Sarah Guan
Editor
Erewhon Books
Works in the book trade: publisher & 2x Hugo Award-nominated editor of speculative fiction @erewhonbooks . @Stanford 🎓, New Yorker, Earth citizen. (she/her)
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Like many fantasy readers, I love a good boarding school novel. I want one that tackles the Anglo-American boarding school as a tool by which socioeconomic class stratification, western imperialism, and patriarchy are taught and reinforced among impressionable children. #MSWL
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How Things Work @Chemistryvid
To defend against wasps, bees create a defense wave known as shimmering. Participating bees need to respond with perfect timing when it's their turn to shimmer. It’s unclear why wasps are intimidated by shimmering, pic.twitter.com/wCSGYG0zntSomeone feature this gloriously strange bee fact in a novel! It seems like something straight out of science fiction. #MSWL
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Sarah Guan @🏡 @Sarah_Guan
All this chatter about a vampire (and werewolf) comeback. I have thoughts...I like my supernatural, human-but-not characters. But I’d love some new takes—not the resurrecting of classics that worked the last time around. Let’s see new perspectives get a bite at that apple.
If a vampire comeback materializes, I’m just going to remind the world that this thread exists and is still on my #MSWL. Give me all the PoC vampires with messy family drama and historical traumas that won’t go away esp. since great-granny vamp is still salty about the Opium Wars
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#MSWL: Speculative novels that feel like poetry, that call to mind specific poems, without being entirely in verse. Specific poets I like for these purposes: Tennyson, Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Langston Hughes, Omar Khayyam, Wallace Stevens (There are more! Surprise me!)
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Alix E. Harrow @AlixEHarrow
@tashadrinkstea tasha you're not wrong. if someone sold me a book as "uprooted but lesbians" i would eat it wholesince i’m shouting my #mswl thoughts to the universe these days... 🙏🏼📚
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#MSWL:
I’m craving speculative stories about immigration & community that cast a wide net. Give me the Ellis Island “empty pockets/big dreams” classic. Give me knowledge workers, refugees, sprawling mixed-status families. Give these characters magic, spaceships, eldritch secrets.
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Sarah Guan @🏡 @Sarah_Guan
I can’t stop thinking about this.Someone write me a reverse, PoC Howard Carter #SFF novel where cultural artifacts are repatriated to their rightful inheritors. Give me the fantasy or future tech inverse heist novel. #MSWL twitter.com/_iwakeli_i/sta…
YES PLEASE (I even wrote a #MSWL tweet about this a while ago!)
twitter.com/sarah_guan/sta…
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Sarah Guan @🏡 @Sarah_Guan
There are many ways to tell #ownvoices stories about queer identity, Asian/diaspora culture, & HEAs that don’t endanger real people! Clearly there’s a market for it, which is great!Write your own. These themes—love, identity, marriages of convenience—are everywhere & universal.
This is just to say, I am still *extremely here* for all your super queer CRAZY RICH ASIANS meets EMPIRE OF SAND novels. #mswl
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sqq’s 🍑 @huaslians
OH MY GOD????????? pic.twitter.com/QqzUzsD6aDSomebody write this queer Asian romcom. PLEASE. I don’t even want to edit it (unless it has speculative elements); I just want to pour this novel directly into my eyeballs multiple times.
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Amal El-Mohtar @tithenai
isn't it interesting that Hansel & Gretel are starving in a widespread famine & find a house in the woods literally made out of good food but its owner won't eat it, just wants to lure starving kids in order to eat THEManyway fairy tales have nothing to do with capitalism
*this,* in perennially relevant collective myth-making
also, my evergreen #mswl *aesthetic*
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Ali A Olomi @aaolomi
Happy #InternationalWomensDayA quick thread on the North African prophetess queen, Al Kahina who fought against the Ummayd armies with the skills of a warrior and the powers of a sorceress
This is an amazing story. #MSWL (It’s practically already speculative!)
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Sirens Conference @sirens_con
Question Eight:What’s an under-used villain trope, or a trope usually attached to male villains, that you’d like to see explored with female and nonbinary villains?
#SirensChat pic.twitter.com/GsMx3Uu47k
Cults of personality.
Historically & in fiction, villains who amass power via charisma, mass manipulation, & curated public personae are male. Non-male villains usually use psychological/emotional power on individuals (e.g. femmes fatales). I want this trope genderswapped!
#MSWL
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Ash Dylan @AshDylanLit
Hades is a librarian, Persephone a devoted patron for the half the year she's there for work. Try as he might to woo her, she's always more interested in his books. After spending her absence writing his own, he sneaks it on the shelves hoping she falls for him through his words.#MSWL 😍
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#MSWL:
Take a society whose economy, development, and peace are necessarily and realistically built on a foundation of cruelty and injustice.
Some characters fight to right these wrongs. The fall of the old world order visits immense suffering on other oppressed innocents.
Go.
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Sarah Guan @Sarah_Guan
SNOW WHITE >> FOREST OF A THOUSAND LANTERNS @juliecdaoBEAUTY AND THE BEAST >> IN THE VANISHER’S PALACE @aliettedb
ROMEO & JULIET >> STREET LOVE by Walter Dean Myers (RIP, I had to include this one)
There are so many more! You could fill a whole display and then some!
Since we’re here: I’d love to acquire some diverse speculative retellings of classic novels and myths by marginalized writers for @ErewhonBooks!
#MSWL