Table of Contents Reveal: Multispecies Cities

​A city is an ecosystem, shared by humans and animals, insects and plants, landforms and machines. What might cities look like in the future if we strive for a more sustainable balance in our urban settings? In these more-than-human stories, 24 authors investigate humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world, placing characters in situations where humans have to look beyond our own needs and interests. A quirky eco-businessman sees broader application in a high school science fair project. A bad date takes an unexpected turn when the couple finds sea turtle hatchlings that are confused by light. A genetically-enhanced supersoldier struggles to find new purpose in a peaceful Tokyo. A community service punishment leads to unexpected friendships with both birds and people. A boy and his mammoth travel across Asia in search of a city of elephants. Set primarily in the Asia-Pacific, these stories don't shy away from the serious issues that affect that region, yet generally offer optimistic visions of future cities. 

MULTISPECIES CITIES will be available sometime late 2020 or early 2021. Subscribe to our newsletter or follow World Weaver Press on Twitter for updates.

Multispecies Cities: Speculative Urban Futures
Table of Contents

"Wandjina" by Amin Chehelnabi
"The Mammoth Steps" by Andrew Dana Hudson
"Vladivostok" by Avital Balwit
"A Rabbit Egg for Flora" by Caroline M. Yoachim
"The Exuberant Vitality of Hatchling Habitats" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires
"The Birdsong Fossil" by D.K. Mok
"Crew" by E.-H. Nießler
"Down the River" by Eliza Victoria
"In Two Minds" by Joel R Hunt
"Mariposa Awakening" by Joseph F. Nacino
"It is the year 2115" by Joyce Chng
"Deer, Tiger, and Witch" by Kate V. Bui
"Old Man's Sea" by Meyari McFarland
"By the Light of the Stars" by N. R. M. Roshak
"A Life With Cibi" by Natsumi Tanaka*
"The Streams Are Paved With Fish Traps" by Octavia Cade
"Children of Asphalt" by Phoebe Wagner
"Listen:" by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
"Arfabad" by Rimi B. Chatterjee
"Abso" by Sarah E. Stevens
"The Songs That Humanity Lost Reluctantly to Dolphins" by Shweta Taneja
"My Boy, We're Going To Be Martians" by Taiyo Fujii*
"Untamed" by Timothy Yam
"Iron Fox in the Marble City" by Vlad-Andrei Cucu

(*Translated from the Japanese by ​Toshiya Kamei)

About the Authors

Amin Chehelnabi is an Australian-born gay Iranian with a strong interest in the speculative fiction field. He has been a Collection/Anthology Judge for the Aurealis Awards, and a First Reader for Lightspeed Magazine. He's also an alumnus of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop at UC San Diego (2014), and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship Award. His publications include a horror story published with Innsmouth Free Press, which received an Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Seven (Edited by Ellen Datlow), and was a panelist for a three-day conference called, Shaping Change: Remembering Octavia E. Butler through Archives, Art, and Worldmaking, which took place in 2016 at the Cross-Cultural Center at UC San Diego. He also has a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts, majoring in sculpture, and loves cats.

Caroline M. Yoachim is a prolific author of short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, among other places. She has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Locus, and multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Yoachim's debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out with Fairwood Press in 2016. To find out more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, Nature, Terraform, Uncanny, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Grievous Angel, Toasted Cake, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Shoreline of Infinity, LONTAR, Mithila Review, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Deep Signal, Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Broad Knowledge, Future Visions and Battling in All Her Finery. Select stories can be read in German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Estonian and French translation. She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter and on her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.

DK Mok is a fantasy and science fiction author whose novels include Squid’s Grief, Hunt for Valamon, and The Other Tree. DK has been shortlisted for six Aurealis Awards, three Ditmars and two WSFA Small Press Awards. DK lives in Sydney, Australia, and her favourite fossil deposit is the Burgess Shale. Connect on Twitter @dk_mok or find out more at dkmok.com.

Eike-Henning Nießler is a freelance translator and writer from Berlin, Germany. Working as a retail-clerk, museum tour-guide and private tutor for the better part of two decades he managed to raise a family and obtain an MA in East-Asian Art-History and Japanese Studies from the Free University of Berlin in 2016. With his self published début novel 'Liminality - At the Edge of Worlds' in 2019 he started to pursue his passion for writing in earnest. Find news about his work on www.atelier-vulpecula.com.

