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As December rolls around each year, authors often share posts about what the science fiction and fantasy stories and other work they had published in the last twelve months.

Last year, James Beamon and I were lucky enough to have our game, The Bread Must Rise, nominated for the Nebula award for game writing.

And I’ve had a pretty dang good year this year as well, with a few new stories, a collaborative science fiction text game, and my debut short fiction collection The Butterfly Disjunct all released in 2024.

Huzzah!

Since I’m feeling pretty good about my own work, instead of the traditional “here is my new stuff” post I want to highlight some of the amazing science fiction and fantasy stories, books, and games I’ve read and played from other authors.

But Wait, There’s More.

Before I list out my favourites I want to talk a bit about what this list represents, and what it is emphatically not. If that makes your eyes glaze over, you can skip right to the good stuff!

I’ve limited my focus to authors who haven’t previously won a major genre award (Nebula, Hugo, etc). Those award-winning authors often write things I absolutely adore, but I want to shine a light on some of the mighty fine writers who I feel are just as excellent with this post.

I tend to enjoy character-driven science fiction and fantasy stories. I also tend to enjoy stories about people who are on the edges of their culture or society, or otherwise don’t fit in. When there is some kind of conflict that involves these characters finding others like them? I’m a major sucker for that found family vibe!

In practice, this means the stories that really resonate with me tend to be written by immigrants, women, neurodiverse folks, people of colour, and queer folks. And indeed, you’ll see a lot of that in the list below, and not a thing written by white dudes like myself!

So if that’s what the list represents, what is it not?

First and most importantly, if something is not on this list, that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. There are way too many new things I loved for me to share them all! I’ve read more than 30 novels this year alone, and a heck of a lot of short fiction.

To drive that home, I’m not in any way saying these things are “the best” or that the things I haven’t listed are not “the best” science fiction and fantasy stories, books, or games of the year. I’m not a big fan of that phrasing in general, since beyond a certain point of technical expertise, judging something’s quality is a subjective process that’s going to differ for everyone.

Are they my personal “best of”? Sure. My personal favourites? Absolutely.

Do I think they’re amazing? I hope it’s obvious that I do.

Am I sharing the list in the hopes that other people will find and love them just as much as me? Heck yeah I am!

So, enough to-do. On to the lists!

Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, Books, and Games from 2024

Flash Fiction, Short Stories, and Novelettes

“Godiva of the Broken Shell” by Maya Dworsky-Rocha

Maya Dworsky-Rocha’s “Godiva of the Broken Shell” (Flash Fiction Online, August, 749 words) explores a future in which everyone has a “shell,” a sort of high-tech skin that modulates their appearance and voice, and then maps the myth of Lady Godiva onto it—but not, perhaps, in the way you might think.

“Rachel is at a Protest” by Esther Alter

Esther Alter’s “Rachel is at a Protest” (The Deadlands, July, 4,500 words) brilliantly tears into the idea that one can only stand on the side of Jewishness or Palestinian human rights. It’s also about transness, feelings of collective guilt, the importance of human connections, and, honestly, a lot of other things.

It’s an unsettling, unflinching, and at times upsetting story that doesn’t give any easy answers, but it does offer hope.

“A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places” by Marissa Lingen

Marissa Lingen’s “A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May, 3,290 words) explores disability, family, especially touching on how complicated expressions of love and support can sometimes be. A nuanced, wry, uplifting, and thoroughly enjoyable tale.

“Those Left Behind” by Kanishk Tantia

Kanishk Tantia’s “Those Left Behind” (Apex, May, 3,500 words) is about caregiver androids mapped with the neural maps of the dead in order to make their charges’ lives perfect. When abandoned by those they are meant to care for, . A story of patterns and how to break free of them.

“D.E.I. (Death, Eternity, and Inclusion)” by N. Romaine White

N. Romaine White’s “D.E.I. (Death, Eternity, and Inclusion)” (Fiyah! Magazine, January, 3,884 words) is an absolutely hilarious skewering of the well-meaning, but often surface level, attempts at creating more diversity, equity, and inclusion in society and its institutions.

Come for the vampire politics and the tension of being newly undead, stay for the deadpan hilarity in lines like “No. No, it felt wrong, even as I was saying it.”—especially recommended for academics.

“A Fisher of Stars” by Ursula Whitcher

“A Fisher of Stars” (North Continent Ribbon, Neon Hemlock Press, August, 10,792 words) is one of a series of inter-connected stories in Ursula Whitcher’s lovely North Continent Ribbon, a SF setting that fans of Ursula LeGuin and Ann Leckie will love. Come for the unionizing spaceships, stay for the adept characterization, imminently relatable struggles, and heartwarming, bittersweet ending–and then pick up the collection for more of the same!

Novellas, Novels, Anthologies, and Collections

Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s novella Lost Ark Dreaming is set in a post-climate collapse future off the coast of West Africa, where a remnant of humanity lives inside a rigidly structured skyscraper initially designed as a weather-proof home for the ultra-wealthy.

Thyme Travellers, edited by Sonia Sulaiman

Edited by Sonia Sulaiman, Thyme Travellers collects fourteen fantastic stories from Palestinian authors of speculative fiction into one excellent book. Often dark and unsettling, and exploring topics from belonging and identity to genocide and war, every single story in this powerful collection is a must-read.

Songs for the Shadows by Cheryl S. Ntumy

Songs for the Shadows is Cheryl S. Ntumy’s debut novella, and the first published stand-alone work in the shared world of the Sauútiverse, an African and African diaspora collective focused on storytelling and collaboration in the traditions of African peoples.

Following a young woman named Shad-Dari as she attempts to escape the tragedies of her past, the book explores the relationship between the past and the future, our efforts to escape who we are, and the cyclical nature of grief (and time!)—amongst other things.

A great and mind-bending story that could only be told with the tools of speculative fiction.

Sargassa by Sophie Burnham

Sophie Burnham’s debult novel, Sargassa, is an alternate history / future / sci-fi novel set in (spoilers) post-apocalyptic Rome. Full of memorable characters, tense situations, and just the right amount of catharsis and terrible mistakes, it’s a great book to pick up if you’re feeling angry and like you want to burn everything down and start over.

The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong

Julie Leong’s debut novel The Teller of Small Fortunes (Penguin Random House, November) follows a young immigrant woman in a fantasy kingdom who makes her living as a fortune teller — but for small fortunes only, as the title implies. With its gentle humour, intimate focus, and focus on character, the book reminds me of a less slapstick Discworld mixed with Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books. Overall, a lovely, soothing, and enjoyable read!

Watermyth by Anita Harris Satkunananthan

Anita Harris Satkunananthan’s debut novel, Watermyth, is filled with rich, lush details and an obvious love for storytelling. The book features mermaids, memories, and comes with high praise from Julie Day, Natalia Theodoridou and Angela Slatter—it’s easy to see why, once you dive deep into the world between its pages. Not to be missed!

Games

1000xRESIST

I’ve talked a lot about 1000xRESIST on my blog before (see “Despair, Guilt, and Resistance in Speculative Fiction“) . If you’ve never heard of the game, you’re in for a treat.

