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My stories are now on AnthologyBuilder (which is having a sale!)

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Stewart

I just recently learned of a website called AnthologyBuilder. It’s basically a way to select whatever available stories you want from your favourite authors and bundle them all together into a fancy printed anthology.

Sounds like a neat concept to me, so I added some stories:

Behind the First Years
How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator
Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things
Oubliette
Raising Words

If you like any of those and would like to read them in a shiny print-on-demand anthology together with stories by other authors, you can see my author listing at AnthologyBuilder.

Also, if it is something you want to do, now’s a great time to do it, because from now until September 25th, anthologies are 15% off.

(And, of course, “Behind the First Years” is coming out soon in the Science Fiction Short Stories anthology by Flame Tree Publishing alongside work by new and classic writers. So that’s an option too!)

Podcast Reprint: “Behind the First Years” at StarShipSofa

Posted on September 16, 2015September 16, 2015 by Stewart

My story “Behind the First Years” has been produced as an audio version by the venerable StarShipSofa!

You can listen to it (as well as Bogi Takács‘ excellent “Changing Body Templates”) for free(!) on your electronomagical computationy device of choice via the following link: StarShipSofa No. 402: Stewart C Baker and Bogi Tacáks

(If you like my story and want to pick up a printed copy, it’s one of the many stories in the forthcoming “Science Fiction Short Stories” collection from Flame Tree Publishing. You can pre-order your copy on Amazon or [if you live in the UK] through the Flame Tree site itself.)

Out soon: “Science Fiction Short Stories” anthology from Flame Tree Publishing

Posted on September 15, 2015September 16, 2015 by Stewart

My story “Behind the First Years” will be included in this anthology, which is due out at the end of the month (after a few printing-related delays).

If you’d like to pre-order it ($18.75—a pretty good deal for a fancy hardcover!), here’s the Amazon link: http://amzn.to/1ieyQ5z

If you’re in the UK, you can also order it direct from the publisher at http://www.flametreepublishing.com/Science-Fiction-Short-Stories.html

(And one neat thing about that last link is that it has previews of the contents—including the first page or two of my story!)

The idea behind this anthology is to mix together contemporary and classic SF writers, so I’m sharing the pages with luminaries like Mark Twain(!) and Edgar Allen Poe(!) and Edith Wharton(!) and Nikolai Gogol(!) as well as a few of the many excellent writers I call friends: Keyan Bowes, Beth Cato, Philip Brian Hall, Alexis A. Hunter, Rachael K. Jones, and M. Darusha Wehm.

Update: incidentally, I just learned that the story I have in this anthology is being podcast by StarShipSofa tomorrow. I’ll post a link when it’s available!

Original Fiction, “Concerning your Recent Creation of Sentient Horse-things on the Next Planet Over,” at Flash Fiction Online

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Stewart

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.)

ToC Announcement for “Gothic Fantasy” anthologies, including my story “Behind the First Years”

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Stewart

My story, “Behind the First Years” (originally published in COSMOS Online) will be appearing in print besides Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and a ton of really awesome present-day writers in an upcoming anthology from Flame Tree Publishing.

You can see the full list of authors here (I’m way down at the bottom under ‘science fiction’). I’m especially pleased to be appearing with author friends Keyan Bowes, Beth Cato, Alexis A. Hunter, Rachael K. Jones, and M. Darusha Wehm. Huzzah!

The anthology looks to be pretty slick in terms of production value, and will be a big, shiny hardcover. I’ll post a link once it’s available!

My story “The Butterfly Disjunct” a free read on @QuarterReads this week.

Posted on July 29, 2015August 1, 2015 by Stewart

My short story “The Butterfly Disjunct,” which first appeared in Spark: A Creative Anthology Volume IV (as “Butterflies”), is available to read for free this week only over at QuarterReads.

Go give it a read (if you haven’t already), and sign in to rate it if you like.

My story “Masks” now available in English and Chinese

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Stewart

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.

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.

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!

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.