Fiction, Poetry, and Games by Stewart C Baker
I like flash fiction. I also like space ships (albeit ones without puppies involved).
So it pleases me to combine the two in my latest publication, “Elements of a Successful Exit Broadcast,” which is now live in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination‘s November/December issue.
It’s super short–about 200 words total–and has some pretty spiffy art to go with it. Go give it a read if you have a spare moment or two. And enjoy!
What would you do if everything you thought was real was ripped away, and you were young again? And what would you do if everything you thought you real was what you wanted back again?
These are the two core questions asked in my story “Fugue in a Minor Key,” which is in the November issue of Galaxy’s Edge.
The story puts us in the head of Katja Maczyk, a young university student who has to answer both when two lab technicians tell her that her husband, her daughter, and her career as an internationally-renowned pianist was all part of a simulation. Katja struggles to cope with what she’s told is reality, and with the help of a newly-budding romance with one of the lab techs starts to think she might just be able to do so. That’s when the hallucinations start up . . .
I call the story “Dicksian” because I was very consciously trying for an overall plot that wouldn’t have been amiss in the works of Phillip K. Dick. I’ve always enjoyed the way his stories played with reality, and found the results fascinating.
Here’s a short excerpt of my story which gets across the feel of the thing:
What they do is sit me in a folding chair in a white-walled room with a single fluorescent bulb on the ceiling. Two techs in white (one short and female, one skinny and male) sit there and tell me this is real, that I was never a world-famous concert pianist, never married and never mourned my husband, and never never never had a daughter.
As such, the skinny one says, it is impossible for her to be in any danger.
Is she in danger? I ask.
Ma’am—
But I don’t let him finish. If she’s all right, I say, I’d like to see her.
Ma’am, the skinny one repeats. You can’t see her. She isn’t real.
Are you the police?
No, the short one says. We’ve been through this before.
We are experimental psychologists, the skinny one says, and you have spent the past eight minutes immersed in a holistic simulation designed to test the human mind’s response to stress.
I know dialogue without quotation marks is a big stumbling block for a lot of people, but in this case I would argue that it plays a big role in adding to the actual feel of the story and its what-is-real core. In the snippet above, for example, “We’ve been through this before.” could be either something the psychologist says, OR something from the viewpoint character.
Anyway, I’m really pleased overall with how the story turned out, and am glad it found a good home.
Go give the rest a read! It’s free until January, and after that available only in the print edition.
Okay… 5 days ago. (insert joke about relativity here)
Interestingly, as Colin Sullivan points out in his intro, both of the flash fiction stories I’ve sold to Nature deal with multiple universes in some way or another.
While my previous story was a humorous take on evil twins and quantum disambiguators, though, this one is a more serious tale about experimental space travel and the potential disasters thereof. But it’s also about the importance of not letting those disasters stop further experimentation. And the even bigger importance of family–however you define it.
On another note, the story is partly inspired by the photo of sari-wearing female employees of ISRO, as I mention in my Future Conditional guest post about the story. Consider this little tale my small way of saying that I think that photo and everything it represents is awesome.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the story!
“Love and Relativity” at Nature Physics
(Oh, and I guess I should mention that it’s supremely nerdy, in that it’s written in the style of an annotated bibliography… Nobody’s perfect, right?)
It’s story release day again! This one is egregiously silly, and details just about what you’d expect.
It’s flash, so I’ll not waste your time summarizing it. Head on over to Flash Fiction Online to read “Concerning your Recent Creation of Sentient Horse-things on the Next Planet Over” right now!
(This is my second time appearing in FFO, and my first since I’ve started reading slush there. Since all submissions are anonymous, slush readers can still submit—we just aren’t allowed to vote on our own work at all. I’ve had several rejections since I started slushing before this sale broke through.)
As I mentioned in a post last year, I was fortunate enough to be selected for inclusion in the latest volume of A New Resonance, the award-winning haiku anthology of new poets put out every year by Red Moon Press.
Fast-forward a few months, and I’ve now received my copies of the anthology. The poems are, as expected, wonderful and varied, making it easy to see why the New Resonance series is so well-received by poets.
In addition to myself, the anthology features: Brad Bennett, Claire Everett, Kate S. Godsey, Cara Holman, P M F Johnson, Gregory Longenecker, Jonathan McKeown, Ben Moeller-Gaa, Beverly Acuff Momoi, Polona Oblak, Thomas Powell, Brendan Slater, William Sorlien, Michelle Tennison, Scott Terrill, and Julie Warther.
I received about 25 copies of the anthology as part of publication, and still have several available to order.
Price is $16 ($1 less than list price), and I’ll throw in free shipping to anywhere in the US, as well as a copy of the chapbook I created just for this occasion, titled Stray Cats. Shipping seems to take between a few days and a week, depending on where you are in the country. (It’s cost-prohibitive to ship books overseas, but if you live somewhere other than the US, e-mail me with your address and I can give you a quote for shipping costs.)
I will also happily sign the chapbook to you, and include an original poem on a topic of your choice.
Here’s the order form if you’d like to get a copy:
Thanks for your support!
In March, I had the pleasure of writing a story for SFComet, a website dedicated to bringing more science fiction to a Chinese audience. I and several other authors were given a theme (“big bang in brain” / 脑中大爆炸) and ten days to write a SF story of between 1500 and 2500 words.
It was a lot of fun, if a little challenging. I ended up with a story set on a generation ship, with an LGBT spy protagonist who has a connection with the ship’s AI inside her head.
The story is called “Masks,” and it’s now available in English as well as in the Chinese translation. Here’s a preview:
Min can tell by the way the man in the lizard mask drums the fingers of one hand on the surface of his desk that he is angry. She avoids the bright green glimmer of his eyes, wishing she were anywhere but here. Wishing she remembered who she was supposed to be.
“This is all you bring me?” the man asks, his voice raspy with distortion. In his other hand he holds the latest chip Min has stolen, heavy with data on Ship’s communications to the other surviving colony ships and its route away from Earth-long-gone.
Min says nothing. She is not strong enough to answer, cut off and alone as she is.
Intrigued? Go read the rest of “Masks” over at SFComet.
Or at least a story I wrote will.
This was my first time writing for a shared world story, and it was quite a bit of fun. My story, “A Solitary Stair,” is about a free-standing staircase with a possibly mystical past.
The Lane itself is a project being put together by Tiny Owl Workshop, an Australian small press which likes to do unusual things. (They once published stories on throw pillows, for instance.) You can read more about the lane, including a few already-published stories, here: http://thelaneofunusualtraders.com/stage-1/
If you’d like to join me in the lane, a submission window for short stories of 1500-3000 words is open until May 31st. I’ll be hoping to submit something myself, as well!
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
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.
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.