The game (created by Canadian studio Sunset Visitor) takes place 1000 years after the arrival of an alien race called the Occupants unleashed a deadly disease that is transmitted by breathing and that kills everybody who is infected by it. Everybody, that is, except a young woman named Iris.

In the game, you play one of Iris’s clones, Watcher, tasked with interpreting the actions and intentions of your felow clones by viewing (and re-viewing) Iris’s memories of that distant past.

As the title suggests, 1000xRESIST explores resistance—and it’s an eerie, surreal experience you won’t quickly forget.

Heaven’s Revolution: A Lion Among the Cypress

Written by Peter Adrian Behravesh and inspired by eighteenth-century Iran, Heaven’s Revolution is the steampunk Persian epic you didn’t know you needed. Pilot a giant mech, fly a spaceship to the stars, and join the revolution, defend the satrap as a military commander—or turn away from both and focus on your budding career as an astralchemical professor. A lot of fun to play, and the first four chapters are free!

Eastward: Octopia

Set in the same world and featuring the same characters, Eastward: Octopia is an AU sequel of sorts to Eastward, one of my favourite sprite-based RPGs of the last few years. Free of all the darkness and trauma of the main game, Octopia follows the tried and true farming sim formula made popular by games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. A great way to relax after a stressful day—and seeing Alva and Izzy happily living out their lives did me a world of good!

That’s All, Folks

Well, to be honest, it’s not all.

This isn’t even close to all the things I’ve read and played this year — I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy stories! — and it’s not even a full list of all the new things I loved.

But as Andrew Marvell definitely said, “if we had world enough, and time / long blog posts, readers, are no crime / but at my back I always hear / Short Attention Span draw near.”

So I’ll leave it here. Thanks for reading to the end, and I hope you have a chance to check out some of the amazing books, games, and stories I’ve linked to above. I promise you won’t regret it if you do!

My short story collection, The Butterfly Disjunct, is out today from Interstellar Flight Press!

You can learn more about The Butterfly Disjunct, read early reviews, and check out a free sampler on my website.

To celebrate the book’s release day, I’m sharing some of the fantastic SFF short fiction collections that came out this year. Most of them are from small publishers or independent authors, too!

Why Read Short Story Collections?

These days, it often seems like the trend in fiction is novel series that are as big, epic, and immersive as possible. Even though I mostly write short fiction, I find that’s where my reading time usually goes as well.

But this year (perhaps because I have a collection coming out myself!) I’ve noticed that there are actually quite a few short story collections that come out every year—even if they don’t get the kind of press the latest blockbuster/doorstopper epic does.

Long before I was a writer myself, I enjoyed short fiction collections just as much as novels. Especially in college, I have fond memories of reading books of short stories by Philip Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, Edgar Allan Poe, Yasunari Kawabata, and many more. I have no doubt that reading all those collections played a part in my focusing more on short fiction once I did start writing.

Don’t get me wrong! I still love novels and novellas. It’s rewarding and compelling as a reader to be able to immerse myself into a different world for a long time.

But at the same time, there’s a lot to be said for short story collections. They can give you a much better sense of an author’s range—whether that means differences in genre, topics, settings, or tone. They can also introduce you to trends in a writer’s work that you might not notice if you only look at their longer-form work.

And last but not least, as a reviewer of my collection pointed out on Goodreads, short story collections allow you to dip in and read a story or two at a time, without needing a huge time commitment:

I would like to have this book living on my night stand or end table picking it up in a quiet moment to read and re-read my favorite stories.

Goodreads review, MagnoliaJulie

That’s certainly something I can appreciate, as an always-busy person whose reading time is not as frequent or as long as I’d like!

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the pile of thick novels in your to-read list, want to check out something by an author who’s new to you, or are just looking to dive into a favourite author’s backlist, make sure you check out some of the collections below—or go seek out others elsewhere.

Some Great Short Story Collections from 2024

This is far from an exhaustive list of the short story collections that were published this year. But each is from a writer whose work I know and enjoy—and I’m absolutely certain their short story collections are filled with the amazing writing, wonderful characters, and unique settings I’ve come to expect every time I click through to their latest published work.

If you’d like to tell me about a book I’ve missed that should be on this list, send me an email and let me know—I’d love to hear from you. (2024-11-05: added two new collections)

The short story collections below are organized alphabetically by title. I’ve shared the cover, publisher blurb, links to buy, and a link to a sample story from each.

Broken Stars, by Jeremy Szal

Broken Stars combines previously published short stories and novelettes with new and exciting tales, ranging from space opera to military SF to science-fantasy and everything in-between.

Tales of broken heroes fighting for hope in dark worlds, full of aliens and outcasts, drug dealers and bounty hunters, mercenaries and soldiers. Tales of far-flung worlds where the lines between machine and human become blurred, the humanity of monsters is explored, and victory always comes with a heavy price.

In these eighteen stories, violence explodes, betrayals abound, and no one is safe.

Sample story: “The Galaxy’s Cube” (Abyss & Apex, 2016)

Links to buy: Author website

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Convergence Problems, by Wole Talabi

From the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Nommo award nominated author of Shigidi and The Brass Head Of Obalufon comes a stunning new collection of stories that investigate the rapidly changing role of technology and belief in our lives as we search for meaning, for knowledge, for justice; constantly converging on our future selves.

In “An Arc of Electric Skin,” a roadside mechanic seeking justice volunteers to undergo a procedure that will increase the electrical conductivity of his skin by orders of magnitude. In “Blowout,” a woman races against time and a previously undocumented geological phenomenon to save her brother on the surface of Mars. In “Ganger,” a young woman trapped in a city run by machines must transfer her consciousness into an artificial body and find a way to give her life purpose. In “Debut,” Nairobi-based technical support engineer tries to understand what is happening when an AI art system begins malfunctioning in ways that could change the world.

The sixteen stories of Convergence Problems, which include work published for the first time in this collection, rare stories, and recently acclaimed work, showcase Talabi at his creative best: playful and profound, exciting and experimental, always interesting.

Sample story: “An Arc of Electric Skin” (Asimov’s, 2021)

Links to buy: Astra Publishing House

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Different Kinds of Defiance, by Renan Bernardo

Defiance has many faces, and in DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE, they are as varied as they are gripping. In a world teetering on the brink of moral ambiguity, each story is a testament to the spirit that resists, rebuilds, and redeems.

From the sunbaked docks of a Rio de Janeiro, changed yet still familiar, to the oil-streaked shores of Barra Nova, Renan Bernardo weaves tales of characters caught in the throes of life’s tempests. Meet Hamilton, whose pursuit of a stolen yacht morphs into a crusade for healthcare for the forgotten, his acts a mosaic of bravery and necessity. Walk with Vitória as she battles the relentless tide of pollution with a fleet of smart-bots at her side, her resolve as persistent as the oil that stains her beach. Stand by Jota, who faces the storms of parenting in the shadow of a past that is never quite done with him or his defiant bloodline.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE is a collection for the rebels at heart—for those who find courage where hope seems lost and for whom every act of resistance is an act of sheer will.

