Genevieve Valentine (www.genevievevalentine.com) lives in New York City. Like most writers, she has been writing all her life, she says, but she began writing for publication in 2007, when her first story appeared in Strange Horizons. She is a prolific writer, and more than thirty of her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as Clarkesworld and Fantasy, and in the anthologies The Living Dead II, Teeth, and Running with the Pack. She is what Jeff VanderMeer terms an “emerging” writer. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, about a mechanical circus in a post-apocalyptic world, was published late in 2011. She enjoys working within and across all genres of speculative fiction (and finding period films in which anyone wears anything remotely accurate). She has a few novels “in various stages of completion.”
“The Nearest Thing” was published online by Lightspeed, and this is perhaps its first print publication. Mason is a coding genius and socially awkward. He works for/is owned by a corporation that makes personalized “memorial dolls,” robotic duplicates of individuals with artificial pseudo-personalities. He has been shifted to a development team led by Paul, a charismatic wonder-boy; the project is to develop an AI, “the nearest thing” to human.