Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South.
For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot--if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
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Speculative fiction that examines race, trauma, and survival in heavily stratified worlds has established a vital space in modern science fiction and fantasy. Rivers Solomon gained critical recognition with their 2017 debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, which depicts life aboard a generation starship structured around strict racial hierarchies. Writing about life in the margins, Solomon crafts narrative landscapes where marginalized voices navigate survival, historical memory, and systemic oppression.
Born on Turtle Island in the United States, Solomon grew up across California, Indiana, Texas, and New York. They graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity before earning a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Solomon was named a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and received the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction for An Unkindness of Ghosts. Their prose has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories. Solomon subsequently relocated to Cambridge, England, where they currently live in the United Kingdom with their family.
Solomon's writing bridges science fiction, gothic fantasy, and horror to explore themes of colonialism, bodily autonomy, gender identity, and intergenerational trauma. A refugee of the transatlantic slave trade, Solomon frequently situates their stories in liminal environments where characters confront institutional power structures and reconstruct suppressed histories. Their fiction combines meticulous speculative world-building with intense, character-driven narrative arcs.
