Mary Rickert lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Her short fiction began appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1999. She has published twenty-five or more fantasy and science fiction stories to date. Most of them are collected in her first story collection, Map of Dreams (2006). It won the IAFA/Crawford Award for best first fantasy book. In 2007 she began to win awards for her fiction. She is one of the most impressive new writers to emerge in this decade. She characteristically writes about families, about fears and anxieties and pathologies. Her major mode is the fantastic. But she can sure turn out a potent SF story occasionally.
“Traitor” was published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and is both a psychological horror story and a science fiction story perhaps in the lineage of Bruce Sterling’s “We Think Differently.” It is about a future in which “mamma” teaches little girls to be suicide bombers. To paraphrase Thomas M. Disch, this story predicts the present: Since it was published there have been news stories out of Iraq along the same lines. If, as some maintain, SF always reflects the present in which it is written, we had better change.