Solarpunk meets treasure hunts in "The Lost Lab," my latest Brave New Girls story!

Hey everyone! Mary here, coming out of my cave after sending the latest BRAVE NEW GIRLS manuscript off to formatting. Whew, how is it already the end of May??

For those of you who don't know, BRAVE NEW GIRLS is a young adult sci-fi anthology series about girls in STEM, edited by Paige Daniels and myself. Proceeds from sales benefit the Society of Women Engineers. This year's anthology, TALES OF GIRLS WHO ENGINEER AND EXPLORE, will be our seventh (!!).

This year, my own contribution is a solarpunk adventure called "The Lost Lab," about two teens searching for a rare plant. I'll admit it took a while for me to get going with this one. Co-editor Paige Daniels and I decided late last year that we wanted a solarpunk cover for this year's anthology, mostly because we hadn't done one before and thought it would be fun. And while all the BRAVE NEW GIRLS short story collections span multiple sci-fi subgenres, we wanted to make sure at least some matched the cover vibes, so we both opted to write solarpunk tales. I, for one, had never written solarpunk before, so of course I had to give it a try.

What is solarpunk anyway? It's a subgenre of sci-fi that imagines a world where technology and nature live in harmony. As such, it tends to lean utopian. Think high-tech cities powered by clean energy and covered in roof and wall gardens. 

The first concept I had for my short story was that it would be about a girl living in a solarpunk future who has a mechanical arm, and whose family is going broke paying it off (hey, just because society has stopped destroying the ozone doesn't mean medical debt disappeared). So she needs a get-rich-quick scheme, and my first idea was that she'd need to win a science fair of some sort.

But thanks to my procrastinating, I didn't end up writing my own story for this anthology until after we'd accepted submissions, and quite a few of the stories we selected were about science fairs / competitions. Okay, I thought, scratch that. How about a heist? Except we'd also accepted some of those too.

That's when it hit me: treasure hunt! Something Indiana Jones-y, except futuristic, and without the colonial overtones. 

So in "The Lost Lab," the girl, Amara, and her partner-in-crime, Ravi, discover the long-lost lab of an eccentric scientist who died two hundred years earlier, and who was rumored to have bioengineered a superfood. Of course, said scientist booby-trapped her lab to prevent anyone from stealing her work. And it turns out they aren't the only ones after it...

Though it took a while for the idea to come together (I confess, I used ChatGPT for brainstorming, though it seemed weirdly fixated on Amara's arm...), once it did, the actual writing process went smoothly (No, I didn't let ChatGPT produce any actual sentences for the story. Mostly because they would have sucked, and I would've had to rewrite them all anyway.)

Here's the illustration, drawn by the amazing Adriano Moraes:

Half a dozen Brave New Girls

Hey everyone! Mary here with a totally shameless blog post this week. Back in 2014, fellow sci-fi author Paige Daniels and I were ranting on Facebook about we didn't see enough tech-savvy girls in sci-fi, especially YA. At least, not as the main characters. Oh, you'd have your bespeckled lab nerd making gadgets for your dudely superhero, or your PhD-at-22 babe who's there to dissect the villain's doomsday machine for exposition purposes and get rescued then swept off her feet by a bro-y action star. But we wanted to put the nerd girls front and center.

So we crowdfunded a YA sci-fi charity anthology about girls in STEM, with proceeds from sales being donated to the Society of Women Engineers scholarship fund, and published it in 2015. Then we decided to make another one. And another. And another. Oh, and another.

And now, we're back again with our sixth volume, BRAVE NEW GIRLS: CHRONICLES OF MISSES AND MACHINES, which just went live for preorder! And here's our pretty cover, art by Streetlight Graphics:

Why do we keep putting out volumes? Well, because we want to. And people seem to like them (we do most of our selling at conventions, and some people are happy to come back every year for the newest volume). We've raised about $8,500 so far, which may sound like peanuts compared to the major charity operations out there but is a big deal for us small-time indie publishers. Plus, there are now about 140 more stories about girls in STEM out there than there were before. So we'll keep going, because why not?

Here's the full list of stories and authors who will be in this year's volume, coming July 5!

