Gwyneth Jones (homepage.ntlworld.com/gwynethann) lives in Brighton, in the UK. She writes both intellectually ambitious SF novels under her real name, as well as books for young adults under the name Anne Halam. She writes aesthetically ambitious, feminist intellectual science fiction and fantasy, for which she has won lots of awards. In a recent interview, she said, “I’m frequently identified as a feminist writer, but just as frequently rejected by feminists.” “My most recent book is called Spirit,” she says, “a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. In the world of Spirit it’s against the law for an AI to be embodied in human form, with the exception of sex workers and street-level police officers. These two jobs are thought to be too psychologically and physically dangerous for human beings, and yet best conducted in human-shaped form. So there are bots … fully sentient software agents, temporarily inhabiting human-shaped machines.” Make that humanoid aliens and you have something like the setup for “The Ki-anna.”
“The Ki-anna” is a murder mystery that appeared in Jonathan Strahan’s anthology Engineering Infinity. It takes place in the established Buonarotti SF future of many other Jones stories and novels. It is about dualized predator-prey relationships among aliens: the protagonist’s twin sister has died. How did it happen?