Susan Kaye Quinn

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About Susan Kaye Quinn
Susan Kaye Quinn is a rocket scientist turned speculative fiction author who now uses her PhD to invent cool stuff in books. Her works range from gritty cyberpunk to hopepunk climate fiction, with side trips into steampunk romance and middle grade fantasy. Her bestselling novels and short stories have been optioned for Virtual Reality, translated into German and French, and featured in several anthologies. She writes full-time, trying to dream a better future into being.
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NOTHING IS PROMISED
• When You Had Power (Book 1)
• You Knew the Price (Book 2)
• Of Kindness and Kilowatts (Book 3)
• Yet You Cry When It Hurts (Book 4)
SINGULARITY
• The Legacy Human (Book 1)
• The Duality Bridge (Book 2)
• The Illusory Prophet (Book 3)
• The Last Mystic (Book 4)
STORIES OF SINGULARITY (novellas)
• Restore
• Containment
• Augment
• Awakening
• Harvest
• Defiance
• Résistance
MINDJACK
• Open Minds (Book 1)
• Closed Hearts (Book 2)
• Free Souls (Book 3)
• Locked Tight (Book 4)
• Cracked Open (Book 5)
• Broken Wide (Book 6)
Mindjack Short Story Collection (Novella Box Set)
THE ROYALS OF DHARIA
• Third Daughter (Book 1)
• Second Daughter (Book 2)
• First Daughter (Book 3)
DEBT COLLECTOR
• LIRIUM (Season One)
• WRAITH (Season Two)
MIDDLE GRADE FANTASY
• Faery Swap
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Blog postHopepunk as a genre is still struggling to be born. It’s popping up in books like Becky Chambers’ Psalm for the Wild-Built, TV series like the third season of Star Trek: Discovery, and movies like Free Guy.
In retrospect, I’ve been writing hopepunk for many years, but it was only in 2017 that I started writing it in an intentional way. In 2020, as I dove into writing my most explicitly hopepunk series yet (a futuristic climate fiction, Nothing is Promised), I blogged my way through th6 days ago Read more -
Blog postDo I start now or wait until the apocalypse is over?
You know what makes me laugh?
And by “laugh” I mean “chuckle knowingly but shake my head.”
The idea that being hopeful is naive, childish, starry-eyed, PollyAnn-ish, or whatever disparaging term you use to tear down someone who dares to do something you’re too afraid to do. This makes me chuckle or perhaps snort in a knowing way, like, buddy, you think this is easy? You think I don’t know exactly how fucked we are?6 days ago Read more -
Blog postWe have a very tangled relationship with hope.
It’s like hot ex-lover we can’t quit. We deny we have it or even want it—we’re too cool for that! But we desperately, ardently do, and when there’s even a flicker of it, we leap up, hearts aflame, ready to tumble into love again because it just feels so good. Then we think we’re chumps for falling for the dopamine once again.
If we can step back from the emotional chaos for a moment, it’s easy to see that hope is a good and ne2 weeks ago Read more -
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Blog postOh, how vulnerability terrifies us.
And writing something called “hopepunk” opens you up wide to all the criticisms society lobs to keep us from hoping for better, daring to change, and worst of all, organizing collectively to make a difference in the world.
“That will never change.”
“It’s hopeless.”
“You’re silly/foolish/naive to think anything like that could work.”
“Work together? Have you met people?”
I have, in fact. And not only are we capable o2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postIt’s a testament to the hard reality of the last couple years that you could write a blog post titled, Writing in the Time of Insanity, and literally not know WHICH YEAR you were referring to. 2020, when SARS-COVID-19 shook the world to a standstill? 2021, when we had an armed insurrection at the Capitol? And a vaccine for the virus, only not everyone wanted to take it? Or 2022, when we entered the first petrostate war as Russia invaded Ukraine?