Sample story: “Soil of Our Home, Storm of Our Lives” (Apex, 2021)

Links to buy: Android Press

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Elephants in Bloom, by Cécile Cristofari

Debut collection from a French author who has been making a name for herself with regular contributions to Interzone and elsewhere (Clarkesworld, ParSec, etc). Providing a fresh perspective on the world, humanity, and its potential (both good and bad), Cécile’s fiction reflects her love of the natural world and concern for its future. Elephants in Bloom contains her finest previously published stories, as selected by the author, alongside eight brand new tales that appear here for the first time.

Each story is followed by a note from the author, providing further insight and context.

Sample story: “The Fishery” (Interzone Digital, 2023)

Links to buy: NewCon Press

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Human Resources, by Fiona Moore

Fiona Moore is a Canadian-born academic, writer and critic living in London. In 2023 her work won a BSFA Award, having been previously shortlisted for both BSFA and World Fantasy Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Interzone and elsewhere, and has been selected for six consecutive editions of the annual Best of British Science Fiction anthology.

Eighteen stories drawn from more than a decade of publications, plus the title story: a brand new novelette that appears here for the first time.

From a woman rebelling against the corporation that has turned her into living, breathing product placement to a story of misfit automata that have outlived their sell-by date. From a murder case involving an AI car to the hunt for a sentient battle tank lost somewhere in the jungle… These stories show us disturbing futures that may be a lot closer than we like to think.

Sample story: “The Lori” (Clarkesworld, 2020)

Links to buy: NewCon Press

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Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism: Short Stories, by Andrea Kriz

A short story collection exploring unexpected, fantastical futures and how we cope in them.

Your friend creates an award-winning VR game—based on your friendship. An AI starts a YouTube channel at the expense of its creator. A fanfic writer plagiarizing the lives of the marginalized gets her comeuppance. Time travel meets magic in a world blown into pieces by war. Dragons modify DNA and undergo peer review. In Andrea Kriz’s debut short story collection, technology and genres wildly blend in stories that will challenge how you see our future.

Sample story: “Communist Computer Rap God” (Clarkesworld, 2021)

Links to buy: Intestellar Flight Press

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The Memory Plague and Other Stories, by D. Thomas Minton

Featuring alien artifacts, curious trans-dimensional mementoes, magical carousel horses, and more, this collection of twenty-four speculative short stories brings together the best of D. Thomas Minton’s explorations of reality, the universe, and what it means to be human.

Sample story: “The Memory Plague” (Lightspeed, 2021)

Links to buy: Author website

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Pick Your Potion, by Ephiny Gale

Magic, mystery, and the macabre collide in Pick Your Potion, a mesmerising collection of genre-blending fantasy, science-fiction, and horror stories from award-winning Australian author Ephiny Gale.

The 26 weird tales in Pick Your Potion are female-centric, mostly queer, and always intriguing.

Within these pages, you’ll find:
A deadly and addictive magical board game.
A time-loop demon apocalypse.
A dimension-jumping cruise ship.
A competition to win a magical orchard.
A collection of murder victims’ last texts.

Heartwarming, heart-stopping, and heartbreaking in turn, Pick Your Potion offers a full apothecary of speculative stories to serve the curious reader.

Sample story: “Rewind” (The Dread Machine, 2022)

Links to buy: Author website

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A Place Between Waking and Forgetting, by Eugen Bacon

A Place Between Waking and Forgetting is dark speculative fiction, an Afro-Irreal collection in which transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, unlimited futures, collisions of worlds, mythology, and more, inhabit. It cases black people stories in bold and evocative text, at times deeply flawed but potentially redeemable protagonists in rich hues of blackness and light. Something beautiful, something dark in lyrical language packed with affection, dread, anguish and hope.

Featuring the World Fantasy Award finalist story “The Devil Don’t Come With Horns”, this collection of short stories is the latest offering by a genre-bending, multi-award winner.

Sample story: Excerpts from “Naked Earth” and “Derive, Moderately”

Links to buy: Raw Dog Screaming Press

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Sinking, Singing, by Gwynne Garfinkle

A young girl hears unsettling messages in the grooves of an old record album. A washed-up horror star gets a second chance at stardom, but at a great price. A robot rebellion is fueled by the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde.

In this collection of short fiction, some characters seek to escape (often through music or magic), while others choose to remain in the beautiful, albeit damaged, present moment.

Sample story: “Sinking, Singing” (Not One of Us 60, )

Links to buy: Aqueduct Press

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So You Want to Be a Robot, 2nd Edition, by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

Set aside traditional norms and the gender binary in this updated collection of twenty-two stories by Nebula Award finalist Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

Here you’ll find robots and cyborgs exploring their own forms of personhood; lose yourself in wildly imaginative landscapes and dystopian worlds; follow assassins, sentient shadows, sorrowful ghosts, and all forms of monsters. Dare to feel everything—from the brightest joy to sorrow and the rainbow of emotion in between.

(First released in 2017 from Lethe Press, the new edition features an extra story (“Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts,” first published in Apex in 2021), as well as two gorgeous cover options.)

Sample story: “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door” (Fireside, 2016)

Links to buy: Author website (robot cover) or Author website (discreet cover)

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Sunflowers in Snow, by Dawn Bonnano

A collection of fourteen fantasy stories about magic in the real world, Sunflowers in the Snow explores friendships and family bonds through sentient houses, magical taverns, secret gardens, and people from other realms who are more like us than we could ever dream.

Featured stories include: Sunflowers in the Snow, Cara’s Heartsong, Voices Heard Within Heartbreak House, Never Say Never, The Legacy of Kalila Arquette, Sarah’s Little Monster Hunter, and more.

Sample story: “Cara’s Heartsong” (Daily Science Fiction, 2014)

Links to buy: Author website

Writing Update: A Short Story Collection and a Short Game

The Butterfly Disjunct, and Other Stories

Speaking of short story collections, The Butterfly Disjunct is out today from Interstellar Flight Press! Featuring more than 30 of my science fiction stories from the last ten years, it’s available in ebook and print from most major retailers.

Although I’ve had lots of short stories published over the years, this is my print book debut, and the first time I’ve filled a whole book with my work and nothing else. That’s exciting!

You can learn more about the collection on my website, and if you’d like a look at what’s inside you can download a free sampler, which includes my stories “How to Break Causality and Write the Perfect Time Travel Story” (Translunar Travelers Lounge, 2019), “The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation” (Lightspeed, 2022), and “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep” (No Police = Know Future, 2020).

Forevermore: A Game of Writing Horror

Forevermore is a very short, humorous piece of interactive fiction about writing and distractibility. Written in just under 4 hours for ECTOCOMP 2024, the game puts you in the shoes of Allen Edgar Poet as you try to stay sufficiently broody to complete your latest masterpiece.

It’s very short (did I mention that?) and a casual, quick play. You can play the game for free on itch.io—and don’t forget to take a look at all the great spooky games folks have put together for this year’s ECTOCOMP.

That’s all for this month. See you in December!

Daily Science Fiction (DSF) was a short fiction magazine edited by Jonathan Laden and Michele-Lee Barasso, that released a new speculative short story pretty much every weekday from September of 2010 through to January of 2023.

Sadly, the Daily Science Fiction website went offline sometime in late 2024, taking its decade+ of original speculative fiction with it.

But all is not lost!

