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Monette, Sarah

Entry updated 9 October 2026. Tagged: Author.

(1974-    ) US author with a PhD in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin, whose work is chiefly Fantasy or Horror. She began to publish genre fiction with "Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland" in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet for November 2002, which won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award as best short fiction. Monette subsequently appeared in other magazines including Alchemy, Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Flytrap, Ideomancer, the US Paradox, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Tales of the Unanticipated and Uncanny Magazine. Many stories are assembled in Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (coll 2011), including "No Man's Land" (2008 Fictitious Force #5), a tale of gender-swapping Identity Exchange.

Of some sf interest is The Goblin Emperor (2014) as by Katherine Addison, a Fantasy of Manners [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] set in a secondary world where an industrial Revolution in the empire of the Elflands has introduced several devices more usually associated with Steampunk, in particular Airships, steam power (providing public transport), various Inventions of the Guild of Clocksmiths, and increasing interest in large-scale civil engineering projects. The Technologies are sufficiently new that the possibility of sabotage is not even considered until an "incendiary device" planted on an airship brings about a crash with no survivors, eliminating the Emperor and his expected successors and leaving the titular half-breed protagonist Maia (a son but out of favour and living in exile) as heir to the throne. The teenage Emperor's burdens include loss of privacy, since soldier and/or "maza" (mage) bodyguards must attend him at all times, and the necessity of marriage – however undesired – to ensure the succession. Maia's Bildungsroman struggles with Byzantine court Politics and clashing personalities – though sometimes finding help from unexpected quarters – make interesting feelgood reading; despite entrenched opposition he is eventually able to initiate the building of a retractable steam-powered bridge across the land's great "unbridgeable" river, acquiring the sobriquet "Bridge-Builder". As a fantasy, the novel is for much of its length interestingly Equipoisal in its handling of Magic: relevant folklore may be no more than "wonder-tales"; clerical "Witnesses for the Dead" (counterparts of the Empire's judicial forensic investigators) can supposedly communicate with the recently deceased, but this is widely scorned as superstition and here in fact yields no useful information; an attempted usurpation involves casting one imperial bodyguard into a charmed sleep, an effect which might as well have resulted from a Drug; only late in the tale are the abilities of a kindly and ineffectual-seeming maza protector briefly displayed. The Goblin Emperor was well reviewed and received a Locus Award as best fantasy novel.

A sequel trilogy, The Cemeteries of Amalo as by Katherine Addison, focuses on the further activities of the eponym of its first volume The Witness for the Dead (2021): the cleric Thara Celehar, who in The Goblin Emperor tracked down the saboteurs and their master via mundane investigative techniques but here is the viewpoint character and shares the stress and anguish of actual communication with the dead (including all too many victims of a major Disaster at an airship works) and the occasional need to put down dangerous revenants. Nonfantastic investigation also features: Celehar solves a number of murders, including cases of deliberately administered Poison. An additional technology revealed in this sequence is photography, here strongly associated with pornography (and together with newspapers banned in the capital city where The Goblin Emperor is chiefly set). The storytelling is effective throughout.

The Orb of Cairado (2025) as by Katherine Addison is an independent novella set in the same world in a context of scholarship rather than politics or Religion; it involves finding the key to a Labyrinth containing a lost treasure of symbolic importance. Again there is a murder whose perpetrator is exposed. [DRL]

see also: Pointed Ears.

Sarah Monette

born Oak Ridge, Tennessee: 25 November 1974

works (highly selected)

series

Companion to Wolves

Elflands

  • The Goblin Emperor (New York: Tor, 2014) as by Katherine Addison [Elflands: hb/Anna and Elena Balbusso]
  • The Orb of Cairado (Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2025) as by Katherine Addison [Elflands: hb/Thomas Canty]

Elflands: The Cemeteries of Amalo

  • The Witness for the Dead (New York: Tor, 2021) as by Katherine Addison [Elflands: The Cemeteries of Amalo: hb/Nekro]
  • The Grief of Stones (New York: Tor, 2022) as by Katherine Addison [Elflands: The Cemeteries of Amalo: hb/Chris Gibbs]
  • The Tomb of Dragons (New York: Tor, 2025) as by Katherine Addison [Elflands: The Cemeteries of Amalo: hb/Chris Gibbs]

collections and stories

links

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