Neon Yang

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CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Jamie Uy
Dated 10 June 2022

Neon Yang (they/them) was born in 1983 in Singapore. [i] A speculative fiction novelist and storyteller, they are best known for their Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.com Publishing —The Red Threads of Fortune (2017), The Black Tides of Heaven (2017), The Descent of Monsters (2018), and The Ascent to Godhood (2019)—billed as “queer Asian science fantasy” on Yang’s official website (“It’s Neon Yang”). The Black Tides of Heaven was named by TIME as one of “The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time” together with titles by fantasy greats Ursula K. Le Guin, J. R. R. Tolkien, N.K. Jemisin, Terry Pratchett, and Rebecca Roanhorse. Yang’s hotly anticipated debut novel The Genesis of Misery, a “space opera twist on Joan of Arc’s story” (“Revealing The Genesis of Misery”), is slated for release on September 27, 2022 from Tor Books. Yang has published over two dozen works of short fiction in publications like Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Lambda Literary, Ignyte, and Locus awards, along with being honoured by the Otherwise Awards. This critical introduction will focus on the widely acclaimed Tensorate series and selected short stories, analysing key themes in Yang’s work within the larger context of speculative fiction in Singapore.

Yang’s writing is known for bold “genre-blending” experimentation, possibly stemming from their interdisciplinary training as a scientist-turned-speculative-fiction-writer (Liptak, “JY Yang’s Tensorate series”). Yang’s unconventional career path defies Singapore’s streamlined approach to engineering the perfect technocratic nation, which demands the rigid specialization and professionalization of the public from primary school age. Yang confesses their journey to becoming an internationally recognized author unfolded “sideways” (“JY Yang: Energy Systems”). In an interview with Locus, Yang describes their parents stealing their leisure reading books as a child so they could focus on their homework. Yang states, “I didn’t start seriously trying to create a career in science fiction until I was 30” (“JY Yang: Energy Systems”). Prior to pursuing speculative fiction full-time, Yang worked as a molecular biologist, a  newspaper reporter, a freelance writer for animation, games, and comics studios, and a science communicator for Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). Yang refers to these previous occupations as “incarnations”, suggesting that these roles embody different iterations of themselves. (“About Me”). Yang’s multi-hyphenate identity, their unusual biography, and the cross-genre nature of their work further emphasize their fascination with heterogeneity.

Motifs of difference and diversity surface continuously in Yang’s oeuvre. They published their first story “Captain Bells and The Sovereign State of Discordia” in The Steampowered Globe (2012), an anthology from a local science fiction collective reimagining steampunk, commonly regarded as a Western genre, from Southeast Asian perspectives. [ii] In 2013, Yang and Joyce Chng co-edited The Ayam Curtain, a microfiction collection featuring Singaporean speculative writing and characters both “uber-rational and supernatural,” re-imagining the borders of the tightly controlled city-state (Math Paper Press). The same year, Yang attended the prestigious Clarion West Writers Workshop in the United States. In 2015, they moved to the United Kingdom to pursue an M.A. degree in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Yang’s prose is especially invested in re-invigorating the Western literary canon from marginalized perspectives and has been published in speculative fiction collections focusing on diverse Asian voices, such as We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (2013), From the Belly of the Cat (2013), and The Djinn Falls In Love & Other Stories (2017). Yang’s energetic, precise fiction amalgamates divergent genre conventions, glittering with unclassifiable cultures, hybrid worlds, and amorphous bodies.

Speculative Fiction in Singapore

While speculative fiction boasts many definitions, this introduction uses the third sense of the term as defined by literary scholar Marek Oziewicz, wherein speculative fiction becomes a superset of “all genres that deliberately depart from imitating ‘consensus reality’ of everyday experience,” including but not limited to science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror, magical realism, and alternate histories (“Speculative Fiction”).

