Shepherd, Peng
Entry updated 22 April 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1986- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Free Cake" in Weird Lies: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Strange Stories from Liars' League (anth 2013) edited by Katy Darby and Cherry Potts; her first novel, The Book of M (2018), a fabulist tale Equipoisal between sf and fantasy, depicts a Near Future world where humans intermittently lose their shadows, and with that loss of the depths of Identity suffer various forms of Amnesia. In her novelette, The Future Library (2021 ebook), an arborist in the moderately distant Near Future attempts, after a century of intensifying and unchecked Climate Change, to save the world's last forest. The Cartographers (2022) extrapolates upon a well-known cartographic practice: the insertion of secret places/names/landmarks into otherwise orthodox maps. They can be meant to be secret, or talismanic: Easter Eggs with Glamour. In this tale, a particular map contains the location of a place of power, upon the discovery of which hangs the protagonist's solving the mystery of her father's murder. [JC]
Peng Shepherd
born Phoenix, Arizona: 12 April 1986
works
- The Book of M (New York: HarperCollins/William Morrow, 2018) [hb/]
- The Cartographers (New York: HarperCollins/William Morrow, 2022) [hb/Helen Crawford-White]
collections and stories
- The Future Library (New York: Tor.com, 2021) [novelette: ebook: first appeared 18 August Tor.com: na/Mark Smith]
links
previous versions of this entry