Kali Wallace's Blog

Several bits of news to share today, a week and a day out from the release of my middle grade fantasy novel Hunters of the Lost City.

But the first is news about news: the best way to get updates from me about various bookish things is to subscribe to my newsletter, which is free and not very frequent, and tends to be more informative than this blog, which I rarely remember to update.

Now for the real news: Dead Space has won the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award! I am so incredibly honored and thrilled to be chosen, and so happy that the panel of judges saw something special in my dark little space murder book. The other nominees were all fabulous, and I didn’t think I had a chance, so the announcement was quite a surprise.

Hunters of the Lost City comes out in a week, on April 26, and just last week it was announced that it has been selected for the May/June 2022 Kids’ Indie Next List! This is a list of books recommended by indie booksellers around the country, and I am beyond delighted to be included.

I will be at the LA Times Festival of Books this coming Saturday, April 23, to talk middle grade books and adventure stories with Lisa McMann, Melissa de la Cruz, and Jonathan Hunt. Our panel starts at 10:30 AM on the YA Stage. There will be a chance to buy the panelists’ books and get them signed afterward! Check out the LA Times Festival of Books for event info.

Dead Space has successfully launched into the world, so here is a round-up of the promo and posts from the past week:

THE BIG IDEA - DEAD SPACE - March 3, 2021 - Post over on John Scalzi’s blog about the ideas behind Dead Space and how they evolved while I was writing.

FIVE THINGS I LEARNED WRITING DEAD SPACE - March 4, 2021 - Post over on Chuck Wendig’s blog about AI, asteroids, and writerly angst.

ON SOCIAL ISOLATION, THRILLERS, AND THE LIMITS OF CONNECTIVITY - March 4, 2021 - Essay on CrimeReads about how the call is always coming from inside the house because the house is the world and the world is not safe. Or something.

LAUNCH EVENT HOSTED BY MYSTERIOUS GALAXY - March 4, 2021 - Audrey Coulthurst interviews me about Dead Space and my cats make an appearance.

Dead Space, my fifth novel, is out in the world today! It is a science fiction murder mystery set on an asteroid mine. It’s dark and creepy and full of action and twists. I hope you enjoy it!

You can find buy links here: Dead Space.

There will be a virtual launch event on Thursday, March 4, hosted by San Diego’s amazing Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore. You can find info on how to register and join here.

Chase Erwin at Mayday Magazine interviewed me a while back, and the transcript is now available online. We talk about Salvation Day, about science fiction, and apparently a lot more about geophysical research than I remember.

Check it out: Interview with Salvation Day Author Kali Wallace

I also have a new essay up on the Tor.com blog, this one about the JRPG Persona 5 and some thoughts on why teenagers are always stuck saving the world when adults fail to do so.

Here it is: Why Do Meddling Teens Always Have to Save the World?

I am delighted to announce that I will be the final judge for MAYDAY Magazine’s 2021 short fiction contest! I am so excited to do this, and I can’t wait to start reading. The contest is open to writers of all backgrounds, all over the world, writing in any fiction genre.

You can find details of the contest—as well as the concurrent poetry contest—on Mayday’s website. The short version: You can submit unpublished short fiction of any genre, in English, up to 6,000 words in length. The deadline is March 1, 2021. There is an online submission system and a contact email for questions on the website.

I spoke with Ted Conti of the Piled High and Deep Podcast about science, science fiction, writing, earning a PhD, and my experience of being an all-around terrible graduate student. Check it out on Ted’s website or on your favorite podcast app.

Episode 35: Kali Wallace, PhD Geophysics

Writing is always a consistent theme in the journey of any PhD. For Kali Wallace, while she always had a love of making up stories, her PhD required her to use the facts to tell stories about the movement of tectonic plates. Today Kali is doing what she loves, making up stories. The science stuff is important too, but Kali has found her place in the world by writing science fiction books and using her science knowledge to provide some reality while making her work compelling.

I didn’t think I would have enough to put together an annual round-up post. Like many writers, I found it very hard to write during much of the year, which was rather inconvenient because I had quite a lot of work to do in spite of everything falling to pieces around us. I didn’t publish a novel this year, although I did spend most of the year working very hard on two novels (one is Dead Space, coming out in March 2021; the other hasn’t been announced yet).

But I guess I did actually publish some stuff this year. A couple of dark fantasy short stories, both of which I am very proud of, and a handful of essays on media that helped me get through the year. All of it is listed here:

Short stories

Her Cage of Root and Bone in Beneath Ceaseless Skies (April 2020)

The river freezes after nightfall. I feel it in the deepening cold that slithers under the door and whispers down the chimney, in the spears of ice that cling to the eaves, in the scrape of the thick icy slurry coursing past the base of my prison. The river’s ceaseless murmur becomes a chorus of creaking, crushing, and snapping, the maudlin groan of ice against stone.