War, Death, and Plague, together aga2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postThe more I learn about this Anthropocene we’re living through and how we’re changing our world—how our soils are depleting, how our oceans are overfished and filling with plastic, how the “forever chemicals” are truly forever, in both the body of our planet, and our own bodies—the more I see in granular detail the reality that we’re intimately connected to everything. But we keep telling a story, a fiction, that we’re separate, that we can actually achieve separation in any meaningful way. T<2 weeks ago Read more
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Blog postNot Just the Hero’s Journey But With a Girl
Since I first discovered Gail Carriger’s Heroine’s Journey in 2020, I’ve written exclusively Heroine’s-Journey-structured stories… I can’t promise I’ll never write another Hero’s-Journey-structured novel, but given that I’ve pretty thoroughly found a genre-home in hopepunk (and climate fiction), and my penname writes romance (which is all Heroine’s Journey), I don’t really see a lot of “heroic” fiction in my future.
Read on to see wh2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postHopepunk: collectivism in storytelling
We live in a hyper-individualist world, especially in America. This extreme focus on individualism has many costs—an epidemic of loneliness, the fracturing of the social fabric, the breakdown of communities—and yet we’re still convinced that “rugged individualism” is the pinnacle of American virtue (rather than, say, working together, organizing for a larger cause, compassion for the less fortunate). That’s the narrative, the cultural story we te2 weeks ago Read more -
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Blog postIt all comes down to the purpose of violence.
There are so many aspects to our world that we simply take for granted, until the world is turned upside down and nothing makes sense anymore. A worldwide pandemic sweeps through, halting everything for a few breathless moments, and suddenly people rethink their lives and decide to go back to school, start that business, move back home… write that novel.
In 2019, I took a retreat and dove into the history of science fiction, se2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postWriting has always centered me.
Writing hopepunk* is saving me in a whole different way.
*”A Brief History of Hopepunk is the first in this ongoing series of blog posts about hopepunk as I write it.
Disruptive compassion.
I don’t know about you, but these two words ignite something inside me. It sets alight the rebellion I have against the cruelty of the world while giving me a pathway that respects my core need for a just and compassionate world. Radical doesn’t have to2 weeks ago Read more
Titles By Susan Kaye Quinn
The Bloodless Assassin by Celine Jeanjean
The tropical city of Damsport clings to its independence from the vast and powerful neighbouring empire by only a few tenuous alliances. As a dreadlocked pickpocket and thief, Rory is mostly oblivious to the political stage, currently too busy blackmailing an assassin into training her to sword fight. That is, until the assassin is targeted by a plot to bring down Damsport, and Rory finds herself in the crosshairs along with him. It’ll take every bit of cunning she possesses if she’s to not only stop the plot but survive it.
The Emperor's Edge by Lindsay Buroker
An enforcer wanted dead for crimes she didn’t commit. An assassin wanted dead for crimes he did commit. Normally, they would be enemies, but they both seek the same thing: exoneration.
Free-Wrench by Joseph R Lallo
Beyond the islands of Caldera the world is a vicious place. A terrible calamity has poisoned the land. Those too ruthless or stubborn to die have crafted steam-powered mechanical wonders and taken to the sky. Yet somewhere in that wretched land there is a cure for a dire disease. With the eccentric crew of an airship called The Wind Breaker, Nita Graus means to find that cure, whatever the price.
Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn
Being Third Daughter of the Queen means Aniri is free to love her fencing instructor--until a marriage proposal from a barbarian prince forces her to choose between preventing a war and breaking her heart.
Dragon Airways by Brian Rathbone
Dragons harbor mysteries and secrets revealed only to those most worthy. When a boy who can sense ancient magic becomes valuable to both sides of the war, enemies close in. Fleeing those sent to capture him, Emmet and his sister Riette board Dragon Airways. Not knowing friend from foe, they must rely on even those who might betray them. In a thrilling journey spanning land and sea, brother and sister come to know the true measure of Emmet's abilities along with the real value of love, friendship, and sacrifice.
Seven full-length novels by bestselling authors that explore the far reaches of the universe, the limits of the human mind, and the divide between man and machine. Aliens, AI, and post-apocalyptic adventure—you’ll find them all among the Savage Stars.
Download this collection of series starters today!
About the Books:
Starship Waking by C. Gockel
On an icy, barren world, a starship dreams of doom…Her nightmares will force an alien race to make contact with the most unlikely of heroes—6T9, a pleasure 'bot struggling to find purpose, and Volka, a lonely mutant on a repressive homeworld. The galaxy will be shaken to its core. The starship is waking.