If you’re an author trying to get copies of your Daily Science Fiction stories, much of the work published in the magazine has been archived by The Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive.

Read on to learn for a slightly detailed descrpition of how to find things in the Wayback Machine.

If you don’t need to know the details, you can jump to the part of this post that explains how to find stories published in Daily Science Fiction using The Wayback Machine’s “URLs” functionality.

Using the Wayback Machine

If you’re not familiar with The Wayback Machine, it’s fairly simple to use.

Point your browser to https://web.archive.org/ and you’ll be greeted with the Internet Archive’s home page, pictured below.

To search for a specific website, just type in the URL where it says “Enter a URL or words related to a site’s home page.”

You’ll now see a screen with the number of pages archived, and a couple of different calendars:

Each of the bar graphs at the top of this page represents the number of web pages from your URL that was archived in each month of each listed year.

Below that, you’ll see the calendar year for a selected month, with blue and green circles over specific dates. These circles will be bigger or smaller depending on the amount of content that was harvested. Blue circles mean that content was archived on that date. Green circles means that the Wayback Machine’s archiving software encountered a redirect.

To access the actual archived content, all you need to do is click on a timestamp. The Wayback Machine will do the rest, resulting in an archived version of the site whose URL you typed in the search bar:

At this point, you can use the archived website just like its original. However, keep in mind that some sub-pages may not have been archived. If that happens, you’ll get an error message.

You’ll notice that the bar graphs stay at the top of the page even when you start looking at archived pages. That’s a good way to jump around and see older or newer versions of the URL you typed in. (From an archival standpoint, this is a godsend! Sometimes content is missing on some dates, or has changed over time. It’s fantastic to be able to see all the options that there are.)

How to Find Daily Science Fiction Stories in the Wayback Machine

The easiest way to find a specific story in the archived Daily Science Fiction site is by using the Wayback Machine’s “URLs” function. This function lists out every single URL associated with a given website.

To save you time, here’s the Wayback Machine’s URL page for dailysciencefiction.com

Once you’re there, just search in the “Filter results by URL…” box on the right:

The format that Daily Science Fiction used for URLs involved putting both the author name and the story title, separated by hyphens.

For author names, use first–middle–last format. For titles, all you need to do is type out the title. (For more common titles, you may then have to browse a bit to find the correct story.)

For example, I typed stewart-c and the Wayback Machine was able to locate the two stories I had published in Daily Science Fiction over the years:

Or, if I wanted to read Aimee Picchi’s fantastic “Advanced Word Problems in Portal Math,” I could type in portal-math to see if it’s been saved.

Once you’re on the results page here, you can click one of the URLs listed to access the calendar page for that URL, and from there you can click the blue or green circles on the calendar and click the timestamp to see the archived page.

You can then copy the new URL from your browser to link the story from your website, save a copy of the page as a PDF, or do whatever else you needed your story for.

A word of warning: Not every page from a website is always archived, so some stories may not be accessible after all.

But with 7332 URLs archived, it looks like a lot of DSF‘s great content is still there, just waiting to be retrieved.

Support the Internet Archive!

If you make use of The Wayback Machine, please consider supporting the Internet Archive, which is a 501c3 nonprofit based in Los Angeles.

You can donate using the “Donate” page on the Internet Archive website.

Or, if you’d like to help out in other ways, consider volunteering!

With a project as big as the Internet Archive, there are lots of ways for people to help. And since the project does important work by archiving content that would otherwise be lost forever, the more people who can help, the better.

Support Great Speculative Fiction!

While Daily Science Fiction will be sorely missed, it isn’t the only speculative fiction game in town. I’ve provided a few carefully curated links that will point you in the direction of other amazing stories from new and established authors alike.

The Factory & Songs for the Shadows
Two Immersive Stories for Our Times from Ukraine and Ghana

Indie publisher Atthis Arts is running a pre-order campaign for two amazing new books, The Factory and Songs for the Shadows.

Although I haven’t yet read The Factory, I was a beta reader for Songs for the Shadows, and loved every word of it.

If you have a moment and a few spare dollars, please consider backing this important indie project!

Speculative Fiction Magazine Subscriptions

Want to stop other SFF magazines from going away? The easiest and best way is to give them money, if you can!

Author and editor Jeff Reynolds has made this even easier with his list of Speculative Fiction Magazine Subscriptions.

With searching and filtering functionality, the list is a great way to find a new favourite magazine—and then subscribe to help it stick around.

Veris swam out of the darkness already weeping, and for a moment only felt peace, for she did not remember why she wept. Then it returned to her, crashing down like the broken side of a mountain, burying her, and she screamed, and hammered her fists on the grass, and clawed it up in ruts, and when the scream ran out she sobbed as if her heart would break.

Premee Mohamed, The Butcher of the Forest

Happy autumn (or, if you’re in the southern hemisphere, happy spring)! This is my favourite time of year, and I’m really looking forward to the rain and cooler weather that’s typical for my part of Oregon.

This month, I’m going in-depth with a look at the themes of despair, guilt, and resistance in speculative fiction. In particular, I’m looking at two speculative works I’ve been enjoying: Premee Mohamed’s fantasy novella, The Butcher of the Forest, and a surreal science fiction game from indie Canadian studio Sunset Visitor 斜陽過客, 1000xRESIST.

Since these are going to be much more spoilery than usual, I’m flipping my usual format to put the writing update first—if you don’t like spoilers, I heartily recommend checking both works out for yourself, as both are fantastic! (But be warned that both pieces touch on some pretty dark themes.)

Head Back to Pelican Town with Stardew & Chill

Changing seasons always puts me in mind of Stardew Valley, which has calming, soothing music to go with its cozy farming community vibe.

In Stardew & Chill, artists DJ Cutman and Coffee Date revisit iconic Stardew Valley tracks like Wild Horseradish Jam and A Stillness in the Rain, giving them a lo-fi spin that makes them even more enjoyable. Check it out below!

Writing Update

This month’s update is a new co-authored piece of interactive fiction!

A Death in Hyperspace, a game I co-wrote with Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, is out now as part of this year’s IFComp competition.

Here’s the teaser and cover image (created by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor):

Gameplay is approximately 1-2 hours, and the game is free to play, so give it a try if that sounds intriguing!

Spotlight on The Butcher of the Forest and 1000xRESIST

Before we dive into a discussion of resistance in speculative fiction, let’s take a quick look at both these recently-released works and where you can find them. The text below is from publisher or developer blurbs.

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

1000xRESIST by Sunset Visitor 斜陽過客

Despair, Guilt, and Resistance in Speculative Fiction

The Butcher of the Forest and 1000xRESIST work in very different genres and with very different tropes. The first is a sort of twisted Hero’s Journey in a secondary world fantasy setting, with a heroine whose return from the realm of the supernatural brings her no real closure. The second, a far-future science fiction narrative involving clones, half-truths, and betrayals layered like a palimpsest.

Both, though, have a lot of commonalities: an all-powerful, autocratic ruler, a protagonist ridden by guilt over events from their past, and a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of body horror and weird. Both are also great examples of resistance in speculative fiction—and how our feelings of guilt and despair can drive us to keep fighting even when we don’t want to.

