New story! "The Message" out at The Future FIre



It’s a new story day for me! “The Message” is now out in the latest issue of The Future Fire. It’s a quiet story of First Contact, of communication (and missed communication) both between the stars and here on Earth. It’s also about anime and fan-fiction, and the accompanying illustrations by Pear Nuallak are perfect; I am in utter love.


This also happens to be my fourth appearance in The Future Fire! This lovely magazine has helped to launch the careers of now well-known writers and continues to be an encouraging place for new and emerging writers in the science fiction/fantasy scene. This looks to be a particularly strong issue; I’m acquainted with the work of a number of my fellow writers in this issue, and I look forward to getting to know the work of the others. And the illustrations are all wonderfully evocative. 

 Update #1: I've read the entire issue of The Future Fire, and it is indeed a strong one. The editors have done an absolutely lovely job of curating stories and poems that resonate thematically with one another. There's a particularly strong thread of environmental themes in this issue, but there are other connections between pieces as well. 

 Update #2: Story notes!

 --The unnamed research institute which the narrator's mother works at is modeled on/inspired by the SETI Institute, headquartered in Mountain View, California. Much of my research on the current state of SETI research also started on the pages of this institute's website.

 --In my story, the narrator mentions a scientist who researched the structure of humpback whale song in the hopes that understanding it might lead to techniques and insight that would be applicable to the study of extraterrestrial languages. A scientist at the real SETI Institute, Dr. Laurance Doyle, has indeed headed such a project. My character's discussion of this research is based on Doyle's 2011 paper, "Information theory, animal communication, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence."*

 *L.R. Doyle, B. McCowan, S. Johnston, and S.F. Hanser. "Information theory, animal communication, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence." Acta Astronautica 68 (2011) 406-417.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On memoir and things I have no experience of—A review of "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan

I know nothing about surfing. I've never stood on a board. I've never even seen surfing done in real life (I've spent most of my life in the American Midwest. And even when I lived in Los Angeles for college, I somehow never met any surfers). Yet it came into my head to write a story that involved surfing. So I read a lot. I was interested in big-wave surfing, so I read Susan Casey's book, "The Wave." I read a lot of journalistic accounts. I watched videos online. And eventually, probably inevitably, I stumbled upon a two-part article in The New Yorker. The article is titled " Playing Doc's Games" by William Finnegan, and it was published in 1992. It is famous among surfers. The surf magazine The Inertia called it " possibly the greatest surf story ever" and a writer at The Surfer described it as "the best written piece (all 39,000 words of it) ever penned about surf culture."  I am not a surfer. Yet Wi
Read more

Short fiction recs! Oct-Nov 2023

Some stories that I read and loved, from October through November.    Fantasy “Four Words Written on My Skin” by Jenn Reese in Uncanny Magazine When the Fae stole my wife, I followed them into the dark woods to win her back.   A short but achingly sharp and lovely piece about finding what’s been lost. The Fae stole the narrator’s wife, but the narrator has been losing Jess for a long time, before the Fae ever appeared. What follows is a confrontation with the narrator’s own responsibility for that loss, for the distance that’s grown between them. And, at the end, a glimmer of hope—the decision to choose to love. Beautifully told.     “Six Versions of my Brother Found Under the Bridge,” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Uncanny Magazine Technically it was built on top of a river that had been dredged and filled in some fifty years ago which made the ground under the bridge degraded and pretty dangerous. But rumor had it—and by rumor Olga meant Maria’s oldest cousin who had be
Read more

Short fiction recs! June-July 2024

So many beautiful, strange stories I’ve read this summer so far. Here are only a few. Strange Tales of Beauty and Horror “Markets of the Otherworld” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny Magazine In the Market of Illusions, I writhed on the cobblestoned street that wound between the gilded stalls, gasping for air, convinced I was a goldfish. Someone dragged me to a fountain and pushed me in, breaking the spell and—a minor point, except the water was ice cold—drenching me to the skin.   In the Cat Market, I was pursued by a large white Persian and coerced into signing away a month of my life in return for the privilege of petting her. In my dreams, I still run my fingers through her thick, beautiful fur while she leans against me and hums in pleasure. Worth it, I tell myself, even as I wonder which month of life has been taken from me.   An absolutely gorgeous, magical, and at times melancholy tale of a woman traveling through the enchanting markets of other worlds. A story that’s al
Read more