Exin Ex Machina by G. S. Jennsen
When man and machine are one and the same, death is no longer an inevitability. Though Nika Tescarav has lived many lives, she no longer remembers them. But if whoever erased her past did so to silence her, they’ve failed. Enter a world of technological wonders, exotic alien life, captivating worlds—and a dark secret that will shatter it all.
Crystalline Space by A. K. DuBoff
Elle and a team of companions with magically enhanced abilities embark on an interstellar quest to stop an alien invasion. If Elle and her friends can’t stop the Darkness corrupting the crystalline network connecting the planets, their worlds and loved ones will be lost in shadow forever.
Star Nomad by Lindsay Buroker
The Alliance has toppled the tyrannical empire. It should be a time for celebration, but not for fighter pilot Captain Alisa Marchenko. After barely surviving a crash in the final battle for freedom, she's stranded on a dustball of a planet, billions of miles from her young daughter. She has no money or resources, and there are no transports heading to Perun, her former home and the last imperial stronghold.
The Legacy Human by Susan Kaye Quinn
What would you give to live forever? Elijah wants to become an ascender, a human/machine hybrid, but it’s forbidden for legacy humans like him. When he’s sponsored for the creative Olympics, he could win everything, including ascendance… or lose it all playing the ascenders’ Games.
Bypass Gemini by Joseph Lallo
Lex was the next great hoversled pilot until a fixed race got him banned. Now a freelance delivery boy, life couldn’t get any worse. Then a mysterious suitcase got him mixed up with mobsters, a megacorp, and a mad scientist. Now he must solve the mystery or die trying.
The Concordia Deception by J. J. Green
After spending 184 years in suspended animation, scientist Cariad begins a new life in a remote space colony. On a planet rife with intrigue, betrayal, and alien threats, can she fight to preserve humanity’s future in the stars?
It’s a legal vow of care for families in 2050, a world beset by waves of climate-driven plagues.
Power engineer Lucía Ramirez long ago lost her family to one—she’d give anything to take that vow. The Power Islands give humanity a fighting chance, but tending kelp farms and solar lilies is a lonely job. The housing AI found her a family match, saying she should fit right in with the Senegalese retraining expert who’s a force of nature, the ex-Pandemic Corps cook with his own cozy channel, and even the writer who insists everything is stories, all the way down. This family of literal and metaphorical refugees could be the shelter she’s seeking from her own personal storm.
She needs this one to work.
Then an unscheduled power outage and a missing turtle-bot crack open a mystery. Something isn’t right on Power Island One, but every step she takes to solve it, someone else gets there first—and they’re determined to make her unsee what she’s seen. Lucía is an engineer, not a detective, but fixing this problem might cost her the one thing she truly needs: a home.
When You Had Power is the first of four tightly-connected novels in a new hopepunk series. It’s about our future, how society will shift and flex like a solar lily in the storms of our own making, and how breaks in the social fabric have to be expected, tended to, and healed. Because we’re in this together, now more than ever before.
In the age of the 'post-human' being, in a world when your humanity can be measured by the number of electro-mechanical components that have replaced your biological limbs, what will be the measure of a man?
In 'The Cyborg Chronicles', twelve of today's top speculative fiction writers explore the approaching collision of humanity and technology.
Eli is back from the dead… and determined to stop the powerful ascenders who blasted him out to the void. But in the three days he was gone, the world moved on. The girl he loves is determined to build an army of augmented humans to fight the ascenders—with herself as the next Offering. The ascenders are lining up in a death cult based on the charismatic ascender Eli accidentally released from storage—and all the restraints that have kept the ascender world in balance are now off. Everyone is rushing to be the first to bring a Second Singularity—to reach the numinous world from which Eli just returned—regardless of the cost. And the chaos and bloodshed of the first Singularity show just how high that cost can be. How can he stop the world from hurtling off the cliff when he’s the one who proved there’s something to reach, if only you could learn how to fly?
