Allow us to introduce you to the editorial team of The Future Fire. We are an international team spread across several continents, with a wide range of interests and loosely defined roles.
| Djibril al-Ayad | General editor |
|---|---|
| Regina de Búrca | Associate editor |
| Valeria Vitale | Associate editor; co-editor: TFF-X (2015); guest editor: Fae Visions of the Mediterranean (2016) & TFF Noir (2022) |
| M.L. Clark | Assistant editor |
| Cécile Matthey | Assistant editor and in-house artist; co-editor: TFF-X (2015) |
| Brian Olszewski | Copyeditor |
| Hûw Steer | Copyeditor |
| Kathryn Allan | Guest editor: Accessing the Future (2015); emerita associate editor |
| Emma Bridges | Guest editor: Making Monsters (2018); emerita assistant editor |
| Fabio Fernandes | Guest editor: We See a Different Frontier (2013) |
| Lori Selke | Guest editor: Outlaw Bodies (2012) |
General editor
Djibril is the nom de guerre of a French-born academic historian who teaches the afterlife of antiquity and the future of archaeology. In meatspace he inhabits London, but travels snapping synapses and burning fibre cables to work all over the world, and welcomes invitations to share, plot, indulge and include. Co-editor of anthologies on outlaw, postcolonial, disability, Mediterranean, monstrous and trangressive speculative fiction, Djibril loves the alien, the alienating, the ugly truth, the beautiful lie.
Associate editor
Regina de Búrca was raised in a bookshop in the West of Ireland, where her fascination with the Irish language and mythology began. Her introduction to the fantasy genre was the book The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea aged 8 and she developed into an avid speculative fiction fan from then on.
Associate editor; co-editor: TFF-X (2015), guest editor: Fae Visions of the Mediterranean (2016) and Noir Fire (2022)
Valeria spends most of her time building worlds. If you look carefully, under the right light, you might see some of them orbiting around her head. Her first contact with gothic horror was the two monsters who hid in the long corridor of her family house waiting for dark to kidnap her; when a successful kidnap attempt never materialized, she became convinced the monsters must be completely incompetent, and began to feel sorry for them. She still has a soft spot for ghosts, vampires and old mythologies, but enjoys all sort of (good) stories. As a hobby, Valeria collects failures and pseudonyms. When she’s not busy writing and reading (for pleasure or work) you may find her staring at ancient objects in museums or modelling buildings in 3D. At night, when she can’t sleep, she makes toys.
Assistant editor
M L Clark is a Canadian writer, by birth and heritage, who now resides in Medellín, Colombia. Clark publishes news analysis and media literacy articles with OnlySky, reviews SFF for Strange Horizons and The Future Fire, and has SFF stories in magazines including Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, and The Future Fire. Clark published Children of Doro , an SF novel inspired by Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in 2023.
Assistant editor and in-house artist; co-editor: TFF-X (2015)
Cécile Matthey, photo librarian, freelance illustrator and eclectic reader, forever attracted to imaginary worlds and strange universes from J.R.R. Tolkien to Philip K. Dick, from Jules Verne to Jasper Fforde—with a soft spot for Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury, Lois McMaster Bujold, Terry Pratchett and steampunk. She has illustrated many stories for TFF since 2006, and joined the editorial team a few years later.
Artist's web page: cecilematthey.ch
Guest editor: Accessing the Future (2015); emerita associate editor
Kathryn Allan is an independent scholar of feminist SF, cyberpunk, and disability studies. After completing her PhD thesis, Bleeding Chrome: Technology and the Vulnerable Body in Feminist Post-Cyberpunk (2010), she set off on her own and now runs Academic Editing Canada. She is editor of the interdisciplinary collection, Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure (2013, Palgrave MacMillan), and the inaugural Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction fellow. Her writing appears in both academic and creative publications, such as The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 7 (2013), and Outlaw Bodies (2012). Kathryn blogs as Bleeding Chrome.
Guest editor: Making Monsters (2018); emerita assistant editor
Dr Emma Bridges spends a lot of time thinking about what happens when characters from ancient mythology wander into the modern world. She particularly likes talking to the writers and artists who help them to get here, and is always keen to hear more from voices (ancient and modern, mythical and real) which have traditionally been silenced.
Guest editor: We See a Different Frontier (2013)
Fabio Fernandes is an SF writer living in São Paulo, Brazil. He has several stories published in online venues like Everyday Weirdness, The Nautilus Engine, StarShipSofa, Semaphore Magazine, Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure, and Kaleidotrope Magazine, and in anthologies like Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded and The Apex World Book of SF, Vol. 2 (ed. by Lavie Tidhar). Two-time recipient of the Argos SF Award (Brazil), Fernandes co-edited with Jacques Barcia in 2008 the bilingual online magazine Terra Incognita, and has translated to Brazilian Portuguese several SF works, such as Neuromancer, Foundation, Snow Crash, Boneshaker, and The Steampunk Bible.
Guest editor: Outlaw Bodies (2012)
Lori Selke has been published in Strange Horizons and Asimov’s. She’s been active in queer, sex radical and feminist activist circles for over two decades. She is also the former editor/publisher of the tiny lit zine Problem Child.
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