Eliza Victoria is the author of several books including the Philippine National Book Award-winning Dwellers (2014), the novel Wounded Little Gods (2016), the graphic novel After Lambana (2016, a collaboration with Mervin Malonzo), and the science fiction novel-in-stories, Nightfall (2018). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several online and print publications, most recently in LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, The Best Asian Speculative Fiction, The Dark Magazine, and The Apex Book of World SF Volume 5. Her work has won prizes in the Philippines’ top literary awards, including the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Her one-act plays (written in Filipino) have been staged at the Virgin LabFest at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Visit her at elizavictoria.com.

Joel R Hunt is a writer and ex-English teacher from the British Midlands. He has a passion for science fiction, horror and all things bizarre, with a particular appreciation for talking animals, twists on classic monsters and [insert genre here] with added robots. Joel’s drabbles and other short stories can be found in a range of anthologies by Black Hare Press, Eerie River and Escaped Ink, among others. He also posts daily micro stories on https://twitter.com/JoelRHunt1 and a number of longer stories and poems on https://www.reddit.com/r/JRHEvilInc/

Kate V. Bui is a Vietnamese-American trans lady from the Pacific Northwest. Kate has been world building her whole life in role-playing games and visual art, but this is her first published work of fiction.  You can reach her at https://katevbui.com/

Natsumi Tanaka is a writer living in Kyoto, Japan. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as Anima Solaris, Kotori no kyuden, and Tanpen. She is the author of the short story collection Yumemiru ningyo no okoku (2017). Her short fiction has appeared in various English-language publications, including Daily Science Fiction, Japanese Fantasy Drabbles, and The William & Mary Review, among others. You can find her online at https://note.com/tanakan.

Rimi B. Chatterjee has published three novels and a number of prose and graphic shorts and is currently working on a science fiction pentalogy called Antisense Universe while running to stay ahead of the apocalypse. This story is set in the world of that pentalogy and features Zigsa, the main character. Rimi also occasionally cosplays as a mohawk-sporting academic and teaches English at Jadavpur University in India. All the dogs know her.

Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Their fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS:  Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Their recent space opera novels deal with wolf clans (Starfang: Rise of the Clan) and vineyards (Water into Wine), respectively. They also write speculative poetry with recent ones in Rambutan Literary and Uncanny Magazine. Occasionally, they wrangle article editing at Strange Horizons and Umbel & Panicle, a poetry about and for plants and botany. Alter-ego J. Damask writes about werewolves in Singapore. You can find them at http://awolfstale.wordpress.com and @jolantru on Twitter. (Pronouns: she/her, they/their)

Meyari McFarland has been telling stories since she was a small child. Her stories range from SF and Fantasy adventures to Romances, but they always feature strong characters who do what they think is right no matter what gets in their way. She has been published in multiple anthologies including Love is Like a Box of Chocolates and Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse from Camden Park Press, and the 2019 Holiday Spectacular by WMG Publishing. Her series range from Space Opera Romance in the Drath series, to Epic Fantasy in the Mages of Tindiere world. Other series include Matriarchies of Muirin, the Clockwork Rift Steampunk mysteries, and the Tales of Unification urban fantasy stories, plus many more. You can find all of her work on MDR Publishing's website at www.MDR-Publishing.com.

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer with a PhD in science communication. She's had close to 50 stories published, in markets such as Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Shimmer, and particularly likes writing stories where science and ecology are explored in positive and sustainable ways. Her own biology background is in seagrass, and she's aiming to put together a research proposal that looks at how communities interact with seagrass populations on their own doorstep. She attended Clarion West 2016, and is the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University/Square Edge.

Taiyo Fujii was born in Amami Oshima Island—that is, between Kyushu and Okinawa. He worked for stage design, desktop publishing, exhibition graphic design, and software development. In 2012, Fujii self-published Gene Mapper serially in a digital format of his own design, and was Amazon.co.jp’s number one Kindle bestseller of the year. The novel was revised and republished in both print and digital as Gene Mapper - full build- by Hayakawa Publishing in 2013, and was nominated for Japan SF Award and Seiun Award on his first work. He won Japan SF Awards and Seiun Award in 2015 with his second novel Orbital Cloud.  After he won these 2 awards, he was appointed for 18th president of SFWJ - Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan. His latest award is a mainstream literature award: Yoshikawa Eiji Literature Awards for New Writers in 2019 with novella collection Hello, World! which is a story about a software engineer awakened to stand by freedom and justice on the Internet.

Vlad-Andrei Cucu, by day an average student, by night an average student that expresses himself through drawing, indie game making, and more recently writing. Trained in the methods of anarchism in Romania’s mountains, and the art of creative writing in Ireland, he is eager to let out some weird, but interesting transhumanist ideas.