Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in the collection Tender: Stories (2017) and was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 25, November-December 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Nommo Award-nominated Novella

A group of religious adherents build a new Noah's Ark, leave the poisoned Earth, and travel through space to a new planet, where they wait for communication which indicates that life on Earth has resumed.

This novella was published in the collection Tender: Stories (2017) and reprinted in the subscriber-only issue of Lightspeed Magazine #108, May 2019.

Nommo-Nominated Novella

On a cold winter's night, some girls in an isolated, religious community uncover a robot abandoned in the snow by the barn. They decide to clean her up and make her a friend.

This novella is available in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 100

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #71 August 2012. It can also be found in the anthologies Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013), edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, edited by Rich Horton, and Clarkesworld: Year Six (2014), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke. THe story is included in the collection Tender: Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection Tender: Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the chapbook Meet Me In Iram/Those Are Pearls (2015, with Kat Howard). The story was reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 102, November 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection Tender: Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, Monster Portraits investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images. An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two--texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday--Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts.

Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the mixed-race child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (2014), edited by Daniel José Older and Rose Fox, in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 12, September-October 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams, and Mythic Journeys (2019), edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection Tender: Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Hugo and Nebula Award nomitated short story first published at Strange Horizons where it can still be read for free. Later anthologized in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), and The New Voices of Fantasy (2017), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman. The story is included in the collection Tender: Stories (2017).

The first collection of short fiction from a rising star whose stories have been anthologized in the first two volumes of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards. Some of Samatar's weird and tender fabulations spring from her life and her literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void.

Table of Contents:

Tender Bodies

• Selkie Stories Are for Losers
• Ogres of East Africa
• Walkdog
• The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle
• Olimpia's Ghost
• Honey Bear
• How I Met the Ghoul
• Those
• A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals
• How to Get Back to the Forest

Tender Landscapes

• Tender
• A Brief History of Nonduality Studies
• Dawn and the Maiden
• Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold
• An Account of the Land of Witches
• Request for an Extension on the Clarity
• Meet Me in Iram
• The Closest Thing to Animals
• Fallow
• The Red Thread

The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes -- literally -- when he is yanked "upstairs" and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship's university alongside the elite.

Overwhelmed and alone, the boy forms a bond with the woman he comes to know as "the professor," a weary idealist and descendent of the Chained who has spent her career striving for validation from her more senior colleagues, only to fall short at every turn.

Together, the boy and the woman will embark on a transformative journey to grasp the design of the chains that fetter them both -- and are the key to breaking free.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue, June 2016. It is included in the collection Tender: Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. It was reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine, October 2017. The story is included in the collection Tender: Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Three, March-April 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection Tender: Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.

In desperation, Jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most powerful cults. Yet even as the country shimmers on the cusp of war, he must face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of becoming free by setting her free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that seductive necromancy, reading.

A Stranger in Olondria is a skillful and immersive debut fantasy novel that pulls the reader in deeper and deeper with twists and turns reminiscent of George R. R. Martin and Joe Hill.

Four women, soldier, scholar, poet, and socialite, are caught up on different sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their families are torn apart, they fear they may disappear into the unwritten pages of history. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history.