Science Fiction & Fantasy
A Conversation with Alyssa Winans by Arley Sorg
Alyssa Winans grew up near Chicago. She studied in Japan for a year in high school, and her education had a strong emphasis on math and science. Regardless, she moved to Rhode Island for college, planning to study graphic design. “Luckily, everyone I met looked at my work and quickly directed me towards illustration.” Winans earned a BFA in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2013 she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where her spouse is originally from, to be close to family.
“When I was in high school, I made applying to T-shirt contests my ‘summer job.’ It’s a weird thing to do, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but I learned a lot.” Winans worked in games for a few years, beginning as a weapons designer for a fantasy MMORPG. She interned at a local company and continued working part-time throughout her senior year, designing over three hundred weapons be
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Aliette de Bodard seems fascinated by relationships with huge power differentials – angels and mortals, giant mindships and modest students, dragons and young teachers, etc. Thanh, the protagonist of
Fireheart Tiger, is a princess of Bình Hải, a small Vietnam-like country seeking to gain protection from the more powerful neighbor Ephteria, and Thanh is assigned by her rather too-critical mother to lead the diplomatic negotiations. Those negotiations quickly grow more complicated and personal when Thanh discovers that the delegation from Ephteria includes the princess Eldris, Thanh’s former lover from the time in which Thanh studied in Ephteria, nearly as a political hostage. The prospect of marrying Eldris is a fairly obvious way of forging an alliance between the two nations, though – once again – it would hardly be an equal relationship. Complicating matters even further is the memory of a palace fire in the capital city Yosolis, which Thanh escaped accompanied by a se
Choosing A Brew
The Empress of Heaven, the Fateful Prosperity Ruler of Bình Hải, stares at the teas. There’s what feels like a myriad of them before her, so many different leaves held in porcelain scoops, a sample of the best that her storehouses have to offer, taken from tight lacquered boxes and displayed for her approval.
Teas.
An audience with foreign envoys is a careful thing–not a matter of ritual, but of messages that must be sent. Of reminders of strength, all the more important when Bình Hải is small and beleaguered, and about to enter negotiations for its very survival in a position of weakness.