Award-winning science fiction novelist exploring the fractures between technology, memory, and what it means to remain human in a universe that doesn't care if you do.
Mira Solano was born in Puerto Rico and grew up between San Juan and the Bronx, raised on her grandmother's ghost stories and her father's dog-eared copies of Isaac Asimov. She holds a degree in astrophysics from Columbia University and a creative writing MFA from NYU, a combination that her editor once called "either a gift or a liability — usually both."
Her debut novel, The Meridian Collapse, was rejected by 41 publishers before becoming a New York Times bestseller and winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Since then, she has published six more novels, a short story collection, and one disastrous attempt at a screenplay she prefers not to discuss.
She lives in Inwood, Manhattan, with her wife, two cats named Kepler and Chandrasekhar, and what she describes as "a structurally questionable number of houseplants."
When cartographer Desta Osei is hired to map unmapped regions of deep space, she discovers that someone — or something — has already been drawing the same maps, centuries before humanity reached the stars.
Three generations after Earth's magnetic field collapsed, the last archivist of human memory must decide which parts of our history are worth carrying into whatever comes next.
A geophysicist tracking the slow failure of Earth's magnetic field begins receiving transmissions from a version of herself who already lived through the end — and chose the wrong thing to save.
Solano writes with the precision of a scientist and the soul of a poet. Void Cartography is the most important science fiction novel published this decade — a book about maps that refuses to tell you where you are.
The Meridian Collapse announced a generational talent. Six years and six books later, Mira Solano has only gotten more dangerous. Read her while you still can.
Nobody working today fuses hard physics and raw grief quite like Solano. Children of the Red Horizon left me unable to speak for two days. I mean that as the highest possible praise.
Solano's prose is staggeringly controlled. Every sentence earns its place. This is a writer who understands that science fiction is not about the future — it is always, only ever, about right now.
A modern master. Void Cartography earns a permanent place on my shelf, right between Le Guin and Butler — the only two authors I'd let share that particular space without an argument.
Thrilling, devastating, and impossible to put down. Solano has mastered the art of the Big Idea novel that still breaks your heart in the final chapter. I want to live inside her brain.