Updates: summer and Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology out now!


It’s been busy—hosting family from out of town, little cousins running shrieking through the house while their big cousins (my daughters) try to keep up. Fights and tears and laughter. Bubbles and water gun fights and Fourth of July sparklers in the driveway. A beach trip and dim sum and cakes and talking talking talking around the dining table.

In the midst of it all, this book came out: Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 4. My story, “Traces of Us,” first published in the online magazine GigaNotoSaurus, is reprinted in this anthology. It’s an honor I never would have dreamed of.

Jeff Somers at the Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog listed this anthology as one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of July 2019. He had this to say:

“If you’re going to trust one editor to pick the best science fiction and fantasy stories of the year, Neil Clarke is a good bet—in addition to his shepherding of award-winning magazine Clarkesworld, he’d assembled a bookshelf’s worth of fantastic themed and annual anthologies. Here he has collected 29 standouts from 2018 into a must-have book for any serious fan of short SFF. . . It’s an essential snapshot of what’s happening in sci-fi and fantasy fiction right now.”


I appear in this book alongside my absolute writing HEROES—Ken Liu, Aliette de Bodard, Sofia Samatar, Alyssa Wong, Lavie Tidhar, and more. It’s a table of contents to make one swoon.

And it's all real; I'm in it. I have my contributor's copy. And last weekend, while my youngest sister was still in town, she and I went to the mall and then stopped off at the local Barnes and Noble and we tracked the book down on the store shelf.
























 And here is me posed with my book. 




This is the first time I've ever been published in a book that actually appears on store shelves (Barnes and Noble, no less!). So yes, I think it deserves a picture =)

                                                                 * * *

In other news, I have two short stories coming out in online venues next month, and I am trying to write. The writing is not coming easily, but I'm trying to have faith that, if I keep at it, the words will eventually flow. And it's summer in Michigan: the wild mulberries near our home are ripe, and the raspberries are ripening. The wild field nearby blooms with the purple globes of milkweed plants, and with purple vetch, Queen Anne's lace, thistles, and pink sweet pea. Monarch butterflies are here. I'm trying to cook new things in the kitchen. I'm reading and (trying to) write, and (trying to) remember to breathe, to relax, to enjoy these sunlit days.  
NOTE: if you'd like some background/science notes on my story, "Traces of Us," you can find them in my prior blog post here. 

 Also, I did a podcast with Full Worlds where I also discussed some of the science behind my story. You can give a listen here. 

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! May-June 2023

My short fiction recs from late spring/early summer. Tales of horror and magic, beauty and grief, discovery and wonder and strength. “Sasabonsam” by Tara Campbell in Strange Horizons I sit high in the mahogany tree, my long limbs dangling toward the earth. My eyes, if you could see them, would gleam at you in the moonlight. I am alert, but I let my arms swing idly with the breeze. They look just like the vines drooping from the branches, don’t they?   This is an older story, which I only just discovered thanks to a recommendation online. It’s a tale about a sasbonsam—a monster of West African folklore—and its prey. It’s a tale of curling tension and deliciously dark twists. The sasabonsam eats humans and feeds on their regrets. But in the end, who is the predator and who the prey?   “Lullaby for the Unseen” by Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rosas in Weird Horror Ariel. It is because of him that I have this scar.   He was my classmate. A very thin kid, shorter than me, with g
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