(One last warning: Spoilers abound from here on out!)

Betrayal and Guilt in 1000xRESIST

1000xRESIST, as noted above, takes place 1000 years after the arrival of an alien race called the Occupants unleashed a deadly disease that is transmitted by breathing and that kills everybody who is infected by it. Everybody, that is, except a young woman named Iris.

Iris is co-opted by a group called The 50, who take her to an underground bunker called The Orchard where they extract her DNA and carry out experiments, ultimately creating clones of her who also have immunity. Iris eventually kills the members of The 50 after deciding to collaborate with the Occupants, leaving her and her clones the sole surviving representatives of humanity. You learn all of this fairly early in the game when you play Watcher (one of the game’s two main protagonists), who is one of Iris’s clones and is tasked with the sacred duty of observing her memories.

Watcher is one of many clones, in fact, all referred to as “Sisters,” who still live in the Orchard and who worship Iris as their god, the ALLMOTHER. None of the Sisters know anything about the past and our own time, except in what little bits and pieces Iris has told them. Some Sisters, like Watcher, have been given special duties. The rest, called Shells, are back-ups.

One of the game’s pivotal plot points is a conflict between Iris and her first clone, called Youngest, several decades after the death of The 50. The Sisters in the game’s present are made to feel that they share a collective guilt over Youngest’s actions, which are framed by Iris as “the ancient sin.”

All is not as it seems, though. As you progress through the game, you learn that there are layers of half-truths, lies, and misdirection. The game pushes and pulls you in various directions, at first casting Iris as an unrepentant villain who mistreated Youngest and the other early clones, and then calling that into question and making you think that Youngest might be the villain after all.

Early in the game, Watcher is tricked into reporting her closest Sister, Fixer, for heretical comments that suggest she believes the ALLMOTHER deserves death. Ultimately, Watcher’s report leads to Fixer’s execution and sets into motion Watcher’s eventual assassination of Iris.

This close, personal guilt itself has several layers: at first, Watcher believes that Fixer deserved execution; as she communes with her fellow Sisters, though, doubts creep in; ultimately, it’s revealed that Fixer was completely blameless and that everything was a set-up by Youngest.

Throughout the game, Watcher’s guilt—both personal and collective—affects how she observes and interprets her world, and how you observe and interpret it with her through her “communions” with other characters that reveal parts of Iris’s distant past, her parents’ roles in protests in 2019-era Taiwan, Youngest’s attempts to get closer to Iris, and even (eventually) parts of Watcher’s own life to other characters.

It’s a neat bit of storytelling that lets the game’s developers mix differing perspectives and narratives together, making for a surreal, unsettling, and deeply impactful ride. And a common theme in all those narratives is resistance—but we’ll get back to that in a moment.

Despair and Guilt in The Butcher of the Forest

Compared to 1000xRESIST, The Butcher of the Forest is much simpler—at least from a narrative perspective.

The novella follows Veris, a woman in her middle years whose only wish is to live out the rest of her life without attracting the attention of The Tyrant, a brutally expansive ruler who invaded her home valley decades before and made it the site of his own castle.

Of course, that wish is never going to happen. When The Tyrant’s children go missing in a dangerous forest called the Elmever in the middle of the night, he sends his men to her home to threaten her family and force her into retrieving them. This isn’t Veris’s first trip to the Elmever—in fact, she’s the only person who’s ever successfully entered it and left alive again, and she did so with a child in tow.

From the moment The Tyrant’s men hammer on her door in the middle of the night, Veris struggles with despair that borders on nihilism. This despair, like Watcher’s guilt, is both generalized and deeply personal.

A portion of Veris’s despair is shared by all her people: despair over the Tyrant’s rule, his brutality, and his seeming invincibility. Although the book personalizes this despair—in taking over her valley, his forces killed many of the people Veris knew and loved—including her mother—it is a second despair, which is much more deeply personal, that drives Veris to keep moving through the book.

That despair is only hinted at to start with, through Veris’s bitter, brief asides about the fate of the first child she rescued from the Elmever years ago. Later, when she finds the Tyrant’s two children and they join her, the book starts to let out a few more hints. By the time Veris reveals that the child she returned with on her previous trip to the forest was her daughter, and that her daughter died a very short while after from an unnamed sickness, most readers will have already guessed.

This misdirection is itself a measure of Veris’s despair: she refuses to let herself dwell on the past whenever she can help it. It also plays a role in a pivotal scene, and is Veris’s tragic flaw—the one weakness in an otherwise practically-minded woman who gets the job done.

The pivotal scene comes late in the book, when Veris tells a malicious fox creature about her father’s death after he asks for her “worst memory” so he can “eat” it. She goes into grueling detail about her mother’s sudden accidental death at the hands of the Tyrant’s men; her father’s refusal to eat afterwards; his slow decline and sickness; and his eventual death.

Just like when we see Iris’s memories through Watcher’s eyes in 1000xRESIST, we observe Veris reliving her own memory as she describes it. We observe the other characters living it with her—mostly through the actions of the fox creature, as the Tyrant’s children hear her story.

Veris, though, is lying. Her true worst memory (revealed shortly afterwards, but only to us readers) is of her own daughter’s death. Veris carries this despair with her at all times, and it illuminates all her previous actions and thoughts.

This despair—like Watcher’s guilt—brings us back to the idea of resistance.

Despair, Guilt, and Resistance

Both Watcher and Veris suffer from varying levels of despair and guilt over their pasts. These traits aren’t just arbitrary—rather, they tie into how, when, and why the characters resist the oppressive nature of the worlds they find themselves in.

And both worlds are definitely oppressive. Veris must deal not only with the supernatural dangers of the Elmever, but with the Tyrant’s promise to destroy her entire village if she fails to rescue his children. Watcher’s entire purpose for existence is dictated by the ALLMOTHER’s long-ago ideas, layered on with various other forms of rigid order and duty and the ever-present threat of the Occupants.

What keeps Watcher moving throughout the story, what keeps her from giving in to the forces that would destroy her and those she love, is her guilt over her part in Fixer’s (apparent) death. This guilt drives her into obsessive re-examination of her own past as well as Iris’s, and it keeps her starting communions with other characters in an effort to drive them to further resistance.

In one of the game’s later chapters Watcher is imprisoned by forces sympathetic to Youngest after her assassination of the ALLMOTHER. She is tortured, lied to, and drugged for several years, and eventually has her eyes gouged out for failing to cooperate and release a statement supporting the Provisional Government (Youngest’s attempt to replace Iris as the new ruling power of the Sisters).

Even then, Watcher does not give in. She does not give up. Driven by mistakes from her past that she cannot undo, she keeps fighting. The game brings in memories from our own time to reinforce this, showing us memories of Iris’s mother and father meeting during the 2019 Hong Kong protests and after. After witnessing many of their friends and compatriots arrested and worse, Iris’s parents flee to Canada.

There, they, too, suffer from survivor’s guilt. In a powerful scene from after Irir has left home, Iris’s mother despairs over the failure of those long-ago protests. Her husband replies that winning and losing was never the only purpose. Another, equally important, was to make their voices known. To ensure that the oppressive government they protested against could not simply say that everyone had always been happy and supportive. The purpose of protest, he argues, is in part to show future generations that resistance is always an option.