The Adventure of the Listening Machine by Veronica Lee

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Flor Contreras

Blooming Where She's Planted by JD Cadmon

CompAInon by Chris Kanther

Girls Rule the Steampunk World! by Ira Nayman

The God-Maker by Tyan Priss

Intergalactic PenPal Program by Andrew K. Hoe

Jupiter Jaguar by Kris Katzen

Mystery Aboard the Old Faithful by Karissa Laurel

Mainframe Magic by Denise Sutton

The Microscope by Brad Jurn

Tuesday Evening Social Club by Paige Daniels

A Planet Named Beatrice by Melanie Harding-Shaw

The Pod by Josh Pritchett

Premature Emergence by Raphael Sutton

The Price of Progress by A.A. Jankiewicz

A Special Theory of Circus by Mary Fan

Tercio by J.R. Rustrian

Vandermecha by Jelani-Akin Parham

Webs by Elizabeth Stombock

Wendy's Findings by Annie Gray

ZIKES by Mackenzie Reide

INTERVIEW: Brave New Girls Authors Talk Inspiration!

A post by Mary Fan

Hi everyone! Mary here, and it's my turn to do an interview! Instead of a tradition Q&A with one person, I decided to ask some of the BRAVE NEW GIRLS authors about their inspirations. What's BRAVE NEW GIRLS? Well, I'm glad you asked! ;-)

Back in 2014, sci-fi author Paige Daniels and I were bemoaning the lack of tech-savvy heroines in fiction. Oh, you'd see the odd glasses-wearing sidekick working the lab while the real (male) hero beat bad guys. Or the impossibly sexy babe who somehow had five PhDs at 22 so she could be the (male) hero's love interest and ostensibly have a role in the plot. But there was a distinct lack of stories about the
girls in the lab, the girls behind the keyboards, the girls who loved science for its own sake.

So we ran a crowd-funding campaign to launch the Brave New Girls YA sci-fi anthologies in which every story featured a brainy girl who was the hero of her own story. No big strong men stealing the spotlight -- the smart girl would be the main character for a change. While the original campaign was for one anthology, Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets (2015), it wound up being successful enough for us to put out two more: Brave New Girls: Stories of Girls Who Science and Scheme (2017) and Brave New Girls: Tales of Heroines Who Hack (just released July 5!).

Each volume contains multiple short stories, with illustrations for every story acting as a cover within the cover. I asked some of the authors to talk about what inspired theirs. Here are their answers:

Art by Jennifer L. Lopez

Author:
Jeanne Kramer Smyth

Story:

"The 17th Quadrennial Intergalactic Neo-Cultural Expo and Science Fair"

Brave New Girls: Stories of Girls Who Science and Scheme

My story, 'The 17th Quadrennial Intergalactic Neo-Cultural Expo and Science Fair', in the 2nd BRAVE NEW GIRLS anthology, was inspired by a combination of things:
- my participation in a science fair in 10th grade
- my desire to set something in space (and the awesome conversations I had with my friend who works at NASA about what might go wrong, both on a space station and with science projects)
- the name of a show my father directed years ago ('Banjo Dancing, or The 48th Annual Squitters Mountain Song Dance Folklore Convention and Banjo Contest, and Why I Lost ...')

Art by Jennifer Stolzer
(both illustrations)

Author: 
Jamie Krakover

Story:
"Arch Nemesis"
Brave New Girls: Stories of Girls Who Science and Scheme

"Pyramid Scheme"
Brave New Girls: Tales of Heroines Who Hack

My first Brave New Girls story was inspired by the fact that I always wanted to write a St. Louis centered story. I focused on the Arch because it's such an iconic landmark in the city. But I wanted that landmark to have secrets than no one knew about. As a female engineer I saw the need for strong female characters with science and engineering minds. So I crafted Valerie, who had experienced loss but also had something to prove and a need to thwart the activities there.

From there I decided to throw in math and science references and puns centered around Arches and thus Arch Nemesis was born. After completing Arch Nemesis I realized that my main character had more adventures to take and since I left things a little open ended, I took a similar approach with Pyramid Scheme. I built on the strong character and explored an adventure within the great pyramid, once again incorporating science and math as well as puns. I wanted the main character to have learned from her previous experiences, developed her engineering skills further and gave her a sidekick to help in her adventure (even though she thought she didn't need one). Overall I've just had a blast utilizing my engineering knowledge and sneaking in fun, nerdy references wherever I could.