The explosion of local speculative fiction titles published since the 2010s may suggest that these literary streams are recent imports into Singapore’s literary scene, particularly science fiction and fantasy, the two genres that most influence Yang’s work. For instance, Nadia Arianna Bte Ramli pegs the rising popularity of Anglophone science fiction on the island to the release of Hollywood films like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1978 Singapore, with bookstores like MPH and Times “quadrupling its shelf space for sci-fi and fantasy titles between 1984 and 1988” (“Sci-Fi in Singapore”). Yang themselves describes growing up and perceiving science fiction through the lenses of foreign franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars, “an American thing ... very distant from me ... it was up there, and I was down here” (“JY Yang: Energy Systems”). However, Ng Yi-Sheng traces the origins of local speculative fiction in Singapore to Malay ghost stories in the 1950s and Catherine Lim’s “uncanny” fiction in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Ho, “Singapore Fantasy Fiction”).

Singapore has a longer history of speculative fiction that pre-dates the panoply of titles published in the 2010s. Taking the genre of science fiction as an example, the first English anthology of local science fiction was published by the Singapore Science Centre in 1980, featuring the winning entries of a public short story competition and a foreword by British science fiction author Brian Aldiss. In 1985, Joan Hon published Star Sapphire, ostensibly the first Singaporean science fiction novel, under the pen name “Han May” (“Interview with Alice Teh Larsson”). The novel was highly commended under the English fiction category in the 1986 National Book Development Council Book Awards. However, these early forays in local speculative fiction were still relatively unknown to the average Singapore reader; worse, in other writing circles, genre fiction was met with “disdain” according to Kirpal Singh, with some considering science fiction unworthy of serious literary attention (Ho, “Science Fantasy Fiction”). Today, there is a growing interest in excavating indigenous traditions of speculative fiction and Yang’s narratives can be read in conjunction with recent projects like LONTAR: A Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction (2011-2018), Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore (2013), and Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore (2021) which reclaim Asian storytelling. Like their peers, Singaporean writers such as Ng Yi-Sheng, Kevin Martens Wong, Nuraliah Norasid, and Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Neon Yang’s work critiques tropes of monsters, robots, and extraterrestrial life by reinventing these figures in Asian contexts, thus unsettling Western assumptions of what the alien looks like.

World-building, Race, and Alternative Geographies

Yang’s writing surveys the boundaries of the colonial nation and critiques the division of peoples along racial lines. Yang’s Tensorate series takes place in the Protectorate, “the dominant nation upon Ea for centuries; a land where naga float upon the horizon and where machinery fights with magic for primacy” (“Unveiling the World Map”). In the Tensorate series, environments are transformed through Slackcraft, a Star Wars-esque Force-meets-feng-shui power, and a revolution is brewing, with people beginning to build technology to battle state control of Slackcraft. Writing for Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Li-Min Lim notes the planet of Ea “appears to spring from a uniquely South-east Asian imagination” with topographical features fusing Chinese, Malay, Indian, Arab, and other cultural influences (“Brave New World”). The capital, Chengbee, for instance, draws from imperial Chinese history, while the Gusai Desert and Quarterlands evoke the Empty Quarter in the Middle East. Meanwhile, an autonomous region ruled by a Sultan, Katau Kebang, reminds the reader of Malacca and cities like Atharayabad recall South Asian towns (Lim, “Brave New World”). These vibrant Asian-inspired societies in the Tensorate series exhibit a “silkpunk” aesthetic. Coined by Ken Liu, “silkpunk” refers to a specific refashioning of Western steampunk narratives where “the vocabulary of the technology language relies on materials of historical importance to the people of East Asia and the Pacific islands: bamboo, shells, coral, paper, silk, feathers, sinew, etc.” (Liu, “What is ‘Silkpunk’?”). Rather than applying the term to all Asian fantasy, silkpunk narratives are primarily interested in “the task of the engineer ... like that of a poet ... devising artifacts that are new expressions” (Liu, “What is ‘Silkpunk’?”). The toponymy and textures of Yang’s fictional cities brilliantly synthesize a multitude of Asian histories.

