The Spear Cuts Through Water

Simon Jimenez is a Filipino American science fiction and fantasy writer who lived in the Philippines and Canada before moving to the United States. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Emerson College, during which time he began writing his debut novel, The Vanished Birds. He credits Dan Simmons’s Hyperion , Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, and the works of David Mitchell and Gabriel García Márquez as primary influences on his writing (Denardo, John. “Simon Jimenez on His Remarkable Debut SF Novel.” Kirkus Reviews, 5 Feb. 2020). Despite his love of science fiction, however, he could not see himself in the published science fiction available to him, stating that his identities a gay man and a multiracial person of color were not represented in the science fiction he read (Jackson, Matthew. “Simon Jimenez: When Time Feels Like It’s Slipping Away.” BookPage, Jan. 2020). This inspired him to bring his own unique identity and perspective to the genre.

The Vanished Birds (2020) is a space opera that spans several millennia, following the lives of several characters including a scientist, a mysterious boy with the power to jump through space-time, and an ageless woman.