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Anders, Charlie Jane

Entry updated 26 June 2023. Tagged: Author, Editor.

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(?   -    ) US editor, performance artist and author, her early stories being signed Charles Anders, then Charlie Anders. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Skin Switch" in Maelstrom Speculative Fiction for January 1999 as Charles Anders; her shorter work includes The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model (11 August 2010 Tor.com; 2011 ebook), Six Months, Three Days (June 2011 Tor.com; 2011 ebook) – which won a Hugo as best novelette – Intestate (December 2012 Tor.com; 2012 ebook), The Cartography of Sudden Death (January 2014 Tor.com; 2014 ebook) and As Good As New (10 December 2014 Tor.com; 2014 ebook). Her first novel, Choir Boy (2005), is a nonfantastic anatomy of its twelve-year-old protagonist's attempt to stay a choir boy forever through testosterone-suppressant drugs. Her second novel, All the Birds in the Sky (2016), is not only Equipoisal between sf and fantasy takes on the Near Future, but between Young Adult and adult presentations of story. Its protagonists when young – a girl who talks with animals and a boy who builds a super-Computer capable of Time Travel two seconds into the future – meet again a decade further into a bad world devastated by Climate Change and Pollution. Their solutions to the threatened dying of the world, not easily defined as a war between Magic and science, complexly clash and meet. En passant, an AI – here defined as the focal node of a huge distributed network of sophisticated tablets – interacts with the protagonists of the tale. This novel won a Locus Award as best fantasy and a Nebula as best novel. Though relatively short, Rock Manning Goes for Broke (2018) compactly and comprehensively envisages gonzo life in a Near Future Dystopian America close to a literal balkanization caused by the destruction of the central state (see Economics), and the rise of local tyrannies. Gary K Wolfe (in "Locus Looks at Books", September 2018 Locus) has described the world Anders depicts here as a Comic Inferno gone, as it were, viral. The City in the Middle of the Night (2019), a Far Future Planetary Romance whose complex narrative lines seem driven to explore the amplitude of the setting, complexly depicts the human/Alien civilization built up over many years, dominated by the human survivors of a long long hegira starwards via Generation Starship (see Colonization of Other Worlds). A less gonzo foregrounding of her four protagonists' idiosyncrasies strengthens the tale, which won a Locus Award as best as novel; in the same year she won the short story category of the same award with "The Bookstore at the End of America" (in A People's Future of the United States anth 2019 ed Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams). If You Take My Meaning (11 February 2020 Tor.com; 2020 ebook) is a tale of urban Transcendental metamorphosis whose protagonist, through her example, may point the way to human Uplift: a needed direction. The Unstoppable sequence beginning with Victories Greater than Death (2021), is a Young Adult coming-of-age Space Opera; the first volume won a Locus Award as best YA novel. The second volume Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak (2022) underlines the message that the world to come in space will offer both physical and psychic challenges, and also won a Locus Award as best YA novel.

With her partner Annalee Newitz, Anders founded in 2008 – and after Newitz's 2014 move to another journal continues to edit – the sf blog io9.com (see Online Newszines). Her short "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue" (in Global Dystopias, anth 2017, ed Junot Díaz) won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2018; this and other stories central to her career were assembled as Even Greater Mistakes: Stories (coll 2021), which won a Locus Award as best collection. Anders's and Newitz's Our Opinions Are Correct received 2019 and 2022 Hugos as best fancast. Her nonfiction Never Say You Can't Survive (2021) won a Hugo as best related work. [JC]

Charlie Jane Anders

born Connecticut

works

series

All the Birds in the Sky

  • All the Birds in the Sky (New York: Tor, 2016) [All the Birds in the Sky: hb/Will Staehle]
  • Clover (New York: Tor.com, 2016) [story: ebook: first appeared 25 October 2016 Tor.com: All the Birds in the Sky: na/Victo Ngai]

Unstoppable

individual titles

collections and stories

nonfiction

works as editor

links

previous versions of this entry



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