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Sedia, Ekaterina

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1970-    ) USSR-born biologist and author, in America from 1984; she began publishing work of genre interest with "Alphabet Angels" with David Bartell in Analog for March 2005. Though most of her work is Fantasy, sf topoi thread through much of her fiction to date, usually as elements in her complex framings of the contemporary urban environment, framings which tend to exclude the Vampires and Werewolves and other gear that became almost de rigueur for a period in the first half-decade of the twenty-first century (see Cities; Dystopia; Fantastika) [for Cities and Urban Fantasy see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The selections in her anthology, Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy (anth 2008), were in part selected to represent this resistance to fashion.

Sedia's first novel, According to Crow (2005), is a fantasy whose plot reflects the story of Judith and Holofernes from the Old Testament. The Secret History of Moscow (2007) is an Urban Fantasy in which an Underground world beneath Moscow, full of fantasy creatures and events, gives the impression that it preserves the soul of Russia, so often threatened by its czars and First Secretaries. The Alchemy of Stone (2008) describes an urban universe where alchemy exists in a Steampunk frame – the protagonist of the tale is a clockwork doll. Perhaps her most complex novel to date, The House of Discarded Dreams (2010) places a small group of friends in a beachside house which begins to become larger from the inside out as it floats out to sea [for Little Big and Ship of Fools see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; the hair of one of the group similarly expands into a Pocket Universe it would be dangerously enticing to explore; an ancestor returns as a ghost; like the world under Moscow, the world of the house which is a ship can be seen as a container for the stories of our race. Set in mid-nineteenth century Russia, Heart of Iron (2011) is a fantasticated Alternate History. Sedia's work as a whole seems tellingly contemporary; a significant career seems to be coming into shape. [JC]

Ekaterina Sedia

born Moscow: 9 July 1970

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