Ted Kosmatka (www.tedkosmatka.com) lives with his wife and kids in Portage, Indiana, “on the north coast of the U.S., not far from the beach.” He intended a career in genetics: “Through some combination of blind luck and the careful application of selective breeding,” he says, “I developed, over the course of five years, a decidedly unusual strain of mice. It even surprised me what they eventually came to look like. Several specimens were shipped all the way to Maine, and the descendants of those mice are now a part of Jackson Laboratories’ craniofacial mutant resource and are sold all over the world.” But he changed directions: “I’m probably the only guy who has ever started his steel industry career shoveling coke and then ended up analyzing experimental steels with an electron microscope.” He sold his first story in 2005, “The God Engine,” to Asimov’s. Since then, he’s had a dozen stories in both literary and science fiction markets, and been selected for inclusion in six Year’s Best anthologies.
“N-Words” was published in the original anthology, Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams. In a Static Multimedia interview Kozmatka says, “In “N-words” I knew I wanted the story to be the wife’s story. I knew I wanted it to be her story of loss, and strength, so I didn’t really have a choice about the gender [of the POV] in that case.” The story, about resurrected Neanderthals, rings some very old thematic bells.