Reprint: “Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things” at Sockdolager

I’m very pleased to announce (a little belatedly) that my post-apocalyptic structuralist/meta-fictional folk tale story, “Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things,” is now available online for the first time over at The Sockdolager.

This story was first published in The Next Review‘s January 2014 issue, and I’m glad it’s getting wider exposure. It’s one of my favourites!

If you’re not familiar with the Aarne-Thompson Index, it’s a book which collects brief summaries of various folk and fairy tales and classifies them according to their subject matter.

My story basically does the same thing, but with stories that haven’t yet been told, but which conceivably might be after some sort of world-shattering apocalypse. I had a lot of fun writing it, and hope you enjoy reading it as well.

So give it a read over at The Sockdolager (if you’re so inclined) and let me know what you think of it.

Original Fiction: “How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator” at Nature

My flash fiction piece, “How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator” is online now at Nature magazines’s “Futures” section.

It’s a short story (about a page and a half long), and is about evil twins, giant bananas, parallel universes, shiny red buttons, quantum superposition, and implausible help desk hours.

Intrigued? Confused? You don’t even?

Go read the rest at Nature “Futures”: How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator

As an added bonus(?), you can also see my notes on the story at the Future Conditional blog.

Sale! “Configuring your Quantum Disambiguator” to Nature’s Futures.

Very happy to announce that I’ve sold a story to Nature magazine’s “Futures” feature.

Nature, for those not familiar, is one of the leading scholarly science journals. More importantly for me, they also have a column that publishes sci-fi flash fiction. This is my first sale to them out of four submissions. The story is written in the form of an instruction manual, and balances absurdist humour with SFnal trope-based jokes and is generally quite weird. (There’s also a nod to Ren & Stimpy for the eagle-eyed.)

Huzzah!