Catherine Baker

Dec 9, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Nnadi Samuel |Corey Farrenkopf |Michelle Koubek |Catherine Baker

gravity ropes a shark upside down as if destined for hanging. the glissading wind, scissoring mushrooms off the hard scale of its body—laid in acrobatic display. the spectacle hunts the small kingdom of man. Its practised weight, silvering the atmosphere in marigold worship. I roam the length of this world, wasteful with minutes,positioning to catch a glimpse of its dorsal fin making an ocean of air. It swam the Mississippis of its lives, indifferent to hurt.

Dec 9, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Catherine Baker |Corey Farrenkopf |Michelle Koubek |Nnadi Samuel

Beginning to read any speculative fiction story means piecing its world together from the words the author gives us, one by one. What kinds of being live here, what spaces they inhabit, what laws their physical and social worlds must follow, what common sense they have that we do not, what technologies they know and how supernatural the cosmology will be—all come piece by piece as we interpret the words. And especially the names.

Dec 22, 2023 | latimes.com | Catherine Baker |Shahd Safi

Sara, 24, is four months pregnant with her third child and living with at least 50 other people in a house in Gaza. This location is supposedly in a safe area — in Rafah, on the border with Egypt. But this city too is being bombed now. This young woman’s plight, and that of the estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, evokes the nativity story depicted in Christmas pageants at churches around the world this time of year. Some 5,500 Gazan women are expected to give birth during Advent.