The delightfully mixed-up place names in the novellas are emblematic of Yang’s deconstruction of national essentialism. The Protectorate represents a collage of cultural influences that go beyond the Sinophone. Names like Sungei Sayagiri, the El Zaharad islands, and Baoquan Lake jostle for space on the same map (“Unveiling the World Map”). Reviewing the first two books in the series for The Straits Times, Ong Sor Fern describes the “rojak” aesthetics of the novellas, “a surprisingly delicious blend of unexpected flavours” drawing from the “cultural melting pot” of Singapore, a fantasy world where a naga-hunting captain speaks in the “singsong” syntax of Singlish, powerful royal twins swear in Hokkien, and monks pass by vendors selling snacks like kacang puteh in wet markets (“J.Y. Yang’s two novellas”). Yang’s worldbuilding retools a genre that has often used non-white peoples as analogues for exotic otherworldly creatures, from the East Asian extra-terrestrial villain Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon comics (1934-1992) to the blue-skinned Na’vi warriors based on Amazon tribes in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). Through Yang’s gravity-defying lands merging diverse cultures in the Tensorate series, Yang celebrates the heteroglossia of Asia rather than flattening Asianness into a caricature. Fantastic Asian worlds also ground Yang’s other stories, such as “Waiting on a Bright Moon”, a space odyssey where skilled girls sing Chinese opera magic to open portals for interplanetary trade, and “Between the Firmaments”, a queer romance between two gods, Bariegh of the Jungle and Sunyol, which borrows widely from Asian cosmologies across epics such as Journey to the West and the Ramayana.

Queerness, Biopolitics, and Nebulous Bodies

Another major theme of Yang’s work is the malleability and fluidity of human identities. Harkening back to their days studying genetics and biochemistry, Yang’s prose often negotiates “flesh as the final frontier,” rediscovering “the human body as a vessel for storytelling” (Markov, “Innumerable Voices”). Yang’s fiction continually overturns Western, heteronormative, and patriarchal ideas of the human as exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Vitruvian Man drawing, which portrays an idealized Caucasian male figure as a symbol of the inner “workings of the universe” (Heydenreich, “Leonardo da Vinci”). In contrast to the primacy of the white,  heterosexual hero in much of Anglophone science fiction, the Tensorate series stars queer characters and women of color. On planet Ea, people are born unsexed and only confirm their gender when they reach adolescence, receiving the necessary biological modifications for their chosen sex. The series hinges on the divergent paths of Mokoya and Akeha, twins born to the Protector Lady Sanao Hekate, an “Empress Dowager Cixi-meets-Darth Vader ruler” with an iron fist (“J.Y. Yang’s two novellas”). The twins vow to remain identical forever, but after Mokoya declares herself a woman, Akeha breaks their promise by choosing to become a man. Stylistically, Mokoya and Akeha are referred to using they/them pronouns and are virtually androgynous until this critical event. Joan Ang observes that gendered language becomes a key point of contention in the novella: “Mokoya’s use of the feminine first-person pronoun signals to Akeha a ‘pulling away from them, standing at the prow of a ship headed into uncharted waters where Akeha could not follow’ (117)” (“In Pursuit of Queer Singapore”). After Akeha tries out the masculine pronoun by saying, “I am. I want. I will. [italics in original]”, he feels the words “sharp and electric” on his tongue and visualizes “a new horizon unfolded, shining with ten thousand unnamed stars” (118-19). Ang notes that when Akeha first uses masculine pronouns, he “claims agency, destiny and desire” (“In Pursuit of Queer Singapore”). Language in Yang’s stories allows characters to imagine and inhabit queer futures.