The Last Mystic is the thrilling conclusion to the Singularity series. This philosophical, HopePunk sci-fi series explores the intersection of mind, body, and soul in a post-Singularity world.
The war has begun, and with the Queen of Dharia on her deathbed, Aniri’s excessively-proper eldest sister, First Daughter Nahali, finally sees her chance to claim the crown. Aniri and Nahali have never seen eye-to-eye, not since they were girls running through the palace courtyard, but with Prince Malik and Second Daughter Seledri kidnapped, Aniri can’t afford to fight with her sister.
So she follows the First Daughter’s orders and prepares for a war she fears will destroy everything she loves. Her sister has spent her entire life preparing for this job—Aniri prays to the gods Nahali knows what she’s doing.
But when the Queen calls the two Daughters to her bedside, she sends Nahali off to prepare for war… and tasks Aniri with a secret mission. She must go after the power-mad prince of Samir and stop his deadly skyship. It may cost Aniri everything, including a chance to ever return home, but she defies the First Daughter’s orders and embarks on a desperate mission to save the people she loves from a war that will tear all three Queendoms apart.
FIRST DAUGHTER is the final book in the Royals of Dharia Trilogy. It is told from Aniri’s point of view.
MINDJACK
Open Minds (Book One)
Closed Hearts (Book Two)
Free Souls (Book Three)
Locked Tight (Book Four)
Cracked Open (Book Five)
Broken Wide (Book Six)
Mindjack Short Story Collection (Book Seven)
FORMATS AND TRANSLATIONS
Mindjack available in ebook, print, audiobook, French and German
LIVE ACTION TRAILER
Voted Best Trailer at the 2014 Illinois International Film Festival and one of 50 Most Cinematic Trailers Ever Made – check it out at Susan’s website.
As the world heats, it takes more energy to keep humanity from dying—a feedback loop that makes net-zero carbon increasingly impossible to reach.
Akemi’s job on the Public Utilities Commission has its own daily disasters—making sure the infrastructure of civilization keeps running is the most thankless job on the planet. When a double event hits—heatwave plus viral breakout—keeping the power on is an all-out battle. It doesn’t help that he’s distracted by his elderly father, who was struck down and neuro-compromised by the same virus that killed his mother the year before. Now his father is living in Akemi’s attic. They’d never had a relationship before, and that was a fair description of the state of things now.
Then an old friend’s daughter shows up with a mystery of physics… and a tale of stolen kilowatts and deadly intrigue. He would dismiss it outright, except she’s also the Regional Director of the power grid. Something isn’t right, and the Governor won’t accept excuses when the power goes out.
Sometimes, you’re the right person in the right place, whether you want to be or not.
Of Kindness and Kilowatts is the third of four tightly-connected novels in a new hopepunk series. It’s about our future, how the world is always more complicated than it seems, and how just when it seems like things couldn’t possibly get worse, they invariably do… and that’s when we discover kindness and quantum entanglement are what hold everything together.
There are worlds beyond worlds out there to explore, and millions of stories spinning across the galaxies. So sit back and be transported... to the dark beyond the stars.
Or might it not be the case that evolution alone, in the right circumstances—if not on this planet, then on others—could give rise to creatures with telepathic abilities?
This collection of fourteen stories explores the ramifications of a future where telepathy is real. From that first glorious moment of discovery, to the subsequent jealousies and class divisions, to the dangers of weaponization and the blessings of medical miracles, The Telepath Chronicles promises to take you inside the creative minds of some of today’s top science fiction authors.
Its companion series – Alt.Chronicles, The Illustrated Chronicles and Chronicle Worlds – are similarly ground-breaking in their coverage of less mainstream tropes such as alternative history and shared universes.
Created by award-winning author Samuel Peralta, and edited by some of the most-respected editors in the genre, each volume brings together work from visionary new voices and from the grandmasters of modern science fiction and fantasy.
This Future Chronicles Special Edition volume is a compendium of stories selected from the Chronicles’ standalone titles, and includes five new stories, never before published, from some of today’s best writers in speculative fiction.
The Legacy Human is the first in a philosophical HopePunk sci-fi series that explores the intersection of mind, body, and soul in a post-Singularity world.
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