Two SFnal reprints in QuickFic – “Masks” and “Little More than Shadows”

These two reprints are actually from late June, but I was visiting family at the time and wasn’t paying much attention to things.

So, under the “better late than never” category: I have two reprints in Digital Fiction Publishing’s “QuickFic” imprint which are free to read online on their website.

The first of these, “Little More than Shadows,” is a roughly 800-word 2nd-person slipstreamy story about dreams, monsters, regrets, and Hamlet references in the title. It starts like this:

On the worst days, just the knowledge that you’re dreaming is enough to set you shivering in the cot, neck stiff from the cables.

Eventually, one of your wardens will come, so you wait. They are little more than shadows, these days: features you can’t quite bring into focus; skin tone somewhere between ivory and midnight. You can’t remember any of the names you gave them when you first arrived.

The second story, “Masks,” is closer to 3000 words, and is space opera featuring a colony-ship, spies, sabotage, alien artefacts of unclear provenance, and more. Also a lesbian couple, hooray!

Min can tell by the way the man in the lizard mask drums the fingers of one hand on the surface of his desk that he is angry. She avoids the bright green glimmer of his eyes, wishing she were anywhere but here. Wishing she remembered who she was supposed to be.

“This is all you bring me?” the man asks, his voice raspy with distortion. In his other hand he holds the latest chip Min has stolen, heavy with data on Ship’s communications to the other surviving colony ships and its route away from Earth-long-gone.

New story in IGMS and an (interactive!) reprint in Sub-Q — Also, I’m a Baen Fantasy finalist!

It’s July! And I have a few stories out or otherwise newsworthy.

First, in Intergalactic Medicine Show, my hard SF story about space elevators and the end of the world (and family, and belonging, and loss, and responsibility, and a myriad of other things), “The View from Driftwise Spindle.”

Here’s the opening paragraph:

The plural for meeting, thought Gayatri Anwar, ought to be headache. And even for a surface stint, where meetings always played a heavy role, she’d had a lot of headaches since the Martian Disaster. The announcement that a rogue planetoid had struck their sister planet, and that meteor-sized pieces of ejecta would crash into Earth in five months’ time, had everyone scrambling to get off-planet. Driftwise, as the only spindle with no ties or obligations to a particular nation, seemed to be bearing the brunt of the attention.

You can read most of the first scene (and see the glorious full-colour illustration which won’t make sense until you’ve read the full story) over at Intergalactic Medicine Show, so go check it out! There are also great original stories by Rachael K Jones, Kat Otis, Aimee Pichee, Andrew Neil Gray, and Shane Halbach, along with an essay and reprint from Kameron Hurley. (Note: the full issue is behind a paywall, but an annual subscription is only $15.)


Second, my Writers of the Future winning story “Images Across a Shattered Sea” is now available as a free-to-read piece of interactive fiction at Sub-Q Magazine. Interactive fiction is perhaps not that well-known, so if you’re confused by the word, just picture those old Chose Your Own Adventure books, but on your preferred web browser and without the ability to cheat by reading straight through. Think of it like a text-only video game combined with a short story.

If that sounds like fun, I hope you enjoy the interactive version of “Images Across a Shattered Sea.” There are several new passages in this version of the story, and a few new endings, so even if you’ve read the story before there’ll be some things that are new to you.

I also want to thank Paul Otteni for letting me use his amazing illustration of the story for the cover art of the Sub-Q version of the story. Thanks, Paul!


Last, but certainly not least, my story “Fox-Sign” is a finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, hosted by Gen Con. The winners will be announced August 6th.

Two new stories and one reprint out this month

I’ve somehow neglected to post about this, but I have two original science fiction stories and one reprint out this month (plus a translation of the reprint, interestingly enough).

The first story is “Just Another Night at the Abandoned Draft Bar and Grill” in the May issue of Galaxy’s Edge. This story is a meta-fictional dig at some of the harmful, clichéd stereotypes which tend to permeate less-than-stellar writing—it features a woman named Mary-Sue, a black man named Alphonse, and a Chinese man who’s so much of a stereotype he barely exists beyond his peasant hat.

You can read “Just Another Night at the Abandoned Draft Bar and Grill” at Galaxy’s Edge for free through the end of June, along with stories by Tina Gower, George RR Martin(!!), Kij Johnson(!!!), and many other super-talented writers.

The second original piece is my story “Images Across a Shattered Sea,” which was my first-place story from Writers of the Future volume 32! I like to tell people it’s an anti-war story about post-apocalyptic Morocco, time travel, and the Open Access movement. (Wait, what?!)

Here’s a teaser:

The air on the cliffs above the Shattered Sea was hot as a furnace and twice as dry. Still, Driss couldn’t suppress a shiver at the way the shimmering message-globe moved through the sky, dozens of meters above the churning, black waves of the sea.

He had seen the globes before, of course, but only after they’d been captured and put on display in the village’s little museum. It didn’t quite seem real, the way the little ball bobbed and danced on the breeze, drifting ever so slowly towards Fatima where she stood atop a heap of boulders at the edge of the cliff.

“Here it comes,” she said, waving her net back and forth as she hopped from foot to foot.

Her eagerness just made the dangers of the place worse, Driss thought. It was as if she didn’t care that one misstep would send her tumbling to her death. He himself would have been happy never to have seen the coast in person. It had always been a deadly, desolate place, even in the days when the message-globes blew across the sea in huge clouds which blotted out the sun. And those days were long since past: They had seen only three globes during their two week hike, and this was the first that had come anywhere near them.

“Gotcha!” Fatima leapt into the air, hooking the bubble-like ball in her net and pulling it down from the sky. “What do you think is in it?”