Ultimately, however, Yang emphasizes the mutability of gender and sexual identity. While the twins choose their gender in the first novella, this decision is not necessarily binding; for example, in the third novella, The Descent of Monsters, Akeha realizes that they are nonbinary. In an interview with Lightspeed, Yang states, “it was the process of writing Akeha—who did not start out as a non-binary character—where I discovered that I myself was non-binary, and I was working out all my non-binary feels with this character who never had a particular inclination towards gender, but was forced to pick one to identify as because of social pressures” (“Interview: JY Yang”). Akeha’s nonbinary identity exemplifies how Yang’s fiction deconstructs gender, dissolves distinctions between us/them, and probes the edges of so-called human experience. For example, the immortal alien cannibals in the short story “The Blood That Pulses In The Veins Of One” lament the limits of the human body they have to imitate, “the reediness of the visible electromagnetic spectrum, the clumsiness of pressure, the reliance on frequencies of air compression”. By eating each other, the ancient beings commingle consciousnesses and gain a more capacious understanding of souls across galaxies: “matter is never destroyed, but passes from form to form to form” (“The Blood that Pulses”). Similarly nebulous bodies feature in “Circus Girl, The Hunter, and Mirror Boy”, a short story where Lynette, an escape artist, sees a drowned boy instead of her reflection whenever she looks in a mirror. Yang’s speculative stories reformulating human bodies remind us that the idea of a fixed ‘human nature’ is always already a socially mediated and politicized fantasy.

Authoritarian regimes, Statecraft, and the Slack

Yang’s work also critiques public bodies and the state, often drawing from their experience as a civil servant to offer “social commentary on authoritarian regimes” in their fiction (“Interview: JY Yang”). For example, The Descent of Monsters is an epistolary novella consisting of fabricated government reports, diary entries, and letters investigating a cover-up after scientific experiments at the Rewar Teng Institute of Experimental Methods go horribly wrong. The main character, Investigator Chuwan, confronts miles of red tape and disobeys the edicts of the Protectorate to uncover the state’s crimes at the classified research facility. At a seminar hosted by Nanyang Technological University’s School of Humanities in 2021, Carlos Rojas posited that the Tensorate series is primarily concerned with “the relationship between centralized authority and individual agency, together with the matrix of power and information.” Certain sections of interviews and other dossier materials are even blacked out in The Descent of Monsters, suggesting censorship and the heavy-handedness of a higher authority (51-61). The tyranny of the Protectorate’s government is suggested early in The Black Tides of Heaven when Akeha joins the Machinists, a rebellion to overthrow their mother, Lady Sanao Hekate, and democratize technology to combat Hekate’s control of the Slack. The title of the novella refers to the overwhelming forces of determinism in the Protectorate: Akeha’s lover, Yongcheow, recalls a famous saying in Ea, “the black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives,” but contends that there is still room for defiance; Yongcheow, like the other Machinists, “chose to swim” (166). The art of statecraft is likened to Slackcraft since the guild of Tensors (adepts who can manipulate the Slack) serve Lady Sanao Hekate, who carefully engineers the social fabric of the Protectorate and believes only the elite should wield the ability to affect real change.

Yang’s characters in their short stories negotiate oppressive laws, make impossible choices in totalitarian countries, and endure the brutality of dictatorships. A lab-grown soldier in “A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential” fights as “God’s perfect weapon” in a holy war with no foreseeable end and struggles with whether to join his comrades in defecting. The Singaporean protagonist in “Tiger Baby”, Felicity, yearns to break out of the ennui of her passionless job and the stifling control of the state: Felicity dreams again and again of metamorphosing into a tiger and navigating the Lion City in feral ways. In “Auspicium Melioris Aevi,” an academy teaches young clones of world leaders, “pod-grown like heirloom tomatoes,” with standardized “algorithmically-tailored training programs” until the fiftieth clone of the late Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew begins to question the education system. Other critiques of repressive states appear in “Old Domes,” where Singapore’s historic civil district buildings are sentient beings that must be brutally killed to pave the way for urban redevelopment, and “Re: (For CEO’s Approval) Text for 10th anniversary exhibition for Operation Springclean,” a dark comedy told through emails and document revisions culling unflattering accounts of the authority’s fight against a giant rat invasion on the island. Through speculative fiction, Yang sheds light on authoritarian rule and envisions what resistance might look like.