Art by Sharon Emmitt

Author: 
Jennifer Lee Rossman

Story: 
"Login"
Brave New Girls: Tales of Heroines Who Hack

I love fairy tale retellings (my first-ever publication was in an anthology of sci-fi fairy tales), and the idea of a Rumplestiltskin retelling really interested me. It seemed to lend itself well to a futuristic setting since the girl gets three chances to guess his name, and that's how many chances you usually get to guess a login name on the computer. 

The rest of the plot - the war machines, the factory, the gold wiring - fell into place around that premise, and I decided to make the main character a wheelchair-user like me because we need more positive disability rep in stories.

Art by Lyssa Chiavari

Author: 

Lyssa Chiavari

Story: 

"Sea-Stars and Sand Dollars",

Brave New Girls: Tales of Heroines Who Hack

I've always been really interested in the concept of seasteading, and one of my favorite TV series is SeaQuest DSV. I wanted to do something that combined those things together and also tied into my ongoing sci-fi series, so I decided to do a fun adventure story about one of the adult side characters from the series back when she was a teenager. It worked out so well that several elements from the story got built into the second book!

Author: 

Me! (I'm also the co-editor) (What? Couldn't resist!)

Story: 

"Takes A Hacker"

Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets

"The Case of the Missing Sherlock"

Brave New Girls: Stories of Girls Who Science and Scheme

"The Altered Avatar"

Brave New Girls: Tales of Heroines Who Hack 

Art by Mary Fan

I've always loved stories about virtual reality, and so for "Takes a Hacker," I wanted to use that as a setting. The heroine is a teen Jane Colt, who's also the heroine of the space adventure trilogy named after her. I thought it would be fun to explore the character at an earlier stage in her life. I also thought it'd be fun to center the story around a science fair of some kind. I'd participated in Science Olympiad as a high-schooler, and while the story ended up being much more... adventurous... than my own experiences, I thought it was a nice nod. Also, I wanted to reject the idea that girls in tech could only be awkward nerds (nothing wrong with that, but there's more than one way to be a girl) or babelicious bimbos (okay, there is something wrong with that). The backstory I'd established for Jane was that she'd always been something of a belle -- good-looking and charming enough when she felt like it. Not to mention the daughter of one of the richest men on her planet. At the same time, I didn't want romance to define her. Besides, for continuity's sake, her love interest in the series couldn't be present in the prequel short. So I made the story an anti-romance... the story of a break-up. Because that's part of being a teen too, and Jane doesn't need no man telling her what to do! 

Art by Jennifer L. Lopez

"The Case of the Missing Sherlock" and "The Altered Avatar" both feature a crime-solving duo inspired by Sherlock Holmes and John Watson -- except now, they're an AI called Sherlock (built to look like a teen girl despite being named after a male character) and a teen engineer named Chevonne Watson. Both are whip-smart and love their sciences. Sherlock gets herself into all sorts of trouble with her whackadoo experiments -- which she swears will help her solve crimes someday -- and Chevonne is an apprentice biomedical engineer. 

"The Case of the Missing Sherlock" thrusts Chevonne into the role of detective. I'd written two stories starring these two characters already, and while she had an active part in both of them, it was still Sherlock doing the heavy lifting. I wanted Chevonne to solve the mystery, and so I got rid of Sherlock altogether -- and had Chevonne show off her smarts by figuring out what happened. 

Art by MunkyWrench

"The Altered Avatar" is told from Sherlock's perspective and featured a futuristic riff on augmented reality. Once again, the girls' science smarts are what save the day.
The thing about all three of these stories is that it's not a big deal that these girls are into tech. It's just part of their reality, and no one questions it. Hopefully, that will be true in the real world someday too. There won't be any of this "ooo you're a girl and you do science/tech/engineering/math!" nonsense. It'll just be "oh, another girl in STEM -- lots and lots and lots of those these days." Because when you're fighting for equality, normalcy, even mundanity, is the goal.

Oof, I did not mea to make my segment so long! Anyway, all three anthologies are available in paperback and e-book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and more! Check 'em out!