Tonight! New Episode of FICTION: IMPOSSIBLE, with GUEST STAR Matthew Kressel!

Dear Reader, 

TONIGHT! Tonight, friends, Carlos and I are so excited to present the newest episode of FICTION: IMPOSSIBLE, our monthly Twitchcast (except when it’s, you know, summer) featuring authors with new books out this year!

We host it on my Twitch channel, twitch.tv/csecooney, in a virtual space we like to call The Phoenix Quill Tavern.

Why the Phoenix Quill Tavern? 

Because, friends, we want STORIES WRITTEN IN FIRE! 

We hope to make this a space for sharing all kinds of stories—fiction, games, music, art—and all the delicious, liminal spaces between!

Tonight’s guest star on FICTION: IMPOSSIBLE (hosted by writer and game designer Carlos Hernandez and yours truly, C. S. E. Cooney) is our good buddy Matthew Kressel—author of Space Trucker Jess!

Who is Matthew Kressel? HOLD YOUR HOSSES! I’m about to TELL YOU!

Matthew Kressel is a multiple Nebula and World Fantasy Award nominated author and coder. His many works of short fiction have appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Tor.com/Reactor, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other publications and anthologies, including multiple Year’s Bests. Eighteen of his stories are included in his debut collection, Histories Within Us, which came out earlier this year from Senses Five Press. And his far-future adventure novel Space Trucker Jess is just out from Fairwood Press. His Mars-based novella The Rainseekers is coming from Tordotcom in Feb 2026. Alongside Ellen Datlow, he runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan. And he is the creator of the Moksha submissions system, used by many of the largest fiction publishers today.

We will be TOTALLY GRILLING him about his SF book, Space Trucker Jess, which we both read and loved, and about what he’s been reading and playing lately. 

He’ll also read an excerpt, which, my friends, will truly BLOW (THE SOCKS OFF) YOUR MIND(FEET)!

What’s Space Trucker Jess, you ask? I (and the person who wrote the back cover copy) HAPPILY answer:

Jessian Urania Darger is a kick-ass take-no-shit foul-mouthed too-smart-for-her-own-good sixteen-year-old girl with a chip on her shoulder. She and her daddy have been grifting their way across the verse for years. But when her daddy gets arrested for running crypto-credit scams, Jess is forced to get a job on Chadeisson Station as a roachrunner, fixing starships to survive. 

She dreams of a better life, away from her corrupt daddy, so she’s been saving up to buy a Spark Megahauler, a huge cargo ship, ever since she saw one in a printer catalog. She wants to run the long hauls, to sail alone into the black and never look back. 

But when her daddy goes missing from prison, Jess realizes she just can’t let him go, and she makes it her life’s mission to find out where he’s gone. In an odyssey that takes her across the galaxy, Jess encounters vanished planets, strange societies, inscrutable alien gods, and mind-bending secrets that may change humanity’s path forever.

When is this amazing show? 

Why… TONIGHT! Monday, September 15th, from 7 PM–8 PM Eastern!

I already know you’ll love Matt, because he’s smart as hell, incredibly community minded, and just an all-around renaissance mind. You can also subscribe to Matt’s newsletter here, if you can’t get enough of him tonight!

Here’s what Carlos wrote about  Space Trucker Jess :

“If Philip K. Dick had a vision of a protagonist as gutsy Katniss Everdeen hyperdriving her way through a Gibsonesque cyberpunk galaxy, he might have imagined Space Trucker Jess—minus the humor and voice that are singularly Matt Kressel’s. Wild, philosophical, inventive and totally unpredictable, Space Trucker Jess is a recklessly paced slow burn that will take you on a journey through a warts-and-all universe where the stakes couldn’t be higher, nor nearer to the human heart.
— Carlos Hernandez, author of Sal & Gabi Break the Universe

Here’s what I wrote:

“Like its titular protagonist, Space Trucker Jess is foul-mouthed, funny, hungry, lonely, and tripping balls. It’s poetry and philosophy and science and religion and friendship, streaking by at light speed, a radioactive burn in the black. Matthew Kressel’s slangy prose sucks you in like a black hole, and like a black hole, is singular in the ‘verse.”
— C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Saint Death’s Daughter

See you tonight, at FICTION: IMPOSSIBLE! and thanks for reading!

Yours Truly, 

C. S. E. Cooney