by Christopher Porter
The first tale in Dr. Ursula Whitcher‘s novella-length short-stories collection, North Continent Ribbon, offers a striking example of the sci-fi author’s poetic prose:
I stepped toward him with a hanging parry, crystal chiming as our blades met. That brought my left hand near his hilt. I pressed his wrist back just long enough to raise my sword and strike his face. My arm absorbed the shock of cutting bone. He slumped and fell. No longer my opponent; no longer caught in the current of our dance. The golden ribbon in his hair was streaked with blood.
The Ann Arbor-based author and mathematician’s debut book, which came out in 2024, is being recognized in the industry, too. It was short-listed for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, with the committee writing:
Whitcher elegantly weaves a complex picture of the cultural and political history of the planet Nakharat—home to assassins, judges, sex workers, teenagers, and sentient starships—building a nuanced, tender understanding of how the politics of power plays out through the lives of individuals, and how collective resistance evolves within intimate relationships.
The architects of Dr. Whitcher’s world-building are the queer characters she portrays across North Continent Ribbon‘s six stories. Yes, there are spaceships imbued with the human consciousness of prisoners, crystal swords, and artificial-intelligence books spouting poetry, but we mostly learn about Nakharat across 400 years through the eyes of its individuals, not its technological marvels. The private sides of these star-faring people are defined by the ribbons braided into their hair, which are then buried in a veil. These strips of fabric represent spouses, friends, family, work, contracts, gods, and more, tracing the wearers’ histories but masking the information behind a head covering.
I spoke with Dr. Whitcher about North Continent Ribbon, what brought her to Ann Arbor, and what it means to be nominated for one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction.
Q: What brought you to Ann Arbor and how has it been for you as a creative person and scholar?
A: I moved to Ann Arbor to work for Math Reviews, which is based on the west side of Ann Arbor—we just moved into one of the old Argus camera factory buildings. Math Reviews collects and publishes summaries of mathematical research from experts all over the world. I’m one of the mathematical editors. Between us, we divide up all of math: I spend my days reading and editing everything from algebraic geometry, which was the focus of my Ph.D. dissertation, to the history of mathematics. I am also a U-M affiliate, which is invaluable for access to academic seminars and obscure research papers.
I was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire before I came here. The shift from a conventional tenure-track/tenured position to a more unusual role freed me to think more broadly about the kinds of creative work I wanted to do—I didn’t have the mental space to imagine a big fiction project when I was in the thick of grading.
And of course, Ann Arbor is an amazing city. I love being able to head downtown after work to doodle ideas in a notebook or browse for a new comic book.
Q: When writing the early stories that ended up in North Continent Ribbon, did you have an eye on making them part of a larger story/world/collection from the outset?
A: I knew something about the world based on a game I was playing with some friends, including Yoon Ha Lee, author of Ninefox Gambit. We had a sort of group blog where we posted from the points of view of different sci-fi revolutionaries—think Star Wars‘ Rebel Alliance, but with more philosophizing about the nature of reality, and also more math jokes. My character for the blog was an immigrant who was slowly realizing that the planet she had moved to was just as bad as the one she had left behind. Her memories of her home planet were the seed for North Continent Ribbon.
But I had absolutely no idea that there would be a collection. At first I was setting myself smaller challenges, such as “Can I write a complete short story?” and “Can I sell a story to a magazine?” Once I was about halfway through, and had sold several of the individual stories, I started believing there could be a book. I wrote some stories to focus on different factions and social classes—I really wanted a sense that people had made terrible decisions for what seemed like good reasons—and then I wrote a final story that would confront the worst parts of the society head-on.
Q: When you’re creating a world, do you map it out first to some degree?
A: No, my process is much more bottom-up. I start with a few key images and a few key facts about the world: I think North Continent Ribbon began with the idea of vows recorded by hair-ribbons and a view of the mountains. Then I dive right in—or maybe it would be fairer to say I lace up my hiking shoes and start moseying, because I do a ton of background research along the way. A great deal of that research is academic reading—I read a lot of history and political science for North Continent Ribbon, as well as the odd bit of chemistry and geology—but I also do things like browsing for photos of a particular city or watching the same video of someone resurfacing a bus tire 10 times in a row. I accumulate facts about the invented world as I go. By the time I was in the thick of North Continent Ribbon, I did have a mental map and an internal chronology, as well as scattered notes of different sorts. In particular, I had to start a spreadsheet with the names and ribbon colors of different corporations, to make sure I didn’t accidentally repeat one.
