Stellar Smoke: Cover Reveal

Beloved readers, I am beyond thrilled to share the cover of my novel STELLAR SMOKE, which comes out on October 20, 2026!

This is my 3rd baby, and wow, it’s been a long, hard labor of love.

This novel took me on an underworld journey, an inner dying and rebirth, eight years of long, late nights until dawn, just to pierce the veil between here and the unknown. What felt like the stuff of dreams — Artificial Intelligence as Mother, as lover, friend or foe — slowly began to become true in our present. Technology reveals our deepest desires and wounds, makes us feel close, yet so distant. How precious our humanness is. How unsettling, eerie and inevitable the march toward the future feels. We yearn for touch, for art and connection and nature. Maybe we’re on here because of that need to build our own archives, to offer evidence that we, and our lineages, existed.

What does it mean to be the first of your kind?

Truthfully, I nearly through this book away after I couldn’t find a publisher for it back in 2018. My editor for In Sensorium had loved Stellar Smoke, even in its earliest version, but the publisher didn’t want to take a risk on a perfume book AND an artificial intelligence book. Considering the cultural obsession with perfume, and the infiltration of AI in our lives, eight years later, I’ve come to understand how when the world doesn’t offer a home for our truth and vision, we have to make our own home. There’s a way that rejection (dozens of them!) hardens your heart to the point where you become brittle. Rejection makes you fragile, for a spell, until you start softening again, start feeling, seeing and taking in the world around you with wonderment. Without worrying about the judgment of others. Most of the editors who rejected Stellar Smoke said the same thing—I don’t find myself caring about these characters—and I heard the implicit bias reeking in those words. It was more than a rejection of the novel, but a rejection of a worldview that did not center the dominant culture in the future.

For years, I avoided the arduous task of revising this novel, which eluded me. I locked away the disappointment and found a new power in writing nonfiction. But I missed the endless capacity for fiction to hold the truth, the way you enter other minds and realities outside of your own.

I found a new, simple way in to the story — a queer femme musician meets a married fuckboy writer—which allowed me to wade the waters of realism, before slowly descending to the depths of the speculative. There’ve dozens of drafts of this novel, the first ones more spare, skeletal, and now, this final draft, as close to what I’ve imagined for all these years, sees a future — the year 2042 — that isn’t only a hellish technoscape of war, mass illness, devoid of brown-skinned people that is so often rendered in Western science fiction.

Here’s more about the book:

A hypnotically original and lush speculative novel from award-winning author Tanaïs about technology, sex, spirituality, family secrets, and the mother–daughter bond across generations—ultimately blurring the boundary between past and present, human and machine.

Qamar is a musician living in a futuristic metropolitan city. Struggling to pay rent and heartbroken after a terrible breakup, she decides to return to the island ashram of her childhood. It’s time to finally settle the rift she has with her estranged mother, Veda—a brilliant scientist, actress, and one of the leaders of a now-dissolved cult called the Endless Temple.

But when Qamar arrives, the land is as verdant as she remembers, but neglected, and, most troubling, there are no signs of her mother or sister. Behind a retina scan–locked door, Qamar encounters a machine consciousness—VEDA (Virtual Experiences, Dreams and Afterlife)—that her mother made in the image of herself. VEDA is her mother’s last opus, an artificial intelligence that allows her to finally tell her daughter the story of her life. The descent into VEDA’s technoscape forces Qamar to confront the taboos and tragedies of their past, while bracing herself for the wild, unexpected possibilities that await.

Available to Preorder Now 🌌 🔮 🌴 🌕