Seth Dickinson

Seth Dickinson
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Genre	Hard fantasy
Notable works	The Traitor Baru Cormorant (2015)
Website
www.sethdickinson.com

Seth Dickinson is an American writer of fantasy and science fiction, best known for his 2015 debut novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its sequels The Monster Baru Cormorant and The Tyrant Baru Cormorant.

Career

Dickinson graduated from the University of Chicago, where he received the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing in 2011 for his short story "The Immaculate Conception of Private Ritter".[1] He has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others.[2] He also contributed writing to video games, including Destiny: The Taken King (2015).[3]

His debut novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant, a hard fantasy expansion of a 2011 short story, is about a brilliant young woman who, educated in the schools of the imperial power that subjugated her homeland, sets out to gain power to subvert the empire from within. It was published in September 2015 and was well received by critics.[4][5] Dickinson has blogged about addressing issues around gender and feminism, race, homosexuality, and imperialism in the world of Baru Cormorant.[6]

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is the first novel in a series called The Masquerade.[7] Dickinson completed the draft of a sequel, The Monster Baru Cormorant, in July 2017,[8] submitting a manuscript of 1,104 pages.[9] The final version, published in 2018, comprised half of this material. The remainder was published in 2020 as The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. As the series was originally planned to be a trilogy, a fourth novel has been announced.[10][11]

Exordia, Dickinson's fourth novel, a science fiction story introducing a new setting, was released in January 2024. Publishers Weekly wrote: "With cool alien technology, admirably hopeful heroes, and SFF pop culture references littered throughout, this will have readers hooked".[12] In an interview with BookPage magazine, Dickinson said that the book was inspired by the LEGO Bionicle toy line, as well as novels The Andromeda Strain and Sphere by Michael Crichton.[13]

Bibliography

Novels

The Masquerade series

1. The Traitor Baru Cormorant, 15 September 2015, Tor Books. Published as The Traitor in the UK. Based on the short story "The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2011).
2. The Monster Baru Cormorant, 30 October 2018, Tor Books.
3. The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, 9 June 2020, Tor Books.
4. A final novel, forthcoming.[11]

Other novels

• Exordia (2024)[14]

Short fiction

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected	Notes
"The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and their Wounds"	2011	Beneath Ceaseless Skies, December 2011
"Worth of Crows"	2012	Beneath Ceaseless Skies, September 2012
"Cronus and the Ships"	2013	Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 2013
"A Plant (Whose Name is Destroyed)"	2013	Strange Horizons, August 2013
"Never Dreaming (In Four Burns)"	2013	Clarkesworld, November 2013
"Testimony Before an Emergency Session of The Naval Cephalopod Command"	2013	Drabblecast, December 2013
"Morrigan in the Sunglare"	2014	Clarkesworld, March 2014	The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF & Space Opera, edited by David Afsharirad
"Sekhmet Hunts the Dying Gnosis: A Computation"	2014	Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2014
"Kumara"	2014	Escape Pod, March 2014
"Our Fire, Given Freely"	2014	Beneath Ceaseless Skies, April 2014
"A Tank Only Fears Four Things"	2014	Lightspeed, May 2014
"Anna Saves Them All"	2014	Shimmer, September 2014
"Economies of Force"	2014	Apex Magazine, September 2014
"Wizard, Cabalist, Ascendant"	2014	Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke, September 2014
"Three Bodies at Mitanni"	2015	Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2015	The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by John Joseph Adams The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke
"Please Undo this Hurt"	2015	Tor.com, September 2015
"Morrigan in Shadow"	2015	Clarkesworld, December 2015	The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF 2015, edited by David Afsharirad
"Laws of Night and Silk"	2016	Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2016	The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan
"The Final Order"	2020	From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back

Writing for video games

• FreeSpace 2: Blue Planet (2010)
• Destiny: The Taken King (2015)
• Destiny 2: Forsaken (2018)
• Forthcoming content in the Subnautica franchise [15]

External links

• Official website
• Seth Dickinson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

References

1. "Past Winners". Dell Award. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
2. "Seth Dickinson". Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
3. "What Seth wrote in 2015!". Seth Dickinson. 16 January 2016. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
4. "The Traitor Baru Cormorant". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
5. El-Mohtar, Amal (27 September 2015). "Baru Cormorant Will Catch You Unawares". NPR. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
6. "The secret design of The Traitor Baru Cormorant". Seth Dickinson. 24 November 2015. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
7. "The Masquerade". Macmillan. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
8. Seth Dickinson [@sethjdickinson] (July 1, 2017). "The rough draft of The Monster Baru Cormorant is done and I'll hit my editor with it on Monday" (Tweet). Retrieved July 1, 2017 – via Twitter.^[dead link‍]
9. Palmieri, Marco (8 July 2017). "*opens file**skips to last page**face melts**closes file*". @mxpalmieri. Twitter.^[dead link‍]
10. Lee, Yoon Ha (25 April 2018). "The Monster Baru Cormorant (ARC)". yhlee.dreamwidth.org. Retrieved 26 April 2018.
11. "Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant Series Gets A Fourth Novel". Reactor. Tor Books. 1 May 2018. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
12. "Exordia by Seth Dickinson". www.publishersweekly.com. Retrieved 2024-03-08.
13. Pickens, Chris (23 January 2024). "'Exordia' is one of the wildest first-contact novels you'll ever read". BookPage. Retrieved 2024-03-08.
14. Dickinson, Seth (2024). Exordia. Tordotcom. ISBN 9781250233011.
15. "I am now working on Subnautica". Seth Dickinson. 22 May 2022. Retrieved 12 October 2024.