Q: I’m not a regular reader of sci-fi, so the first thing I noticed about your book wasn’t the world-building or future-isms, it was the writing, which I thought was lovely: tight, bright, and poetic. Later, I found out you write poetry, too. How has that form of writing impacted your prose style?
A: Oh, thank you! This is a tough question for me to answer because I focused much more on poetry than on prose as a young writer—my early adventures in fiction are scraps of satire, pastiche, and other kinds of goofing around—and I don’t have a sense of a voice for “real” fiction that’s separate from the voice I’d use to write my way into a poem. An individual character might have a voice, but I often write poetry from the point of view of someone who isn’t exactly me.
But as a fiction reader, I’m extremely visually driven—I remember stories through a central image, or sometimes the palette of colors in which I imagine they’re painted—and I think reading and trying to write poetry trained me to notice sound, rhythm, and the silence around words in a deeper way.
Q: One of the things that sometimes keeps me from reading sci-fi is remembering all the made-up or obscure words—my brain just malfunctions trying to keep everything sorted. How do you come up with names and words for the characters, the worlds, and the things in those worlds? Do you create a language for the world?
A: That’s an interesting point about readerly experience. As a longtime sci-fi fan, I’m accustomed to invented words in English, but I find that science fiction in French, my second language, can be challenging, because I don’t always know which words I ought to recognize.
I didn’t invent an entire language, but I did have lots of ideas about names and name patterns, including rules for creating nicknames. The place names are a mix of English words, words adjusted from Kazakh using my nickname rules, and words I just made up. I wanted to give the textural sense that the characters know the meaning of some place names but not others—think of the contrast between “Battle Creek” and “Ypsilanti.”
On the individual word front, many of my inventions are English compounds that are supposed to seem like translations. Some are obvious—a lizard-dog is a lot like a lizard and a lot like a dog—while others are intended to cue the reader that there are cultural differences in play. For example, “terraforming” is a classic sci-fi word—I just used the AADL Oxford English Dictionary subscription to check that it goes back to the 1940s—but I used “planet-gardening,” partly because my characters don’t remember a lot about Earth, and partly because “terraforming” has colonialist overtones and my initial planet-gardeners had a different ethos.
Q: You wrote the stories in the novella before the current administration, but I couldn’t help but feel they are a commentary on the way AI is being thrust into our lives and the rapid expansion of the prison-industrial complex. In the book, society has deemed both of these things a good idea—but then comes the resistance. How much do current events influence your work?
A: There’s definitely massive, longstanding anger at the American prison-industrial complex threaded through the whole book.
There are also all sorts of places where something I thought was historical background reading has turned out to be intensely relevant—I’m seeing all kinds of people invoking Erica Chenoweth‘s research on nonviolent resistance lately, for instance.
The more direct influence of current events on my writing tends to appear in sideways fashion. There’s a lot in North Continent Ribbon about what it felt like to live through the beginning of this decade—the shortages, the Black Lives Matter protests, what it feels like to keep doing your day job when the world around you is falling apart—but it’s there in the emotional landscape, not in precise correspondences.
Q: North Continent Ribbon was nominated for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. For those of us who might know Le Guin but not be familiar with the award, is this like a Grammy or the Booker for sci-fi? Have you read the other works nominated?
A: There are several big science fiction awards. The Hugos and the Nebulas are a lot like the Grammys, in the sense that they have multiple categories, a fancy award ceremony, and a big group of voters choosing the final winners. The Le Guin works more like the Booker: it’s a juried award, with finalists and winners chosen by a small and distinctive group, and though it’s a tremendous honor simply to be on the list, the winner does receive a cash prize.
Something I love about juried book awards is that they develop a sort of personality. The Le Guin Prize favors books that are deeply engaged with how society could change; it also has a soft spot for experiments in form and prose style. Of this year’s other nominees, there are three that I had read and found fascinating, three that I had been curious to read, and one that I only learned about when the shortlist was released. It’s an exhilarating mix of celebration and discovery.
First published in PULP.
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