Speculative fiction from the edge.
I tell stories at the intersection of nature, biology, and technology. I seek the universal in the specific.
My debut novel is Zebrafish.
Trained here. Published here. Read here.
The Debut Novel
What if sex change were natural?
Zebrafish
BY S.A. MIRELES
Natural Beauty meets Black Mirror, with a queer twist.
Imagine Washington, DC in 2063, or maybe tomorrow. The country is run by a human-synthetic alliance steeped in nostalgia for a 1950s Americana that never really existed. Think Dick Van Dyke meets Robocop. Androids, in the guise of long dead celebrities, walk the streets and LGBTQ people meet in underground speakeasies. Gender-affirming care is nonexistent.
Dr. Sheila Robinson — a trans woman scientist, in a romantic relationship with her conservative General boss — is on the verge of discovering a revolutionary technology that could make sex change as seamless for humans as it is for the hermaphrodite zebrafish in her lab. Where Sheila sees liberation from the vicissitudes of biology, the government sees a new and powerful means of control, a bioweapon to rule them all.
Welcome to Zebrafish, a wild romp into a not so distant future where the ability to change sex is both miracle and menace.
Writing
Selected writing.
Essays, opinion pieces, and short fiction.
Short Fiction · Forthcoming
“Tiktaalik” · “Holes” · “On Disclosure”
The Advocate · Opinion · April 2025
About
I’m S.A. Mireles
Physician, author, shape-shifter.
I grew up in the liminal space between countries, genders, and cultures. One thing about liminal space: there is always a bridge somewhere.
The day after my sixteenth birthday I found myself on one such bridge, between Iraq and Turkey, facing what appeared to be a firing squad. It was a bright, sunny day and I was holding a small child in my arms. Even then, the water called to me as it shimmered and coursed beneath us. Soldiers with machine guns pointed and laughed. It was the beginning of the rest of my life.
I write literary, speculative fiction that asks questions about what it means to be human. What it means to be in a specific body or gender, or neither. What it means to be a part of the natural world in a world that is increasingly synthetic. I seek truth through the absurd and the strange. I seek bridges between worlds.
Taped to my laptop is a quote from “Not Knowing” by Donald Barthelme: “what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.”
That’s the assignment. Join me.
In the Wild
Reading fiction at Adobe Books,
San Francisco. 2022.
With the late author and friend, Red Jordan Arobateau
My writing wall. It goes around
the whole room.
Elsewhere
By day, medicine.
When I'm not writing, I'm a pediatric anesthesiologist at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.
Writing Prompts
Images that get me writing and other adventures.
More on Instagram: @SAmireleswrites →