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of my 2019 novella about AI in the workplace,
"The Auditor and the Exorcist."

2019 award eligibility post

The end of the year is a time to look back, to reflect on the new stories I’ve had published this year… and to note which of them are eligible for genre awards, in case anyone’s tempted to nominate one.

Here’s my list of award-eligible fiction for 2019. I note also that it’s my second year of eligibility for the Astounding award.

SFF Short Stories
🚀 “The Zest for Life,” – published in Future Science Fiction Digest, Issue 2, March 2019.
The plastic-pollution problem is solved by our appetites.
Kori and Nori Go Out For T. A. C. O.s – published in Young Explorers’ Adventure Guide Volume 6, December 2019.
Two adventurous child-droids go on a mission. Outrageous puns, post-apocalyptic adventure, and maybe even a TACO at the end.
SFF Novelette
🚀 “The Auditor and the Exorcist” – published in Working Futures, October 2019.
A story about the future of work in a near-future world with AI-mediated social credit.
Literary Flash Fiction
🚀 Salt, Spices, Fat, Honey – published in Flash Fiction Online, January 2019.
A brief meditation on hunger, need, and co-dependency.

New story out today! “The Auditor and the Exorcist”

The people behind the American tech industry blog TechDirt have put together an anthology of stories about the future of work called (appropriately) Working Futures, and I’m excited to have a story in it. Continue reading “New story out today! “The Auditor and the Exorcist””

New story out next week

I have a story coming out next week in a very interesting anthology, Working Futures: 14 speculative stories about the future of work.

There are a couple of really cool things about this anthology: (1) All the stories in it are CC licensed; and (2) it was created via an unusual process. Continue reading “New story out next week”

New story in Future Science Fiction

Future SFI’m excited to have a story, “The Zest for Life,” in issue 2 of FUTURE SF, which drops today, March 15th. “The Zest for Life” will also be published on their website mid-April, the week of Earth Day.

Future SF is a collaboration between the Future Affairs Administration, which publishes excellent SFF in China, and UFO Publishing, which is much-loved for its annual Unidentified Funny Objects anthologies. Issue 2 has stories from MIKE RESNICK, DAVID WALTON, BETH CATO, DANTZEL CHERRY, WANXIANG FENGNIAN, TAIS TENG & JAAP BOEKESTEIN, NATALIA THEODORIDOU, and SVYATOSLAV LOGINOV. I’m quite chuffed to be sharing a TOC with these authors.

The science inside the story

My winning science fiction story for Writers of the Future vol. 34, “A Bitter Thing,” was inspired by hard science. In the story, an intergalactic traveller falls for Ami the moment he sees her. It seems to be love at first sight, but can she really trust her understanding of his alien emotions?

The story revolves around the intergalactic traveller, Teese. His alien emotional system was inspired by two disparate pieces of real, Earthly biology. The first is the biology of cephalopod skin, and the second is known as mirror-touch synesthesia. Continue reading “The science inside the story”

There’s always new SFF to discover…

In a perfect world, I’d have time every month to read every sff magazine and zine and listen to every sf, fantasy, and horror podcast. In the real world, of course, I rarely make it beyond my 4 or 5 favorites. But… sometimes I’ll write a story, or a poem, and when it’s done, it doesn’t seem quite right for any of the magazines or zines I read every month… Hooray, it’s time to go market-hunting! I get to explore and discover new magazines, zines, websites, podcasts, communities, etc. I’m nominally looking for a place for a given story, but the fun is really in reading the free issues online. Continue reading “There’s always new SFF to discover…”

Philosophy and Science Fiction

I first encountered Dr. Eric Schwitzgebel’s work in the Sept. 2017 Clarkesworld, which published his story Little /^^^\&-. (That’s neither a typo nor an encoding error. If you haven’t seen the story, I recommend it.) Dr. Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at UC Riverside, writes philosophical SF and also maintains a list of philosophical spec-fic recs here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/PhilosophicalSF.htm Continue reading “Philosophy and Science Fiction”