blog post - Infomancy.net

Sale – Nature Physics – “Love and Relativity”

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Stewart

I’ll be appearing a second time in Nature‘s pages—this time in their Physics magazine. Hooray!

This story is told in the form of an annotated bibliography. It’s more serious by far than my previous Nature sale, and deals with several types of love (love lost and love gained) as well as special relativity, the Fermi paradox, and… Well, I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I’ll stop there.

It’s also set in India, so hopefully I didn’t screw anything up too much on that front. (My apologies in advance if I did!)

Anyway, just a quick post to announce the sale. I’ll be sure to put up a link when it’s available—although I have no word yet on when that may be.

Original Fiction: “Some Salient Details About Your Former Lives” at Plasma Frequency

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Stewart

I somehow didn’t spot this one when it came out, but I have a piece of flash fiction up in January/February’s Plasma Frequency Magazine.

The story, “Some Salient Details About Your Former Lives,” is very loosely inspired by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the character of Agrajag, that hapless multi-mortal being whom Arthur Dent inadvertently kills thousands of times.

Of course, my story isn’t much like Hitchhiker’s Guide. It’s more of a fantasy than anything, and while it does deal with a similar set-up, it shakes things down in a very different way.

Go give it a read over at Plasma Frequency and let me know what you think!

Some Salient Details About your Former Lives, by Stewart C Baker

Five reprints now available on Quarter Reads

Posted on April 7, 2015April 8, 2015 by Stewart

Do you like stories? Do you like quarters? Do you like reading? Do you like reprints? Do you like five?! ~~(Fnord)~~

Wait, wait, wait. Where was I going with this…?

Ah, right. I have five new reprints (does that even make sense?) available over on Quarter Reads as of right now. Here are links to each, and where they first appeared:

Nikumaroro, July 1937 – In which Amelia Earheart attempts to co-exist with a number of coconut crabs, with unpredictable results. First appeared in Fine Linen Magazine, January 2015.
Oubliette – In which Neuroscience! And Regret! And Long Periods of Time Glossed Over! And other fun things. First appeared in Flash Fiction Online, April 2014. (Where you can, in fact, still read it for free if you’d prefer!)
Little More than Shadows – Which plays with the boundaries between dream and reality, and does not use quotation marks (you have been warned). First appeared in Daily Science Fiction, November 18, 2014. (Again, it is still online for free if you can’t spare a quarter.)
The Robotic Poet Reads Bashō – A story masquerading as a scholarly article on haiku criticism. First appeared in Beyond Borderlands in September of 2014. (Not only is it still available for free, but so is my essay, “Fishing for Bashōs,” in Modern Haiku which treats the same theme at much greater depth and without the SFnal trope on top of it.)
Against the Dark – An older story, obliquely inspired by Dunsany and Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle of Unknown Kadanth stories. Not much like what I write these days, overall. :) First published in the Journal of Microliterature in August 2010 (link)

If any of those sound like they’d be up your alley, go give them a browse!

I made the James White Award longlist

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Stewart

While I didn’t win anything, or even make the shortlist, I was pleased to see that my longish short story, “The View from Driftwise Spindle,” made the recently-announced longlist for the James White Award.

The James White Award, for those who aren’t familiar, is a contest for new authors of SFF which includes a monetary prize and publication in Interzone. There were about 255 entries this year, and only 30 stories on the longlist—which means I was at least in something like the top 10%.

Congratulations to those who made the top five, and to the winner, Mack Leonard, who was just announced today!

Reprint: “Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things” at Sockdolager

Posted on April 4, 2015April 8, 2015 by Stewart

I’m very pleased to announce (a little belatedly) that my post-apocalyptic structuralist/meta-fictional folk tale story, “Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things,” is now available online for the first time over at The Sockdolager.

This story was first published in The Next Review‘s January 2014 issue, and I’m glad it’s getting wider exposure. It’s one of my favourites!

If you’re not familiar with the Aarne-Thompson Index, it’s a book which collects brief summaries of various folk and fairy tales and classifies them according to their subject matter.

My story basically does the same thing, but with stories that haven’t yet been told, but which conceivably might be after some sort of world-shattering apocalypse. I had a lot of fun writing it, and hope you enjoy reading it as well.

So give it a read over at The Sockdolager (if you’re so inclined) and let me know what you think of it.

