Fran Wilde

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Fran Wilde

Goodreads Author


Born
Philadelphia, The United States
Website

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Genre

Influences

Member Since
August 2011

URL


Fran Wilde writes award-winning speculative fiction and fantasy. She can also tie a number of sailing knots, set gemstones, and program digital minions. She reads too much and is a friend of the Oxford comma. Her short stories appear in Asimov's, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Uncanny, and Tor.com.

Fran's debut novel, Updraft, was nominated for a 2015 Nebula Award, won the 2015 Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult SFF and the 2016 Compton Crook award for Best First Novel, and was nominated for a 2016 Dragon Award for Best Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy.
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Fran Wilde Revisions for the next book after Updraft!
Fran Wilde Hi Lisa! Thank you for saying so - I love hearing back from readers.

> How do they get resources like food and such to sustain their population? Seems…more
Hi Lisa! Thank you for saying so - I love hearing back from readers.

> How do they get resources like food and such to sustain their population? Seems like farming would be tough on the towers, haha.

Great question -- farming *is* tough on the towers. It's a scarcity environment, though the people living in it think all is normal. The food grown must survive at high altitude and in recycled soil. (a *lot* gets recycled, like guano) - so instead of wheat for the cakes, it's a "grain" like quinoa; the apples are tiny & fist-sized, the stone fruits, ditto, & they have really strong tastes. Berries -- cloudberries & etc. -- grow on vines & shrubs, all in planters or divots in the tiers' balconies.

Above the clouds, there are garden tiers on each tower, plus every family maintains its own gardens. There are particular towers given over to certain crops -- honey is a good example, & tea leaves -- just as certain towers are known for what crafts they produce.

This is part of the reason why traders are so important -- shifting goods between the towers that need them, both in emergencies, and for markets in each quadrant and in the center of the city.

For more on this, Elizabeth Bear interviewed me at Cooking The Books last month! (You know how long it took me to realize that by writing a food-in-fiction blog, I was setting myself up to be grilled? A *long* time!). Here's the interview: https://franwilde.wordpress.com/2015/...

> And cloth, how do they get that? I'm so curious!

Kirit's seen feeding the family silkspiders in the first few chapters of Updraft, but the major sources of silk comes from a set of towers in the south that are almost entirely focused on silk production (though a lot of the finer weaving is done elsewhere)... you'll see those towers in the next book. There's also flax, but it's not as durable or comfortable to wear. Down, for linings, is as plentiful as the birds bred for food and those the hunters take out of the sky.
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What I’ve Read, Written, and Edited this year, part 1

It’s that time of year again, and I’ll admit I was looking at this post with a huge side eye because things were so much different this year. I’ve done a lot of reading, but much of it was student work (some of which is below!)

*A time capsule note before I get rolling: I’ve been doing this since at least 2013 (I think earlier, but wordpress is hiding the posts). One of the embarrassing things abo

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Published on November 21, 2022 06:49
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Quotes by Fran Wilde  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“On a morning like this, fear is a blue sky emptied of birds.”
Fran Wilde, Updraft

“I tried to quash my anger and fear. If I was being set up to fail, then I would fail spectacularly.”
Fran Wilde, Updraft

“I had become an arrow of sound aimed at the most terrible creature in the city.”
Fran Wilde, Updraft

Topics Mentioning This Author

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“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

“Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.”
Sherwood Smith, Crown Duel

“Sure I do,” countered Lila cheerfully. “There’s Dull London, Kell London, Creepy London, and Dead London,” she recited, ticking them off on her fingers. “See? I’m a fast learner.”
V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borges

“When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.”
Wisława Szymborska, Poems New And Collected

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