The story (like all others in the anthology) is gorgeously illustrated, in my case by the talented Seattleite Paul Otteni.

You can buy a copy of Writers of the Future through various retailers, all listed at http://www.wotf32.com along with information about the anthology’s writers and illustrators. If you want to try it out before you buy, I have electronic samplers to give away. E-mail me and I’ll send you one! :)

On the reprint front, my Nature story “Love and Relativity” is now up at Flash Fiction Online, along with three wonderful original stories by Gary Emmette Chandler, Lynette Mejía, and Evan Dicken.

“Love and Relativity” is also due to be translated into Croatian by fanzine Eridu later this month, which is pretty cool.

This weekend is your last chance to vote in the Quantum Shorts competition.

As the post title suggests, the deadline for voting in the Quantum Shorts competition is coming up.

Voting is open until “the end of January,” which I’m guessing translates to the middle of the day January 31st in most places (the contest organizers are Singapore-based).

My story “How to Configure Your Quantum Disambiguator” is on the short-list, along with a lot of other great stories. Go give them a read and vote for your favourite!

Come check out my story “How to Configure Your Quantum Disambiguator” in the Quantum Shorts competition

…which sadly is not a competition involving clothes that have the fly open and closed until you think to check.

But it is a pretty neat flash fiction competition. I’ve entered my story “How to Configure Your Quantum Disambiguator” in the lists, so go give it a (re-)read and a vote if you like it. The story appeared earlier this year (February) in Nature, and is in part an ode to Ren and Stimpy. So if nothing else, that ought to make it worth reading, right?

Out today: an Interview and an Anthology

Actually, both of these things were out yesterday. But today is the new yesterday! Or it will be tomorrow. So: close enough.

The first thing is an interview with me in the Polk County Itemizer-Observer (my local newspaper) about my win in Writers of the Future. I was happy that the journalist agreed to interview me by e-mail, as I do not do well speaking extemporaneously, and probably as a result gave him way too much text to fit into an article. Still, it’s neat to see myself in print this way. Or electronic print, at least: http://www.polkio.com/news/2015/sep/30/writer-future/

The second thing is a shiny, hardcover print anthology my story “Behind the First Years” is in. The release date for that was some time between September 28th and yesterday (I got conflicting information), and if you’d like a copy you can order it here: http://amzn.to/1ieyQ5z (If you’d like a taste of the anthology, you can listen to an audio version of my story on StarShipSofa.)

My stories are now on AnthologyBuilder (which is having a sale!)

I just recently learned of a website called AnthologyBuilder. It’s basically a way to select whatever available stories you want from your favourite authors and bundle them all together into a fancy printed anthology.

Sounds like a neat concept to me, so I added some stories:

  • Behind the First Years
  • How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator
  • Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things
  • Oubliette
  • Raising Words

If you like any of those and would like to read them in a shiny print-on-demand anthology together with stories by other authors, you can see my author listing at AnthologyBuilder.

Also, if it is something you want to do, now’s a great time to do it, because from now until September 25th, anthologies are 15% off.

(And, of course, “Behind the First Years” is coming out soon in the Science Fiction Short Stories anthology by Flame Tree Publishing alongside work by new and classic writers. So that’s an option too!)

Podcast Reprint: “Behind the First Years” at StarShipSofa

My story “Behind the First Years” has been produced as an audio version by the venerable StarShipSofa!

You can listen to it (as well as Bogi Takács‘ excellent “Changing Body Templates”) for free(!) on your electronomagical computationy device of choice via the following link: StarShipSofa No. 402: Stewart C Baker and Bogi Tacáks

(If you like my story and want to pick up a printed copy, it’s one of the many stories in the forthcoming “Science Fiction Short Stories” collection from Flame Tree Publishing. You can pre-order your copy on Amazon or [if you live in the UK] through the Flame Tree site itself.)

Out soon: “Science Fiction Short Stories” anthology from Flame Tree Publishing

My story “Behind the First Years” will be included in this anthology, which is due out at the end of the month (after a few printing-related delays).

If you’d like to pre-order it ($18.75—a pretty good deal for a fancy hardcover!), here’s the Amazon link: http://amzn.to/1ieyQ5z

If you’re in the UK, you can also order it direct from the publisher at http://www.flametreepublishing.com/Science-Fiction-Short-Stories.html

(And one neat thing about that last link is that it has previews of the contents—including the first page or two of my story!)

The idea behind this anthology is to mix together contemporary and classic SF writers, so I’m sharing the pages with luminaries like Mark Twain(!) and Edgar Allen Poe(!) and Edith Wharton(!) and Nikolai Gogol(!) as well as a few of the many excellent writers I call friends: Keyan Bowes, Beth Cato, Philip Brian Hall, Alexis A. Hunter, Rachael K. Jones, and M. Darusha Wehm.

Update: incidentally, I just learned that the story I have in this anthology is being podcast by StarShipSofa tomorrow. I’ll post a link when it’s available!

ToC Announcement for “Gothic Fantasy” anthologies, including my story “Behind the First Years”

My story, “Behind the First Years” (originally published in COSMOS Online) will be appearing in print besides Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and a ton of really awesome present-day writers in an upcoming anthology from Flame Tree Publishing.

You can see the full list of authors here (I’m way down at the bottom under ‘science fiction’). I’m especially pleased to be appearing with author friends Keyan Bowes, Beth Cato, Alexis A. Hunter, Rachael K. Jones, and M. Darusha Wehm. Huzzah!

The anthology looks to be pretty slick in terms of production value, and will be a big, shiny hardcover. I’ll post a link once it’s available!