Original Essay: “Fishing for Bashos: Interpretive Communities and Haiku in English” at Modern Haiku

Posted on March 19, 2015March 18, 2015 by Stewart

I’m very excited to announce the publication of this scholarly essay, which is based on a presentation I gave at Haiku North America last year.

In short, the essay tackles translation, Stanley Fish’s idea of Interpretive Communities, and

I had a blast doing the presentation and writing the essay. Who knew literary criticism could be so fun?! (Okay, ~~maybe~~ I’m just a nerd.)

What makes it doubly exciting is that the whole essay is available to read for free(!) on the Modern Haiku website as a PDF: Fishing for Bashos: Interpretive Communities and Haiku in English.

Give it a read, and I’d love to hear what anyone thinks about it, either here in the comments or via e-mail.

Original Poetry: “Night Shift” at Lakeside Circus

Posted on March 18, 2015March 18, 2015 by Stewart

I have a poem up today (actually, last Friday) at Lakeside Circus.

It’s about cockroaches, metaphor, synochdoche, and other strangenesses, and is at least partly inspired by all the time I spent eating at Denny’s and other late-night diners when I used to hang out at the local game store until way too late in high school and college.

Go give it a read and a comment here: http://lakesidecircus.com/2015/03/stewart-c-baker-presents-night-shift/

Original Fiction: “How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator” at Nature

Posted on February 4, 2015February 4, 2015 by Stewart

My flash fiction piece, “How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator” is online now at Nature magazines’s “Futures” section.

It’s a short story (about a page and a half long), and is about evil twins, giant bananas, parallel universes, shiny red buttons, quantum superposition, and implausible help desk hours.

Intrigued? Confused? You don’t even?

Go read the rest at Nature “Futures”: How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator

As an added bonus(?), you can also see my notes on the story at the Future Conditional blog.

Under new SFWA rules, I almost qualify

Posted on February 4, 2015February 4, 2015 by Stewart

Yesterday, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) issued a press release stating that they’re changing their qualifications for membership:

Short version:

Specific details will be posted at sfwa.org by the first of March, but the basic standards are $3,000 for novel, or a total of 10,000 words of short fiction paid at 6 cents a word for Active membership. A single story of at least 1,000 words paid at 6 cents a word will be required for Associate membership

I’m very excited about this, since I hope it will break down some of the taboos around self-publishing (if those taboos even exist any more?), and it’s also nice to see SFWA doing something so positive for writers of all stripes after, uh… recent kerfuffles.

I’m also excited to see SFWA dropping its current language about “three paid sales” totaling 10,000 words, which has kept me well away from qualifying since I mostly write flash fiction.

Under the new rules, I currently have a total of 9200 qualifying words:

“Raising Words” – Penumbra eZine, July 2013 (1200 words at then-SFWA-qualifying 5cpw)
“Oubliette” – Flash Fiction Online, April 1 2014 (1000 words at 6cpw)
“Little More than Shadows” – Daily Science Fiction, November 18 2014 (750 words at 6cpw)
“Fugue in a Minor Key” – Galaxy’s Edge, forthcoming (5400 words at 6cpw)
“Configuring Your Quantum Disambiguator” – Nature Magazine’s “Futures”, which goes live today some time (850 words at 15cpw)

That means I only need one more 800-word sale at 6 cents per word to qualify. Mind you, I’m not 100% sure I want to join–or that I can even afford the $90 yearly membership, to be honest–but it’s definitely nice to know I’d have the option. And it feels validating to qualify, as well.

Now Available for Pre-order: New Resonance 9 (and a chapbook!)

Posted on December 30, 2014March 18, 2015 by Stewart

If you’re an avid reader of haiku, you may already be familiar with the “New Resonance” series of anthologies from Red Moon Press. If not, they’re well worth exploring: They’ve won at least seven Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards, and the poets featured in their pages often go on to do great things in the haiku community.

(a previous year’s edition of the anthology)

I’m very proud to have been selected for inclusion in the ninth edition of the anthology along with sixteen other poets.

As part of the publication process, I receive 25 copies of the anthology in return for paying part of the publication costs (yes, fiction friends, Yog’s Law(!!!)—but haiku works a bit differently in this particular case).

I’ve taken the pre-order form down for now (thanks to my early buyers for your support!), but will place an order form up again when I receive my copies in June.

In other news, I’ve created a chapbook of my haiku and tanka, called Stray Cats, which isn’t available anywhere else. You can still order a copy of that (if you so desire) using the form below).

Thanks!

Category: blog post