Szpara, K M
Entry updated 7 September 2026. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Ordinary Souls" in Shimmer for January 2013; his useful anthology Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (anth 2016), was meant to be the first of an annual series, though no further volumes have appeared. Szpara is primarily of sf interest for his first novel, Docile (2020), set in a Dystopian Near Future America where debts are not only purchasable by entrepreneurs (as now) but inheritable. Capitalism has disturbingly edged into Slavery as facilitated by the Drug Dociline whose takers become compliant slaves with no will of their own, with the scant "solace" of Amnesia about their time under the influence. The story alternates between an underclass man who sells himself into life servitude but exerts his right to refuse Dociline, and the boss-class CEO of the company that manufactures Dociline, who reshapes the personality of a woman slave (another refuser of the drug) he has acquired. There is much uncomfortable coerced – or perhaps worse, "compliant" – Sex. Lessons are duly and appropriately drawn.
This author's second novel First, Become Ashes (2021) is fantasy; the third, Till Death (2025) as by Kellan McDaniel, is gay romance featuring a Vampire. [JC/DRL]
Kellan M Szpara
born
works
- Docile (New York: Tor.com, 2020) [hb/]
- First, Become Ashes (New York: Tor.com, 2021) [hb/]
- Till Death (New York: Simon and Schuster/MTV Books, 2025) [pb/Elena Masci]
works as editor
- Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (Maple Shade, New Jersey: Lethe Press, 2016) [anth: Transgender SF: pb/Noel Arthur Heimpel]
links
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