Cosmobiological, Jilly Dreadful

Cosmobiological is a dreamy and feminist collection of science fiction short stories by Jilly Dreadful. Hopeful, spellbound, and full of mermaids, cyborgs, ghosts, goddesses, frog maidens, occult texts, and Venusians, these stories adhere to dream logic, and like dreams, they are wonderfully strange and fabulously queer. Throughout the deepest reaches of the galaxy and our imaginations, Cosmobiological charts new mythologies, ones in which kindness and softness are sources of power. Here, female characters embrace their insatiable hunger and cosmic desires, devouring the universe and undergoing glorious transformations. By weaving together science and magic, Dreadful spins fairy tales teeming with charming pop culture references and intergalactic creatures. With luminosity and abundance, Cosmobiological flirts with our deepest curiosities and delves into the celestial glimmer of our ephemeral, human lives.

“Cosmobiological is like the shimmering lovechild of Francesca Lia Block, a science textbook, a healer, a cyborg and a storyteller sitting on a porch with a lemonade. Jillian Burcar’s stories burst with playfulness and heart and shining, dream-soaked sentences.”
-Aimee Bender

“The stories in Cosmobiological celebrate the resilience of the human spirit and the tricky net of narrative structures that connect us to each other and to the inexplicable realities of a world sometimes unreal its expression. Just as our mythologies remind us that energy is reshaped in the universe in unexpected ways, the energies of these multidimensional characters and their refractory worlds ricochet and resonate like cosmic blooms, reminding us that what is broken can sometimes still cut with the jagged edge of beauty even after the breaking. This collection is as intimate as it is diverse, as unusual as familiar. It reminds us of the strength that we build within ourselves from the wreckage of our dreams and remnant fumes of hope, taking us from the value of tears to the frailty of fire, from the expectation of rebellion to that of metamorphosis, from the lines that dictate surrender to the ones that embroider the ache of longing, and from the breath of the body to the dance of the cosmos. By creating modern tales from threads of familiar hue, Jilly Dreadful weaves, in this collection, a shadow-scape that invites our curiosity and wonder, that devastates our tranquility, that reminds us of how intensely we long for the world when we make a cocoon for ourselves away from it, and that immerses us in a subversively critical exploration of human intimacy, perception, and culpability in the transgressive delights and derelictions of the psyche’s own orbiting bodies. In these times of transformation and heartache, the stories we encounter can give us the hopeful light and fire of stardust, the certainty that the world is bigger than our fears of it.”
-Saba Razvi