Resistance in Speculative Fiction

One of the things I enjoy the most about science fiction and fantasy, no matter its medium, is how its creators use imaginative setups to explore real-world issues.

The theme of resistance is no different. By showing us characters who keep standing up and keep fighting for justice and freedom and joy, speculative fiction stories teach us the importance of our own fights and how they can improve not only our own lives, but the lives of everyone around us.

That’s all for this month. See you next time!

“Lots of Earth floors in this building,” Carissa added.
“I see,” the shapeshifter said. “What happens on these ‘Earth floors’?”
“Murderous extraction of capital value from helpless human beings,” Carissa replied. “And theme parks.”

Scotto Moore, Wild Massive (source)

It’s been a cool, wet summer here in our part of Oregon, with the occasional thunderstorm (a rarity for us), and fall is right around the corner.

This month I’m going to chat a little about what folks can do to create positive change in SFF as a field, and share a few things I’ve been reading and listening to.

Wild Massive, by Scotto Moore

Scotto Moore’s 2003 novel, Wild Massive, is described by the publisher as “a glorious web of lies, secrets, and humor in a breakneck, nitrous-boosted saga of the small rejecting the will of the mighty.”

The novel follows a (psionic) refugee from a state-sanctioned genocide, a shapeshifting magic user of immense power, and a young woman who’s inadvertently absorbed the power to alter the future by writing a novel draft as they travel through The Building in an attempt to stop (a) another state-sanctioned genocide and (b) a terrorist attack that might destroy up to a thousand floors at once and (c) other even more bad things involving former demiurges with opaque agendas.

As promised by the quote at the top of this post, theme parks (and roller coasters!) play an integral role in the plot.

With writing and scenarios that remind me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide (only slightly weirder and more surreal), fun prose, and just a little bit of metafiction, it’s a heck of a lot of fun, and I’m really looking forward to more of Moore’s work.

Eurobeat, and other glorious mistakes

Last month, my wife and I started watching old-school racing anime Initial D. Following the street racing exploits of a young tofu shop delivery driver, the show is supremely cheesy and a surprising amount of fun.

Although we ended up enjoying it a lot, the main reason I decided we should watch it was the music. A lot of the music that plays while (badly-rendered late 1990s 3D) cars drift down the slopes of Mount Akina is from a genre called Eurobeat.

This music features fast paced music with Italo Disco and EDM influences and very little in the way of lyrical sense. This month I’m recommending a Dave Rodgers Eurobeat megamix to put some soul gasoline in your tank and get you running in the 90s. Both of which, if you couldn’t guess, are the titles of Dave Rodgers songs.

Eurobeat definitely isn’t for everyone, but personally I think it’s a lot of fun. Check out the Dave Rodgers Super Eurobeat Megamix below and see what you think.

Speculative Organizations Need Your Support!

I’ve been an active member of SFWA since around 2017.

And by “active” I don’t just mean “as opposed to associate member.” I’ve been involved with a lot of SFWA committees and initiates, including the short fiction, game writing, fundraising, and international committees, as well as working on projects like Publishing Taught Me (SFWA’s NEA grant-funded blog series highlighting the contributions of BIPOC editors to publishing).

SFWA has always been a little dysfunctional, especially when it comes to volunteer and staff burnout and poor communication. Still, the organization has done a lot of good in the last ten years, from its initiatives like Writer Beware and

In the last couple of months, though, SFWA has gone into crisis mode, as this File770 post and this Genre Grapevine post describe.

I sincerely hope SFWA’s current board can resolve its issues, and I really do think SFWA has the potential to do a lot of good in the SFF community. But I’ve been hearing that folks are anxious and stressed about the idea of SFWA’s good work disappearing if the organization goes under, while simultaneously feeling like they can’t trust the organization enough to volunteer for it any more.

I am too.

While I definitely hope the organization recovers, I wanted to put out an important reminder: SFWA isn’t the only way to do good in SFF. It’s not even close.

To that end, I’ve put together a list of SFF organizations that do good work and that could benefit from volunteer help or donations.

Whether you’re a former SFWA volunteer looking for somewhere else to donate your time, or just someone who wants to make a cash-based donation, check it out and see what’s out there, and who needs your support!

Writing Update

Just a quick update here at the end:

• My short story collection, The Butterfly Disjunct, is now coming out in November. You can get a PDF review copy on NetGalley or a PDF/epub review copy on Booksirens, or preorder it from the publisher in print and ebook.
  
• My short story, “The List Making Habits of Heartbroken Ships,” came out in Thinking Ink’s The Neurodiversiverse anthology August 6th. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
  
• My short story, “White Lies Cast Dark Shadows,” came out in Tyche Press’s Carpe Noctem anthology. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
  
• Work on the new choicescript game proceeds apace! You can play a free demo here. The game will be out sometime next summer.

That’s all for now.

See you next time!

Carer SB-11 was neither Rosh nor happy. It called me Hari, and I called it Smita, because we had names. They weren’t our names, but names, nonetheless.

— Kanishk Tantia, “Those Left Behind” (Apex 144)

Welcome

Like it says on the tin: The Butterfly Disjunct, my debut short story collection, is coming soon. This November, you’ll be able to find it online or in bookstores, and ARCs are available now if you’re into that!

That said, I don’t like doing two heavy self-promo posts in a row — so by way of apology, I’m going to talk about other people’s interesting stuff up front.

Problems in Utopia

This month I’m sharing two stories that ask pointed questions about what utopia means and who, exactly, it’s for. Also: androids!

The Butterfly Disjunct ARCs and Launch Party

With stories that first appeared in Galaxy’s Edge, Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed, Nature, and many other places, The Butterfly Disjunct collects science fiction short stories I’ve written over the last 12 or so years.

It’s coming this November from Interstellar Flight Press, with a stunning cover (seen below) from Dante Luiz.

Want a little more info about what’s inside? Here’s the publisher’s blurb, and some early praise:

The Butterfly Disjunct is a short story collection exploring the expanse of human experience across infinite futures.

A scientist haunted by an impossible ghost. A cocky poet attempting to outrun peace. A grieving mother looking for life beneath Europa’s icy surface. A ship AI desperate to rescue its beloved crew. An ongoing fight against the end of existence. Equal parts earnest and strange, Stewart C Baker’s stories span the breadth of human emotion, space, and time. In this debut collection, gender and genre collide to celebrate relationships and empathy in all their forms.

The book has received praise from authors such as Kij Johnson, who called it “a delight,” and positive reviews on Netgalley, with readers calling it “a masterclass in character-centric worldbuilding” and saying it “captures your heart and makes you ponder the complex themes of life.”

Writing Update

• We’ve retitled my forthcoming Choicescript game to “Spire, Surge, and Sea” and I’m still working on that. I just crossed 150k, and am nearly done with chapter 5 of 11.
  
• My story “The List Making Habits of Heartbroken Ships” is coming out in early August in Neurodiversiverse from Thinking Ink Press. You can pre-order now in ebook or print!
  
• My story “White Lies Cast Dark Shadows” is also out this August in Carpe Noctem from Tyche Books. You can pre-order now in ebook!
  

