French-Vietnamese Hugo and Nebula nominee Aliette de Bodard is a rising new star in the field of science fiction. De Bodard has a day job working with applied mathematics and computer science, but in her books she prefers to deal with themes related to culture, religion and politics. She names Orson Scott Card and Ursula Le Guin among writers from whom she has drawn inspiration.
De Bodard’s first published novel, Servant of the Underworld (2010), crosses genre boundaries fluently, combining dark fantasy with detective story and the history of the Aztec empire. Her later books, Harbinger of the Storm (2011) and Master of the House of Darts (2011), are set in the same world. All of them can also be read as standalone novels, and they have been collected into an omnibus under the title Obsidian and Blood. In 2012, de Bodard published a short story collection, Scattered Among Strange Worlds.
De Bodard has risen to prominence as an especially productive short story writer. She began to write short stories in order to develop her writing skills, and this has most evidently produced results: since 2006, dozens of her stories have been published in prestigious magazines such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. De Bodard’s short story The Shipmaker (2010) received the British Science Fiction Award. In the same year, her novelette The Jaguar House, in Shadow was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and a year later her short story Shipbirth was nominated for the Nebula award. Just in time for Finncon, de Bodard’s short stories are published in Finnish in the collection Perhonen ja Jaguaari (The Butterfly and the Jaguar).
At the moment de Bodard is working on a science fiction novel named Foreign Ghosts, which is set in the alternative-historical world of Xuya familiar from her novelette The Jaguar House, in Shadow and numerous short stories. In the world of Xuya, China has discovered America long before the Europeans got there. In her short stories and novels, de Bodard examines the significance of alternative paths of development on both the present day and the near future, as humanity begins to populate space.
In her free time, de Bodard is passionate about cooking, and her home page hosts dozens of delicious recipes, mainly of Vietnamese cuisine.