Scoop: Kali Fajardo-Anstine wrote a sci-fi novel
Coming in 2027, 'Mountains South' follows two sisters in a near-future American West devastated by war.
According to Carla Bruce-Eddings, One World (a Random House imprint) will publish a new science fiction novel called Mountains South in 2027 from Kali Fajardo-Anstine, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, as part of a two-book deal.
“The initial idea for Mountains South came to me over a decade ago on a wind-blasted morning as I walked outside of the library at the University of Wyoming,” Fajardo-Anstine tells me. “I grew up a reader and that included science fiction and fantasy. But I didn’t separate my reading into categories. After spending years working on Woman of Light, which is set in the past, I found pivoting to the future complementary to imaging a historical world.”
Set in 2045, Mountains South follows “two sisters — one whose childhood involvement in a biogenetics experiment seeking immortality comes to a head, and the other a prominent smuggler in the new American West — as they navigate the aftermath of a war-torn America where invasive technologies control every aspect of human life, from reproductive rights to natural resources.”
Some of Mountains South is set in Denver, a city that features prominently in Fajardo-Anstine’s two previous works of fiction, 2019’s Sabrina & Corina, which was a finalist for that year’s National Book Awards, and 2022’s Woman of Light. It’s also where Fajardo-Anstine was born and raised — I spoke with her for Longreads back in 2019 about working at West Side Books and how Denver’s gentrification has impacted the city’s Indigenous communities.
“There are other locations” in Mountains South, Fajardo-Anstine says, “including Texas. This is the region many of my ancestors are from and this is the land that calls me to storytelling.”
This will be Fajardo-Anstine’s first work of science fiction. “My bookshelf has quite a few additions since I started writing Mountains South — titles like The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil, or Sam Sternberg and Jennifer Doudna’s A Crack in Creation,” she says. “Growing up, I was always told by teachers that I was ‘bad at math’ or I should stick to the humanities. It was a fascinating and pleasurable experience to conduct research in fields that I had originally thought were off limits to a learner like me.”
One World (not to be confused with Oneworld Publications in the UK) published Fajardo-Anstine’s two previous books, and also one of my favorite books of 2025, Original Sins by Eve L. Ewing. They’re no strangers to speculative fiction, having brought out Victor LaValle’s The Changeling and Lone Women, as well as Mat Johnson’s Invisible Cities.
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