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

Hello all!

After about six months of development, I’m excited to finally be posting a demo of my new Choice of Games project, Gigantea: Age of Rot.

Unlike The Bread Must Rise, which drew from a bunch of zany comedies and parodies, Gigantea: Age of Rot is a science fantasy epic inspired by Studio Ghibli movies like Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, as well as the Final Fantasy series of games.

Introducing Gigantea: Age of Rot

Now, the eternal stone city of Gigantea is all that remains of humanity, a bulwark against the death and decay of the World-Sea, kept safe by the power of its royal family’s holy magics. It is only these magics, coupled with the royal family’s vigilance and the obedient reverence of all Gigantea’s children, that keep the Rot and the wildlings at bay.

At least, that’s what you’ve always been taught…

Play the Demo!

Want to try out the game?

You can play the demo here!

If you do, please feel free to use this handy form to send me suggestions or bug reports. You can also check out my whole dang demo site for a mood board, playlist, and story/game/movie suggestions

Thanks in advance for any feedback you are willing to offer!

Listen to Some Music

Music is a big part of my creative process.

I’ve built a playlist of the music that gets me in the mood for Gigantea: Age of Rot, mostly instrumental and atmospheric pieces and a couple of movie soundtracks.

Check that out on YouTube, if you like!

What Will You Encounter Inside?

• A diverse group of NPCs, with transmasc, transfem, nonbinary, male, and female characters to choose from as possible romantic options (or, play as ace/aro)
  
• A science fantasy world where you can master strange magics as a spirit user, practice scientific rigor as a mason, or mix both disciplines as an alchemist
  
• A world where disability is normalized rather than stigmatized, with major and minor NPCs who represent a broad variety of physical and mental diversity
  
• A tumultuous political landscape where you can support one of two major factions—or turn away from both and forge your own path
  
• Spirits and godkings and gods, oh my!
  
• A dynamic world where your choices bring peace to Gigantea or send it spinning into chaos and violence

Thanks for reading. See you soon!

Stewart

I was a shapeshifter, worshipped for my pluralities. Without, within. So many stories of self, huddled together to wander the void of my own uncertainty, fleeing and seeking in equal measure. Transcendent.

— Avi Silver, Pluralities (source link)

Welcome

This month, I’m going to do something a little different and talk about independent press Atthis Arts. I always greatly enjoy the titles they release, so if you’re new to the press, I hope you’ll find a new book that calls out to you!

Atthis Arts is currently running a crowd-funding campaign to offset publishing costs. Please go and support them if you’re able!

About Atthis Arts

Atthis Arts isn’t just any small publisher. They’re a press with a purpose, informed by their strongly defined and clearly articulated core values of authenticity, thoughtfulness, and community.

What are these values? Here’s a summary based on the press’s website:

• authenticity – a focus on the author’s unique voice, rather than what “sells”
• thoughtfulness – an intentional, reflective approach to all aspects of publishing
• community – building connections between people both real and fictional

What do these values mean in practice? In my experience, it means that the books they publish are unlike most titles you’ll find on a bookstore shelf—and that they’re willing to take risks on works by authors that larger, more commercially-focused publishers wouldn’t touch.

Those risks pay off. The books I’ve read from Atthis Arts have stayed with me, changing my worldview and helping me to better understand myself and those around me.

My Favourite Atthis Arts Titles

To be clear, every title I’ve picked up from Atthis Arts has been fantastic. I can’t remember reading something from one of their authors where I put the book down halfway out of boredom or distaste.

That said, here are three of my absolute favourites

Other Great Books from Atthis Arts

These are just a handful of the great books that Atthis Arts has put out over the years. Here are teasers for some others!

• One Arm Shorter than the Other – a novella set in a Delhi market that mixes human relationships with fantastical events
• The Dragon of Ynys – a heartwarming fable about a dragon and a knight that’s lovely no matter your age
• Alia Terra: Stories from the Dragon Realm – a gorgeously illustrated book of bilingual fairy tales about dragons (English/Romanian)
• Be the Sea – follow a trio of unlikely sailors on a voyage through the future seas
• Rosalind’s Siblings – a collection of stories and poems about scientists from marginalized genders, edited by Lambda and Hugo Award Winner Bogi Takács

Support Atthis Arts!

As I mentioned earlier, Atthis Arts is currently running a campaign to offset some of the costs they have incurred in the pursuit of their mission and values.

In particular, the campaign will allow them to fund a translation for The Factory, a book by Ukrainian author Ihor Mysiak, who was killed during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The money raised will go primarily to translation and publishing costs for that book, but also will help Atthis Arts get a boost it badly needs to pay for ongoing printing costs, travel to conferences in their professional roles as booksellers and publishers, and more.

Things are tight for everyone right now, of course. But if you have anything to spare, please do consider donating or sharing the campaign in your social circles—or picking up some of the great books listed above!

I don’t have any updates on the writing front this time around (still just keeping my head down and putting down words on Gigantea: Age of Rot, for the most part), but I should have something to announce next month.

Thanks for reading. See you soon!

When I arrived back at my rooms, I found Mossa in her usual spot, slumped before the fire in my dressing gown, pondering so deeply that she only murmured indistinctly when I greeted her.

I did not press a conversation. I did not, in any case, feel fit for her style of interrogation at that moment.

     — Malka Older, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles (source link)

Welcome

Two of my favourite things to see in SFF books are intelligent ships and characters who don’t quite see the world the way others do. (Often, there’s a lot of overlap in those two things!)

In this month’s update, I’m centering a few books which feature neurodiverse characters.

The Neurodiversiverse

My story in the book, “The List-Making Habits of Heartbroken Ships,” is a sequel of sorts to “The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation,” which was published in Lightspeed in 2023. 

Just like that earlier story, this one follows Ship as they struggle to make their way through a disorienting and challenging situation. In this case, though, it’s not a distorted time field but something far more terrifying: meeting a potential new crew.

The story has a lot of social anxiety feels, and I can’t wait to share it—and the rest of the anthology—with the world. If you can afford it, I hope you’ll consider backing the Kickstarter and supporting a small publisher!

Megumi Hayashibara – Seiyū City Pop

For a change of pace from previous newsletters, I’m breaking out the city pop!

If you’re not familiar with city pop, the term is a vaguely defined way to refer to Japanese rock and pop from the 70s and 80s which embraced western styles and approaches to popular music.

Perhaps as a result, city pop songs tend to sound kind of nostalgic if you grew up with western 80s music, as well. (Or maybe that’s just all the anime I watched as a teenager…)

Megumi Hayashibara is a popular voice actress (声優, or seiyū), known mostly for her work in anime. As you can see from the image above, she’s played a lot of quintessential 80s and 90s anime roles—and this is just a very small snapshot of her acting work.

Hayashibara is also a talented singer. Classifying her as city pop is a little odd, but her work does have an upbeat, synth-heavy style with clean vocals—all fairly consistent characteristics of the pseudo-genre. Check out two of her songs below, both of which originally featured as anime character image songs.

