It’s time to return one last time to Balticon 2025 by taking a seat at the table for the third and final conversation I wrangled for you there. You’ve chatted and chewed with Kemi Ashing-Giwa and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, now it’s time for lunch with Samantha Mills.

Mills is a multiple award-winning author living in Southern California. Her debut science fantasy novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, came out in 2024 and won the Compton Crook Award for best SFFH debut in 2025. Her short stories have appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and other venues.

In addition to winning the Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards for her short story “Rabbit Test” in 2023, Mills has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, made the Locus Recommended Reading List and the BSFA long list multiple times, and was included in the best-of anthologies The New Voices of Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2023.

She graduated from the University of Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Pre- and Early Modern Literature, and received a Master’s in Information and Library Science from San Jose State University. In the other half of her life, she’s a trained archivist specializing in primary documents, with a particular focus on local historical societies. When she isn’t working, writing or taking care of children, she’s watching B-movies, binding books, and crocheting stuffed animals.

We discussed how the eighth novel she wrote became her award-winning debut novel, what she means when she says that novel was “kind of” outlined, the way fascism takes root in a society, the trickiness of writing a narrative with split timelines (and why she’s never doing it again), how being an archivist helped her write about a world where archiving matters, the secret to writing believable fight scenes, her technique for switching up writing time between novels and short stories, the early influence of Xena: Warrior Princess, how years of research resulted in her award-winning short story “Rabbit Test,” the way an early pregnancy test led to a worldwide frog apocalypse, navigating the difficulties of the modern short story market, the organizing principle of her upcoming collection, how she was able to power through her initial rejections, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Nick’s Fish House — (more…)