Conclusion: In/Out/Of Singapore

Depending on which timestamped version of their biography you read, Neon Yang is either described as being based “in” or “out” of Singapore (“About Me”). To Philip Smith, “Singaporean science fiction has historically served as social criticism, challenging both state narratives and foreign readings of the city state along the axis of East and West and ‘new’ and ‘old’” (1). Yang’s stories creatively expand the borders of queer Singapore speculative fiction while refuting the stereotypes of Western science fiction, framing both Singapore and Western cultures slantwise. Nalo Hopkinson, in her introduction for So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, observes that “one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonizing the natives... for many of us, that’s not a thrilling adventure story; it’s non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship that appears out of nowhere” (7). Yang’s writing explores “the wrong side”, placing the disenfranchised at the nucleus of their story universes. Although Yang’s biography may simply refer to whether the author is currently located in the country, Yang’s alternative worlds are simultaneously in/out/of Singapore. Their work subverts binaries and deftly weaves diverse global traditions of speculative fiction to critique ideas of Otherness, from sexual to racial minorities.

Notes

[i] Neon Yang has previously published work under the names JY Yang and JY Neon Yang.

[ii] “Steampunk” was coined by American science fiction writer K.W. Jeter in a letter to Locus magazine written in April 1987 (Guffey and Lemay 439-40). Jeter proposed that the category “steampunk” for “Victorian fantasies” that took inspiration from the technology in that era of English history, such as the steam engine (Guffey and Lemay 440).

Works Cited

“A Space Opera Twist on Joan of Arc: Revealing The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang.” Tor.com, 12 January 2022, www.tor.com/2022/01/12/a-space-opera-twist-on-joan-of-arc-revealing-the-genesis-of-misery-by-neon-yang/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

“The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.” TIME, 15 October 2020, www.time.com/collection/100-best-fantasy-books/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

“The Tensorate Series by Neon Yang.” Pan Macmillan Australia, www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781250807540/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

“Unveiling the World Map for JY Yang’s Fantastical Tensorate Series.” Tor.com, 20 June 2017, www.tor.com/2017/06/20/unveiling-the-world-map-for-jy-yangs-fantastical-tensorate-series/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

Ang, Joan. “In Pursuit of Queer Singapore: Tracing Queer Time and Space in Singaporean Speculative Fiction.” SP Blog, Singapore Unbound, 5 November 2021, singaporeunbound.org/blog/2021/11/5/in-pursuit-of-queer-singapore-tracing-queer-time-and-space-in-singaporean-speculative-fiction. Accessed 1 June 2022.

Bhathal, R. S., Dudley de Souza, and Kirpal Singh, editors. Singapore Science Fiction, Rotary Club of Jurong Town and Singapore Science Centre, 1980.

Chng, Joyce and Neon Yang, editors. The Ayam Curtain. Math Paper Press, 2012.

Guffey, Elizabeth and Kate C. Lemay. “Retrofuturism and Steampunk.” The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 435-448.

Heydenreich, Ludwig Heinrich. “Leonardo da Vinci.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 April 2022, www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci. Accessed 8 June 2022.

Hon, Joan. Interview by Alice Teh Larsson. Alice Teh Larsson’s Blog, 13 Oct. 2010, alicetehlarsson.se/blog/joanhon. Accessed 28 February 2022.

Ho, Olivia. “Singapore fantasy fiction takes flight.” The Straits Times, 2 May 2017, www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/singapore-fantasy-fiction-takes-flight. Accessed 1 June 2022.

Hopkinson, Nalo. “Introduction.” So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004, pp. 7-9.

Lim, Li-Min. “Brave New World.” Review of The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune by Neon Yang. Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, vol. 17, no. 2, April 2018, www.qlrs.com/critique.asp?id=1403. Accessed 1 June 2022.

Liptak, Andrew. “JY Yang’s Tensorate series is a sweeping, experimental blend of sci-fi and fantasy.” Review of the Tensorate series by Neon Yang. The Verge, 3 August 2019, www.theverge.com/2019/8/3/20750655/jy-yang-tensorate-science-fiction-fantasy-novella-experimental-series. Accessed 1 June 2022.

