Month: June 2017

Free to read in IGMS: The View from Driftwise Spindle

Posted on by Stewart

For a limited time, my science fiction story “The View from Driftwise Spindle” from last July’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, is free to read on the IGMS website. The story is about space elevators and the end of the world (and family, and belonging, and loss, and responsibility, and a myriad of other things).

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.

Go give it a read!

“The View from Driftwise Spindle,” by Stewart C Baker

#FridayReads round-up for 2017-06-16

Posted on by Stewart

Over in the newly-round Twitter timeline, there’s a thing called #FridayReads where you post (you guessed it) things you’ve read. On Fridays. (I don’t think you have to read the things on Fridays, though.)

So! Here are four fictive things and one essay I’ve read and enjoyed lately, arbitrarily ordered, and one thing I’m about to read:

THING ONE!
Naomi Kritzer’s “Paradox” in the May/June issue of Uncanny starts out looking like just another Time Travel Trope Takedown, but it’s so, so much more.

THING TWO!
“Baroness,” by E. Catherine Tobler, in the May edition of Clarkesworld. This haunting story of post-human explorers takes a subtle but convincing look at what exactly we mean by human anyway.

THING THREE!
Matt Dovey’s “To the Editors of The Matriarch, re. Allegations of Press-Ganging” in Daily Science Fiction is a clever, cutting satire of rape culture set in a steampunk-flavoured Napoleonic-War-era England.

THING FOUR!
K.M. Szpara’s “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time” (also in Uncanny‘s May/June issue) follows the misadventures of a newly-turned gay transgender vampire. It’s all-around excellent, and you should read it!

ESSAY!
John Wiswell’s “Evil isn’t a Disability,” in Fireside looks at the intersection between mental illness, ableism, and evil in the movies and in critiques of Donald Trump.

What next?!
I’m about to read Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, which sounds like a lot of fun if by fun you mean disturbing surrealist weirdness. I haven’t had much luck with the few newly-published novels I’ve read this year (excepting Kameron Hurley’s amazing The Stars are Legion, which I loved) so I hope this one aligns with my tastes a bit better.

April/May updates: An award shortlist, a contest win, and a few new publications

Posted on by Stewart

I have been very bad about updating this blog lately. Gah! So, here’s April/May.

April

I had a new piece of flash fiction out in Daily Science Fiction on April 4th titled “Heisenball.” The story explores the many world theorem and takes a look at what we blame ourselves and others for, and what we do when we learn how else things might have turned out. Go give it a read! “Heisenball” by Stewart C Baker

Other exciting April news was the announcement that Futures story “Love and Relativity” was selected as one of seven finalists in my Naturethe 2016-2017 Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing, in such luminous company as Alastair Reynolds, Aliette de Bodard, David D. Levine, and Alex Shvartsman. (And that’s just in the short story category. Neal Stephenson? Cixin Liu? AAAAAAAH!)

You can read “Love and Relativity” at Nature Futures, or listen to it in audio form at Audible, courtesy of its being reprinted in Flash Fiction Online.

Also in April, I sold a Little Mermaid retelling to an anthology of fairy tales by Fantasia Divinity. Check it out on Amazon in ebook and paperback.

And the gloriously-titled story I co-wrote with Matt Dovey, “How I Became Coruscating Queen of All the Realms, Pierced the Obsidian Night, Destroyed a Legendary Sword, and Saved My Heart’s True Love,” was released in audio form at Podcastle. If you like absurd, D&D-gone-wrong style misadventures, Listen/read online“>give it a listen! (As a bonus, you can also view the art my wife Jane drew for the story in its original publication in No Shit from Alliteration Ink. Art makes everything better! If you’d like to see her other three illustrations, you’ll have to buy the anthology.)

May

In early May, my original story “The Monsters Your Mother Still Asks About” was published in Great Jones Street. This one is a darkly humorous urban fantasy romance, complete with a ridiculous vampire, an overbearing mother who may or may not be acquainted with brooms, and–just maybe–a chance at love or something like it.

Great Jones Street also published two reprints from me: “Fugue in a Minor Key,” originally from Galaxy’s Edge, and “Images Across a Shattered Sea,” my Writers of the Future winner. “Fugue in a Minor Key” is no longer available online elsewhere, so I’m especially glad to get that one some more eyeballs.

And last, but certainly not least, just a few days ago I learned that my story “At the Edge of a Human Path” took first prize in the annual Friends of the Merril contest. The story is a retelling of a Medieval English tale, “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” only set in Yamato Japan. Features fox-women, besotted lords, and devious backstabbery.

Friends of the Merril is a pay-to-enter contest, which I usually avoid, but I make an exception for this one because they use the proceeds to support a library collection of speculative fiction. Yay libraries! (And, obviously, I am very glad that I made that exception, this year!)

Phew. That seems like a lot of stuff. What will June hold? I sold two stories to Remixt, but am not sure when that comes out, and have a few other forthcoming releases, as well.

(Also, if you’re into haiku, you should go read the June issue of The Heron’s Nest. I’m the web editor, and also get to sometimes write the essay for the poem that gets the most editorial votes. This time I was privileged enough to be the one writing about an incredible haiku from Anthony Itopa Obaro of Nigeria.)