『Just Be Conscious』

『I’ll Be There』 

A Tour of Jupiter with Mossa and Pleiti

I’m very glad I did! The Mimicking of Known Successes follows an academic and her one-time lover—now a sort of investigator, but with a focus on safety checks rather than enforcing criminal punishment—as they struggle to solve the case of a mysterious disappearance.

The book takes place on a series of platforms that ring an imagined future Jupiter, with one key twist: people live on the planet because Earth’s ecosystem completely collapsed several centuries earlier. Pleiti (the academic) studies a mixture of ecology and literature, mining ancient Earth books and media for references to animals and plants in the hopes of redesigning a successful ecosystem on Earth one day. Mossa (the investigator) comes looking for her when a well-known academic disappears from a remote platform, possibly stepping to his death, and possibly being pushed.

Although I was immediately hooked on Mimicking, one thing I especially came to appreciate about it is that Mossa is not like everyone else. She has a very succinct style of thinking and understanding the world which helps her in her work but makes maintaining personal relationships a little tricky. The great thing is that, as Pleiti comes to realize they both still have feelings for one another, she never thinks this means Mossa is broken or sick. She just accepts it as part of how her friend (and, eventually, her lover) is. And that’s a breath of fresh air (well, maybe a breath of recycled air, on the platforms that ring Jupiter?) in any book.

Both novellas are a pleasure to read, especially if you like cozy mysteries or sci-fi stories that focus on building community in adverse circumstances. But even if you don’t, there’s much joy to be found within these pages, as Mossa and Pleiti work on their relationships with one another—and overcome the obstacles their own approaches to life and love put in their way.

You can find The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles at a library near you (book 1, book 2), or at any major retailer.

Writing Update

I’m still hard at work on Gigantea: Age of Rot (my next title from Choice of Games), but I’ve got a few short fiction updates to share this month.

In fact, this summer is looking to be an embarrassment of riches!

Here’s what’s coming up:

• “Kuriko” (reprint) – Summer of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume 3 (Worldstone Publishing, June) – Now on Kickstarter
• “The List-Making Habits of Heartbroken Ships” – The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters (Thinking Ink Press, August) – Now on Kickstarter
• “White Lies Cast Dark Shadows” – Carpe Noctem (Tyche Press, August)
• “An Evening of Theatre on Floating World Station,” “Festival of Lights,” and “Ghosts of Maricourt Crater” – The Butterfly Disjunct: Stories (Interstellar Flight Press, August)

Those last three titles are the previously unpublished stories in my forthcoming short story collection, which I’m very excited about! 

I’m also working on a new piece of interactive fiction (IF) with some friends for this year’s IFComp. That also features an intelligent spaceship and it’s shaping up to be a lot of fun so far.

Look for more details on those projects in future newsletters, and as always: Thanks for reading!

“Granted, the plants all looked dead or dying. Granted, the windows of the house stared down like eye sockets in a row of skulls, yes, but so what? Actual rows of skulls wouldn’t affect me so strongly. I knew a collector in Paris … well, never mind the details.”

     — T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead (source link)

Welcome

We’re officially into spring. In this part of the world, that means a brief respite from cold drizzle, and I’m enjoying a little sunshine.

But not too much sunshine.

I’m a creature of shade and cooling rain at heart, and this month’s newsletter takes a look at some suitably umbral offerings!  

ICYMI: The Bread Must Rise is a Nebula Finalist!

I’m thrilled to announce that The Bread Must Rise is a finalist for this year’s Nebula award for game writing.

James and I had a ton of fun writing and coding this weird comedic baking eldritch horror fantasy, and we’re both very honoured to have our work recognized like this!

There are a ton of other great stories, books, and games on the final ballot, as there are every year. I’m especially excited to be sharing space on the list with so many writing friends and acquaintances.

You can watch the official SFWA announcement video here.

Sworn Soldier Series: Historical Horror That’s a Lot of Fun

Recently, I picked up T. Kingfisher’s historical horror novella, What Moves the Dead. 

The book is an unapologetic retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which was enough for me to pick it up. Although I love T. Kingfisher’s writing, so I didn’t need much convincing.

As you might guess from the cover art (pictured here) and the concept, this isn’t the kind of book where everyone lives happily ever after.

But it is fascinating—and fun! 

Set on the shores of a gloomy tarn in a fictional eastern European country in the late 1800s, the story follows Alex Easton, a very voicy narrator called to the Usher estate by a desparate letter from an old friend.

As anyone familiar with Poe might suspect, it doesn’t end well for the Ushers. But getting there is a lot of fun (for the book’s readers, at least).

One thing that added to the fun for me was how Kingfisher plays with pronouns. The language spoken by Easton’s fictional country is described as the worst in the world because it steals bits and pieces from all the other languages it encounters. 

One thing it also has in spades? Pronouns, including specific ones for rocks, God, and soldiers.

This last one is important, because Alex Easton is a sworn soldier, a person who was born female but gave up that birth identity to serve in one of the country’s many ongoing wars. Originally, all the country’s soldiers were male, but because the language has a specific set of pronouns for soldiers (kan), technically anybody can become a soldier. And during the time the book is set, there are many non-male soldiers, known collectively as “sworn soldiers” and viewed with a mix of lurid obsession and terror by the residents of many other countries.

The interplay between Easton’s soldier-identity and the people around kan is incidental at most to the plot of the book, but it adds a whole layer of fascinating subtext in kan interactions with other characters. Plus, kan is just a super-fun character to follow!

If you have gothic sensibilities, love queer retellings of classic works, are the kind of history/literature nerd who’s excited by the word Ruritania, or just want an all-around good time, I highly recommend What Moves the Dead. (As a bonus, the second book in the series, What Feasts at Night, released recently and was also a treat!)

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (Tor Nightfire, 2022)

What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher (Tor Nightfire, 2024)

Perturbator: Horror Synth

This month, I am pleased to suggest Lustful Sacraments by French artist Perturbator.

The synth-based sounds and horror-inspired backdrops of this 2021 album pair wonderfully with gothic horror.

You can listen to the album on YouTube, courtesy of the artist and publisher.

The Heartbeat of the Universe

In other publication news, my Asimov’s Readers’ Choice award winning poem “The Three Laws of Poetics” is included in The Heartbeat of the Universe, a multi-author collection of speculative poetry.

This book has a ton of great poems from the pages of Asimov’s and Analog, with work by amazing poets like Jane Yolen, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Mary Soon Lee, and many, many more!

Sounds good, right?

You can preorder The Heartbeat of the Universe now using this link.

The publisher, Interstellar Flight Press, is throwing a virtual release party at 4pm Pacific Time on April 4th. It’s possible I will be reading from my poem “The Three Laws of Poetics,” so I hope to see you there!

Writing Update

I recently finished up the second chapter of my second Choicescript game, Gigantea: Age of Rot. Huzzah for progress!

I’m hoping to have the first three chapters finished and polished enough by June that I can share a demo during the 2024 Nebula conference, which I’ll be attending online.

Finally, I have a short story collection coming out soon!

That’s called The Butterfly Disjunct after one of my earliest published stories, and it will feature science fiction stories ranging from the hilarious to the heartfelt to the unsetling. Sometimes, individual stories are all three at once.

Watch this space for more details on both the game and the collection. :) 

Thanks for reading. See you soon!

Stewart