Tag: short story

Up and Coming: Stories from the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors – Free download!

Posted on by Stewart

The inimitable SL Huang and equally awesome Kurt Hunt have put in some serious hustle and created an anthology containing over a million words of fiction(!) from the authors who are eligible for the Campbell Award this year.

For those not in the know, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer is awarded each year concurrently with the Hugos, and is awarded to a SF author who has had their first professional fiction publication in the past two years. Past winners include luminaries like Lev Grossman, Sofia Samatar, and Wesley Chu, and–the further back in time you go–Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Ted Chiang, CJ Cherryh, and Spider Robinson.

So you know you’re in for a treat with this anthology.

And did I mention that it’s free to download?

Here’s what Lisa has to say about the anthology:

This anthology includes 120 authors — who contributed 230 works totaling approximately 1.1 MILLION words of fiction. These pieces all originally appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the SFF field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next generation of speculative storytelling.

All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016. We hope you’ll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.

This anthology will be offered as a free download through March 31, 2016 only.

You can download the anthology in various formats over at Bad Menagerie: http://www.badmenagerie.com/up-and-coming-stories-from-the-2016-campbell-eligible-writers/

Hey! You can now pre-order Writers of the Future 32, featuring a short story by me.

Posted on by Stewart

As I am pretty sure I have announced multiple times already, I was a first place winner in quarter 2 of the Writers of the Future contest last year.

Well, now it’s this year, which means the book will be coming out soon and my story will be in it.

Indeed, thanks to fellow Writers of the Future winner J.W. Alden‘s eagle eye, I can share some exciting information: Writers of the Future volume 32 is now available for pre-order.

So if you’d like to buy a copy of a book with a short story in it by me (not to mention stories by a bunch of great writers), now’s your chance: Pre-order Writers of the Future volume 32 on Amazon.

There are a lot of awesome stories in the anthology (I’ve read quite a few!), and it will have fantastic art as well—although I haven’t seen any of that yet.

Plus it has a really spiffy cover:
Writers of the Future Volume 32 cover image

My Dicksian story “Fugue in a Minor Key” free to read at Galaxy’s Edge

Posted on by Stewart

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.

Story sale! “The Plumes of Enceladus” to Abyss & Apex

Posted on by Stewart

Thrilled to announce that I have sold “The Plumes of Enceladus,” a roughly 7,000-word science fiction story, to Abyss & Apex. It is by far the “hardest” story of mine to see publication to date. Most of my skiffy is much squishier…

This one was originally written for the Baen Memorial contest back in February of 2013(!), and has lived a long and varied submission life since then, including an “almost” from Giganotosaurus and Future Fire’s Accessing the Future anthology. It’s been through a number of revisions for clarity and scientific accuracy, and I’m very pleased with where it ended up.

The story follows two pilots, Andry (who is disabled) and Jim, as they race to Enceladus to harvest water from its cryovolcanic plumes. They start the race as bitter rivals, but distance from Earth and isolation from the rest of humanities can have a surprisingly mollifying effect. You’ll have to read it to find out the rest.

Anyway, the publication date is October of 2016, by which time I will probably have forgotten I sold the thing. All the same, I’ll post a link when it’s out!

Out today: an Interview and an Anthology

Posted on by Stewart

Actually, both of these things were out yesterday. But today is the new yesterday! Or it will be tomorrow. So: close enough.

The first thing is an interview with me in the Polk County Itemizer-Observer (my local newspaper) about my win in Writers of the Future. I was happy that the journalist agreed to interview me by e-mail, as I do not do well speaking extemporaneously, and probably as a result gave him way too much text to fit into an article. Still, it’s neat to see myself in print this way. Or electronic print, at least: http://www.polkio.com/news/2015/sep/30/writer-future/

The second thing is a shiny, hardcover print anthology my story “Behind the First Years” is in. The release date for that was some time between September 28th and yesterday (I got conflicting information), and if you’d like a copy you can order it here: http://amzn.to/1ieyQ5z (If you’d like a taste of the anthology, you can listen to an audio version of my story on StarShipSofa.)