Liu, Ken. “What is ‘Silkpunk’?” Ken Liu’s Website, www.kenliu.name/books/what-is-silkpunk/. Accessed 28 February 2022.

Markov, Haralambi. “Innumerable Voices: The Short Fiction of JY Yang.” Tor.com, 29 July 2016, www.tor.com/2016/07/29/innumerable-voices-the-short-fiction-of-jy-yang/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

Ong, Sor Fern. “J.Y. Yang’s two novellas are like rojak, a surprisingly delicious blend of unexpected flavours.” Review of The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune by Neon Yang. The Straits Times, 26 September 2017, www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/fantastical-world-rooted-in-the-east. Accessed 1 June 2022.

Oziewicz, Marek. “Speculative Fiction.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Oxford University Press, 29 March 2017, doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78. Accessed 8 June 2022.

Ramli, Nadia Arianna Bte. “Sci-Fi in Singapore: 1970s to 1990s.” Biblioasia, vol. 13, no. 2, 6 Jul 2017, www.biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-13/issue-2/jul-sep-2017/sci-fi-in-singapore. Accessed 1 June 2022.

Rojas, Carlos. “The Web and the Slack: Contemporary Singapore Speculative Fiction.” Nanyang Technological University School of Humanities English Department, Centre for Chinese Language & Culture. 13 Oct. 2021. Guest Lecture.

Smith, Philip. “Where there is life: Science fiction in Singapore.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 11 Nov. 2019. SAGE Journals OnlineFirst, doi.org/10.1177/0021989419881232.

Yang, Neon. “A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential.” Clarkesworld, May 2020, www.clarkesworldmagazine.com/yang_05_20/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

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---. “Auspicium Melioris Aevi.” Uncanny Magazine, 7 March 2017, uncannymagazine.com/article/auspicium-melioris-aevi/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

---. “Between the Firmaments.” The Book Smugglers, 9 October 2018, www.thebooksmugglers.com/2018/10/between-the-firmaments-by-jy-yang-part-one.html. Accessed 7 June 2022.

---. “Biography.” Prose.sg. www.prose.sg/neon-yang-bio. Accessed 28 February 2022.

---. “Circus Girl, The Hunter, and Mirror Boy.” Tor.com, 30 January 2019, www.tor.com/2019/01/30/circus-girl-the-hunter-and-mirror-boy/. Accessed 7 June 2022.

---. “Homepage.” It’s Neon Yang, www.neonyang.com. Accessed 1 June 2022.

---. “Interview: JY Yang.” Interview with Christian A. Coleman. Lightspeed, no. 98, July 2018, www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-jy-yang/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

---. “JY Yang: Energy Systems.” Interview. Locus Magazine, vol. 80, no. 1, 12 January 2018, www.locusmag.com/2018/01/jy-yang-energy-systems/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

---. “Old Domes.” We See A Different Frontier, edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, Futurefire.net Publishing, 2013.

---. “RE: (For CEO’s Approval) Text for 10th anniversary exhibition for Operation Springclean.” Bahamut Journal, vol. 1, edited by Rima Abunasser and Darin Bradley, Resurrection House, 2015.

---. “The Blood That Pulses in the Veins of One.” Uncanny Magazine, 3 May 2016, uncannymagazine.com/article/blood-pulses-veins-one/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

---. “Tiger Baby.” Lackington’s, 12 February 2015, lackingtons.com/2015/02/12/tiger-baby-by-jy-yang/. Accessed 1 June 2022.

---. The Ascent to Godhood. Tor.com Publishing, 2019.

---. The Black Tides of Heaven. Tor.com Publishing, 2017.

---. The Descent of Monsters. Tor.com Publishing, 2018.

---. The Red Threads of Fortune. Tor.com Publishing, 2017.

---. “Waiting on a Bright Moon.” Tor.com, 12 July 2017, www.tor.com/2017/07/12/waiting-on-a-bright-moon/. Accessed 7 June 2022.

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