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Seth Dickinson is an American writer of fantasy and science fiction, best known for his 2015 debut novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its sequels The Monster Baru Cormorant and The Tyrant Baru Cormorant.

Career

Dickinson graduated from the University of Chicago, where he received the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing in 2011 for his short story "The Immaculate Conception of Private Ritter". He has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. He also contributed writing to video games, including Destiny: The Taken King (2015).

His debut novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant, a hard fantasy expansion of a 2011 short story, is about a brilliant young woman who, educated in the schools of the imperial power that subjugated her homeland, sets out to gain power to subvert the empire from within. It was published in September 2015 and was well received by critics. Dickinson has blogged about addressing issues around gender and feminism, race, homosexuality, and imperialism in the world of Baru Cormorant.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is the first novel in a series called The Masquerade. Dickinson completed the draft of a sequel, The Monster Baru Cormorant, in July 2017, submitting a manuscript of 1,104 pages. The final version, published in 2018, comprised half of this material. The remainder was published in 2020 as The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. As the series was originally planned to be a trilogy, a fourth novel has been announced.

Exordia, Dickinson's fourth novel, a science fiction story introducing a new setting, was released in January 2024. Publishers Weekly wrote: "With cool alien technology, admirably hopeful heroes, and SFF pop culture references littered throughout, this will have readers hooked". In an interview with BookPage magazine, Dickinson said that the book was inspired by the LEGO Bionicle toy line, as well as novels The Andromeda Strain and Sphere by Michael Crichton.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (July 2022)

Novels

The Masquerade series

1. The Traitor Baru Cormorant, 15 September 2015, Tor Books. Published as The Traitor in the UK. Based on the short story "The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2011).
2. The Monster Baru Cormorant, 30 October 2018, Tor Books.
3. The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, 9 June 2020, Tor Books.
4. A final novel, forthcoming.

Other novels

• Exordia (2024)

Short fiction

Writing for video games

• FreeSpace 2: Blue Planet (2010)
• Destiny: The Taken King (2015)
• Destiny 2: Forsaken (2018)
• Forthcoming content in the Subnautica franchise

External links

• Official website
• Seth Dickinson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

References

1. "Past Winners". Dell Award. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
2. "Seth Dickinson". Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
3. "What Seth wrote in 2015!". Seth Dickinson. 16 January 2016. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
4. "The Traitor Baru Cormorant". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
5. El-Mohtar, Amal (27 September 2015). "Baru Cormorant Will Catch You Unawares". NPR. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
6. "The secret design of The Traitor Baru Cormorant". Seth Dickinson. 24 November 2015. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
7. "The Masquerade". Macmillan. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
8. Seth Dickinson (July 1, 2017). "The rough draft of The Monster Baru Cormorant is done and I'll hit my editor with it on Monday" (Tweet). Retrieved July 1, 2017 – via Twitter.
9. Palmieri, Marco (8 July 2017). "*opens file**skips to last page**face melts**closes file*". @mxpalmieri. Twitter.
10. Lee, Yoon Ha (25 April 2018). "The Monster Baru Cormorant (ARC)". yhlee.dreamwidth.org. Retrieved 26 April 2018.
11. ^ "Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant Series Gets A Fourth Novel". Reactor. Tor Books. 1 May 2018. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
12. "Exordia by Seth Dickinson". www.publishersweekly.com. Retrieved 2024-03-08.
13. Pickens, Chris (23 January 2024). "'Exordia' is one of the wildest first-contact novels you'll ever read". BookPage. Retrieved 2024-03-08.
14. Dickinson, Seth (2024). Exordia. Tordotcom. ISBN 9781250233011.
15. "I am now working on Subnautica". Seth Dickinson. 22 May 2022. Retrieved 12 October 2024.

• Living people
• 21st-century American male writers
• 21st-century American novelists
• American fantasy writers
• American male novelists
• American science fiction writers
• Analog Science Fiction and Fact people
• University of Chicago alumni