collection NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON, forthcoming from Neon Hemlock Press!
YHL: Tell me about the cover and the artist!
UW: Danielle Taphanel is a queer Filipino-Latine artist. I love the intricacy of their illustration and the way their work references textile designs and the natural world. Here you can see someone setting off on a grand adventure, perhaps all the way across the valley and up the space elevator toward the stars.
YHL: How can readers get their hands on the book?
UW: North Continent Ribbon is a short story cycle that snuck into Neon Hemlock's 2024 novella series. The Kickstarter for the series is launching soon and will involve a host of fascinating titles—as a mathematician, I'm really looking forward to Ann LeBlanc's Transitive Properties of Cheese.
If you're only able to commit to a single book, later this year you'll be able to buy North Continent Ribbon directly from Neon Hemlock, or from your favorite bookseller.
YHL: If you had to recommend ONE story in here as a starting point for someone who has never had the pleasure of reading your fiction before, but is generally interested in science fiction, which would it be?
UW: Each of the stories in this collection shows you the society of Nakharat at a different moment in time. Some of them are available online, or if you track down the right issue of a magazine. The final novelette, about an engineer named Aizu who organizes a disparate band of starships into a union, is brand new for this collection—but now I've told you where to end and not where to start!
If you want beautiful women and crystal swords and an assassin who's grumpy about gun safety, then you should begin at the beginning, with the short story "Closer than your kidneys," which first appeared in the online magazine Frivolous Comma. "Kidneys" takes place on a spaceship that's part of a nomadic convoy.
If you want to immerse yourself in the world of Nakharat, with all the complexities of its competing factions, then the novelette "The Fifteenth Saint," about a judge whose best friend is an artificially intelligent book, would be a good place to start. "Fifteenth Saint" was one of the finalists in this year's Asimov's Readers' Choice awards (!), so for a limited time you can find it online at their website.
YHL: What's a cultural or personal influence in Nakharat that you think people wouldn't guess if you didn't tell them?
UW: There are so many influences!
I really wanted Nakhorian culture to feel rooted in but distinct from Earth cultures. I've written before about how family stories from early twentieth-century Shanghai made it into Nakharat, and I've drawn on the history of many other times and places. If I can only recommend one book here, it's Afsaneh Najmabadi's Women with mustaches and men without beards: Gender and sexual anxieties of Iranian modernity—in addition to offering interesting ways to frame thinking about gender, it really crystallized my understanding of how historically unusual nationalism is, and helped me envision how social and political conflicts might play out in a world without distinct nations. Meanwhile, I have strong professional (mathematical) connections to the Canadian province of Alberta, and there are parts of Nakharat that feel like Calgary or Banff or Edmonton to me in ways that you might not guess without this signpost!
On a lighter note, I have spent a ton of time experimenting with different hats, veils, and headscarves for historical reenactment reasons. I even worked out a design for an ancient Greek face-veil that will hide a modern KN-95 mask. (If you flip the Greek veil away from your face, it makes a cute hat strikingly reminiscent of an early twentieth-century nurse's cap.)
YHL: If you would recommend a dish or recipe or drink to eat/drink while reading this, what would it be? Or would it be a whole tasting menu with different items for each story?
UW: Oh, it should absolutely be a tasting menu. You'd want the northwest mountain-style savory pumpkin pancakes from "Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers," and the soy yogurt mint drink that they make in "Kidneys" because yogurt is traditional but the starship has no cows or goats, and so on through the whole collection.
If you want a quicker way to induce a Nakhorian frame of mind, I recommend very strong black tea sweetened with a spoonful of jam and the best kind of fried pastry rolled in sugar you can find in your city. Buying food to go is definitely a Nakharat tradition!
YHL: What was the most rewarding part of assembling a short story collection?
UW: I started writing Nakharat stories because I was in love with the setting. I think I was about halfway through when I realized that this could be a collection, and started writing stories that would fit into a larger whole. There's a big historical arc about ethics and labor and machine intelligence, and I wanted to write about characters with different class backgrounds and from different parts of the society. The unintentional organizing principle is forms of transit: there's a buses story, a bicycle-cabs story, a trains story, and the space elevator story, as well as starships and one very bad idea for a road. I very much enjoyed seeing these kinds of unplanned patterns emerging!
YHL: What's an area of Nakharat (geographically, historically, culturally, otherwise) you left as a lacuna, deliberately or otherwise?
UW: This really is a collection about North Continent (and the resentment many people on North Continent feel towards West Continent, which has a bigger population and more connections to the universe beyond the planet of Nakharat). Space opera often feels sweeping but sparse, with histories spanning thousands of years or light-years but only involving a few key players. I wanted a world that felt as rich and complex as ours, but I could only share a few people's stories in depth. Nakharat has at least six continents!
YHL: If someone offered to adapt one of the Nakharat stories into another medium, which would it be and what would be your hopes for the adaptation?
UW: My pick if a filmmaker came calling would be "The Last Tutor," which is about a furious teenager striving to bring down their parents' corporate empire. I'd want to see sweeping mountain views with creepy trains crawling along the valley, a glittering party, and a six-legged salamander. There's a sequence in "Last Tutor" where someone hacks into a computer by imitating someone else's body language: I'd love to see an actor embodying that transformation.
If an opera composer was interested? I'd choose the final novelette, "A Fisher of Stars". Aizu's story involves multiple doomed love affairs, a mysterious illness, and lots of organizing, and I absolutely want to hear the triumphant union chorus where one of the singers is pretending to be a space elevator.
YHL: Objectively speaking, what is the best Nakharat hairstyle or braid?
Red is clearly the best color for a hair ribbon. I love it so much that I've deliberately avoided giving red ribbons to any of the Nakharat Companies—they can't be trusted with such excellent graphic design!—though I think another untrustworthy organization did score red and silver ribbons.
YHL: How did your feline friends contribute to this volume?
They're particularly supportive of major research dives, because then we can all curl up on the daybed together. Here's Gennoveus looking studious.
YHL: Where else can we find updates and learn more about your projects/work?
UW: My newsletter exact sequences has updates about what I'm writing and the very best cat pictures. My website yarntheory.net has links to all kinds of projects, including the social media accounts du jour—lately I've been hanging out on bluesky.
YHL: Thank you so much, Ursula! Looking forward to getting this book in my hands!