Mia Tsai

Mia Tsai is a Taiwanese American author of speculative fiction. Her debut novel, a xianxia-inspired contemporary fantasy titled Bitter Medicine, was published in 2023. Her new novel, The Memory Hunters, is an adult science fantasy.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Tsai's reply:

Aside from books by my colleagues and friends in the industry, which I am always happy to read (Gabriella Buba's Daughters of Flood and Fury; JR Dawson's The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World; LD Lewis's The Dead Withheld; Yume Kitasei's Saltcrop; AD Sui's The Iron Garden Sutra; Jared Poon's City of Others; EM Anderson's The Keeper of Lonely Spirits), I try to keep a mix of personal interest nonfiction and fiction on the desk. Since I work in genre and am basically always reading something speculative or romantic, nonfiction has truly become my escape. I've been collecting books about horses for the next project's research (Susanna Forrest's The Age of the Horse) as well as some architectural books (Chris van Uffelen's Bricks - Now & Then). I also have Lynne Boddy and Ali Ashby's Fungi on the desk in preparation for book two of the Consecrated series. I'm happiest, though, in medical nonfiction, so I am looking forward to reading Carl Zimmer's Air-Borne, though I might need to prepare myself. The last book of his I read, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, was deeply informative but also profoundly upsetting, and I mean profoundly upsetting in the sense of how upset I was to learn, truly, the history of eugenics and heredity. It's ugly truth but still truth we need to face, especially in America.

A younger version of me from twenty years ago had already been exposed to the eugenicist language floating around in the dark corners of the internet. Innocent me had no idea what Stormfront or incels were, or calipers, or the racist and dated language of the West when it came to describing skull shapes and body types. Reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh brought me right back to that time, and it saddened and disturbed me to know there can be a line drawn directly from Henry Goddard's horrific work in the early 1900s to people arguing that marginalized people, whether disabled, queer, of color, or intersections of those categories, don't deserve help and don't deserve to live. I liked the book. I thought it was excellent. I also thought it must have been incredibly difficult to research and write for Carl Zimmer.

That's a really depressing note to end things on, so for levity, I'll also say that I keep up with new chapters of Spy × Family every two weeks, provided Tatsuya Endo's health is okay and he isn't overworked and stressed, as well as the infrequent but always welcome chapters of Inoue Takehiko's Real.

Visit Mia Tsai's website.

Q&A with Mia Tsai.

--Marshal Zeringue