Darcie Little Badger

Darcie Little Badger (born 1987) is an American author and Earth scientist.

As an author, Little Badger specializes in speculative fiction, especially horror, science fiction, and fantasy.

She is a member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. She develops her stories with Apache characters and themes.

She has also added her voice to Indigenous Futurisms, a movement among Native artists and authors to write science fiction from their historical and cultural perspectives.

At the same time, some of her works feature characters who reconfirm the presence and importance of LGBTQ+ community members.

Darcie Little Badger was born Darcie Erin Ryan to Patrick Ryan, an English professor, and Hermelinda Walking Woman, the webmaster of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas.

At age seven she wrote her first book, which was submitted for publication with her father's help and politely rejected.

Throughout her childhood Little Badger moved due to her father's job, but considered Texas to be her home.

After graduating from Pleasant Grove High School in Texarkana, Texas, Little Badger adopted her current surname, as per Lipan tradition.

She attended Princeton University in New Jersey, where she earned a bachelor's degree in Geosciences after being rejected twice from the school's creative writing program.

Little Badger graduated cum laude in 2010 and was honored by her department with the Arthur F. Buddington Award for Overall Excellence as an undergraduate student.

She subsequently enrolled in the doctoral program in oceanography at Texas A&M University, College Station, where she earned a Ph.D. She wrote her dissertation on the genomics of Karenia brevis, a species of plankton that causes toxic red tide in the Gulf of Mexico.

For her research, she received a Ford Dissertation Fellowship and TAMU's Chapman Award for Graduate Student Research, both under the name Darcie Ryan.

After graduating from Texas A&M, Little Badger took a job as an editor of scientific papers.

She quit this job after selling her first novel, Elatsoe, wanting to divert all her energy into writing.

Little Badger's short fiction has appeared in a range of publications, including Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Mythic Delirium, and The Dark Magazine, among others.

Notably, Little Badger enriches her short stories with Apache history and lore.

For example, two Apache sisters reunite in "Whalebone Parrot" (The Dark Magazine, 2017), a Victorian horror story set in the late 19th century on an island in the Atlantic.

During the conflict between their tribe and the U.S. Army, the women were orphaned and grew up together in a residential "Indian school".

Thus, as Little Badger notes, her story is rooted in Lipan Apache history, a history that "few remember".

Similarly, in "Owl vs. the Neighborhood Watch" (Strange Horizons, 2017), she revives Native legend when she places Owl, a shape-shifting supernatural harbinger of evil, in a story set in contemporary Appalachia.

Little Badger began writing her debut novel, Elatsoe, in 2017.

She sold the manuscript in late 2018.

It was published in August 2020 by publisher Levine Querido, and made the Indibound Young Adult bestseller list in its first week.

The story is set in modern-day Texas; the main character Ellie is a seventeen-year-old asexual Lipan Apache teen.

Ellie is accompanied by the ghost of her pet dog Kirby; she used her grandmothers' traditional techniques to bring him back to life.

Kirby and Ellie are joined by Ellie's friend and classmate Jay as they work to solve the murder of her cousin.

At the same time, they confront an enclave of vampires plaguing people near Willowbee, a mysterious town in South Texas.

Little Badger began writing her second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth, in early 2020.

It was released in November 2021, also through Levine Querido.

The story focuses on Nina, a Lipan Apache girl trying to learn about her recently deceased grandmother, who meets a cottonmouth snake named Oli.

The setting shifts between near-future Texas and a fantasy dimension, from which Oli originates.

Climate change plays a pivotal role in the story's plot.

Indigenous Futurism is a growing movement in the arts and literature in which Native writers create science fiction and fantasy with characters and themes drawn from indigenous cultures.

With much of her science fiction, Little Badger has contributed to this movement.

In Strangelands, for example, Little Badger introduces an Apache comic book superhero.

In her short story "Né łe!"

the main characters are a Navajo interplanetary ship's captain and a Lipan Apache veterinarian accompanying 40 chihuahuas on their way to forever homes on Mars.

Little Badger serves as a delegate for the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas to the National Congress of American Indians.

She also serves as a science advisor to the tribe.