Dickinson, Seth
Entry updated 9 December 2024. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) US author, active from around 2010, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Traitor Baru Cormorant, her Field-General, and their Wounds" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies for 29 December 2011; much expanded, the story became the heart of his first novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant (2015; vt The Traitor 2015), which begins The Masquerade sequence for which he is best-known. Though ostensibly couched as fantasy, the world-building involved here is easily understandable in (never explicit) sf terms (see Planetary Romance), the Gender and Sex issues faced by the protagonist are never solved through magic, and the medical speculations engaged upon (Baru "loses" half her mind) could be unpackable into sf. The long story itself – which unpacks the slow self-incriminating Realpolitik rise of Baru to power within a baroque imperium known as The Masquerade, while at the same time she helps shape a Pariah Elite dedicated to The Masquerade's destruction – requires relatively few fantasy tropes in its unfolding.
Dickinson is more direct sf interest for a singleton, Exordia (2024), a tale of First Contact involving a refugee (her deftness at survival resembles Baru's [see above]) who is contacted by a female Alien in New York. As a secret rebel against the Imperial designs of the galaxy-spanning Space-Operatic Exordia, the alien is also, in a sense, a refugee. The tale becomes taxingly complex in its scrutiny of the world the two suffer through, but help create. [JC]
Seth Dickinson
born
works
series
The Masquerade
- The Traitor Baru Cormorant (New York: Tor, 2015) [The Masquerade: hb/Sam Weber]
- The Traitor (London: Tor UK, 2015) [The Masquerade: hb/]
- The Monster Baru Cormorant (New York: Tor, 2018) [The Masquerade: hb/Sam Weber]
- The Monster (London: Tor UK, 2018) [The Masquerade: hb/]
- The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (New York: Tor, 2020) [The Masquerade: hb/Sam Weber]
- The Tyrant (London: Tor UK, 2020) [The Masquerade: hb/]
individual titles
- Exordia (New York: Tor.com, 2024) [hb/Lodewijk Duijvesteijn and Christine Foltzer]
links
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