Podcast Reprint: “Behind the First Years” at StarShipSofa

Posted on 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 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!

Writers of the Future V32 Q2: A winner is me! (With bonus rules clarification!)

Posted on by Stewart

I’m pleased to be able to announce that–after entering the Writers of the Future contest every three months for about four years–I’ve finally managed to break into the winner’s circle! And not just that, the story I submitted for the 2nd quarter this year (Volume 32) managed to snag first place in the quarter.

Woohoo!

If you’ve been following the contest’s blog (or if I have you friended on Facebook), it may seem a bit odd that I’m announcing this on my blog now, about a month behind the official announement.

Part of that delay has just been logistical: I have family visiting, and haven’t had much time to sit down and write anything. Another part, though, is squishy-feelings-related.

In particular, it has to do with the contest’s reason for existence, which is to give “new and amateur writers” a fairly high-profile break-through to pro-writer-dom. Once a person has had four short stories published professionally (i.e. At 6 cents per word and with a high enough circulation—in practical terms, published by an SFWA-qualifying market), they can no longer submit to the contest.

So how do I, who currently have something like 27 stories on my bibliography, still qualify? Heck, I qualify for membership in SFWA, the professioal association of science fiction and fantasy writers. I feel more than a small amount of imposter syndrome at work—if, weirdly enough, in the opposite direction than usual.

The short version is: I didn’t have enough pro-paying short stories published yet to disqualify me.

The long version (quite long!) is below:

A large number of my publications are not at pro rates. Also, the contest does not count flash fiction (1000 words or below) as a short story. Technically, none of the stories on my bibliography are disqualifying, so far as the contest is concerned. This is because of the other fine-print style detail in the rules: the word “published.”

I do have two sales on my bibliography that would count against me: “Fugue in a Minor Key” to Galaxy’s Edge and “Behind the First Years” in a reprint sale to Flametree Publishing’s Gothic Fantasy: Science Fiction anthology.

However, neither of these has actually been published yet, so they don’t count against me as far as Writers of the Future is concerned. Since none of my actually published pro-paying works are longer than flash-length, they don’t either.

But that (to me) feels weird. I like flash fiction, and it’s most of what I write and publish, so I decided to count flash fiction as short stories even if it meant disqualifying myself before I was actually disqualified. (Micro-fiction and other super-short stuff, I didn’t count.)

When I sumitted in April, I had the following three pro-paying pieces of flash fiction published:

“Oubliette,” at Flash Fiction Online (April 2014)
“Little More than Shadows,” at Daily Science Fiction (November 2014)
“Configuring Your Quantum Disambiguator,” at Nature (February 2015)

One below the four publications required by the contest (flash notwithstanding).

After submitting my last entry, I published another two pro-paying pieces of flash in August and September:

“Concerning Your Recent Creation of Sentient Horse-things on the Next Planet Over” at Flash Fiction Online (August 2015)
“Love and Relativity” at Nature Physics (September 2015)

That would put me at five publications at pro rates (but still zero short stories—so far!), over my personal comfort level and what I feel is the spirit of the rules, if not the letter. (Of course, now that I’ve won the thing, I can’t enter again anyway, but even if I’d gotten a form rejection I would have stopped submitting.)

It does make me feel better to know I’m not alone in this. Friend and former winner Martin Shoemaker voiced similar sentiments in a Facebook post recently, and Anaea Lay (ditto friend and former winner) also talks about the weirdness of “backwards imposter syndrome.” (Although in my case, I’m more surprised than having feelings of being too worthy to be worthy.)

I’m in good company, in other words.

Once I’m all the way over the weirdness of reverse-imposter syndrome, I’ll be pretty excited about this win. I’ve been entering the contest for a long time, and even though I’ve proven to myself via other publications that this isn’t a fluke, I definitely appreciate the boost to morale that my fiction is winner-quality. And I’m sure that on a practical level, I’ll learn a lot at the workshop which is part of the prize. I still have more misses than hits, when it comes to submissions-to-sales ratio. Anything that can help with that will definitely be appreciated.

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

Posted on 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 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.