The Salt Warrior in Lightspeed Magazine (December 2020)

Angela found the saint at the base of the cliffs beneath the old watchtower. She had followed his trail from the village: a line of footprints braided with the chaotic, black-stained tracks of the raiders, leading to the cliffs. There he must have fallen, or leapt away in fear. The crumbling stones of the watchtower were marred with scars from the raiders’ lashing claws and teeth, striped with their fetid black ichor, but there was no sign of them on the switchbacks that wound down to the beach.

Essays

Comfort, Connection, and Community in Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura on Tor.com (March 2020)

I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort reading lately. I know I’m not alone in this. We are, after all, in the middle of a socially isolating global pandemic with no end in sight, and we spend too much of each day worrying about everything from the health of our loved ones to the fragility of our institutions. The uncertainties of daily life have been compounding for a good long while. The value of a comfort read lies in its familiarity, in the way sinking into its pages removes some of that uncertainty from our increasingly frightening lives.

The Reality of Writing in Uncertain Times on SFWA Blog (April 2020)

By now everybody who spends any time on the internet has seen the quarantine memes. Isaac Newton invented calculus during a plague outbreak–what are you doing with your time? Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when stuck inside during bad weather–why haven’t you invented a literary genre yet? Look at how Giovanni Boccaccio used his pandemic–have you been as productive?

You Can’t Eat Something That Talks: People and Cultures in Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura on Tor.com (May 2020)

Sometimes you think you’re talking about an invading army when you’re actually talking about a swarm of locusts. Not in the real world, mind you. Metaphorical rhetoric aside, we can (or should be able to) tell the difference between bipedal primates and six-legged arthropods. But in speculative fiction things get complicated. Sometimes the army looks like the swarm—a favorite trope of SF going way back in many classics of film and literature—but that’s fine, that’s cool, we can handle our Arachnids and Buggers and Xenomorphs just fine.

Anxiety, Empathy, and Making Sense of the Senseless Through Storytelling on Tor.com (June 2020)

But as this mad spring has rolled into the mad summer—as we spent several weeks furiously sewing a few hundred face masks, as we cancelled much-anticipated trips abroad, as we swung wildly between anxiously devouring the news and avoiding it entirely, as the publishing industry flailed and faltered and left us with giant question marks over both our immediate and long-term careers, as a Postmates driver named Linda shamelessly stole our pizza that one time, as the Covid-19 death toll crept upward and upward, as an angry man at the grocery store huffed and shouted about being asked to wear a mask, as we’ve dealt with far-away family members enduring medical scares and natural disasters (both in the same week!), as our friends lose loved ones and jobs and security, as nations around the world struggle and flail, as more people are subjected to more terrifying police violence, as frustration and grief and fear erupt into unrest, as everything spirals farther and farther out of control—through all of that, the one comforting constant in this uncertain and frightening time has been sitting down every evening to play Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It’s a nightly activity that’s grown into something between a coping mechanism and an obsession.

Inside the Cult of Fear: Finding Humanity in Horror Fiction on Tor.com (August 2020)

The unveiling of the central story in The Magnus Archives is gradual, but it doesn’t take all that many episodes for it to become obvious that everything is connected in some awful, hidden way. And, to be absolutely clear, by “everything is connected,” I don’t mean “mostly monster-of-the-week with occasional arc episodes.” I mean everything. Everything that we hear, from the events described in each episode to the manner in which the statements are recorded to the emotional impact each event has on the characters, it’s all part of a much bigger story. Dig down beneath the surface and it turns out this isn’t quirky, episodic creepypasta at all, but is instead pure cosmic horror, the kind of high-concept storytelling in which every element conspires to make you feel small and lost and powerless in a monstrously uncaring reality.

My short story “The Salt Warrior” is in this month’s issue of Lightspeed Magazine and is available online here. It’s about religion and women and islands and monsters. There is also an author interview in the same issue: Author Spotlight. Enjoy!

I am so delighted to share the cover for DEAD SPACE, coming March 2, 2021 from Berkley! Check out the book page for preorder links.

An investigator must solve a brutal murder on a claustrophobic space station in this tense science fiction thriller from the author of Salvation Day.

Hester Marley used to have a plan for her life. But when a catastrophic attack left her injured, indebted, and stranded far from home, she was forced to take a dead-end security job with a powerful company in the asteroid belt. Now she spends her days investigating petty crimes to help her employer maximize its profits. She’s surprised to hear from an old friend and fellow victim of the terrorist attack that ruined her life—and that surprise quickly turns to suspicion when he claims to have discovered something about their shared history and the tragedy that neither of them can leave behind.

Before Hester can learn more, her friend is violently murdered at a remote asteroid mine. Hester joins the investigation to find the truth, about both her friend’s death and the meaning behind the cryptic message he left for her. But catching a killer is only the beginning of Hester’s worries, and she soon realizes that everything she discovers about her friend, his fellow miners, and the outpost they call home brings her closer to revealing secrets that very powerful and very dangerous people would rather keep hidden in the depths of space.

I have a new essay up on Tor.com, this one about the fantastically weird and creepy podcast The Magnus Archives and the feeling of experiencing horror fiction while we are living in a real-live horror story.

Inside the Cult of Fear: Finding Humanity in Horror Fiction

All of my essays and articles can be found here.