Tag: time travel

New Stories in Translunar Travelers Lounge, Nature, and Little Blue Marble

Posted on by Stewart

I have two new flash fiction pieces and one longer short story out in the virtual wild this month. Two are fairly depressing near-future SF stories that involve climate change and the third is an off-the-rails time travel romp. So that’s fun?

How to Break Causality…

First up, in new magazine Translunar Travelers Lounge, is the fun one of the batch, “How to Break Causality and Write the Perfect Time Travel Story.”

What do you do when a future version of yourself shows up with a time machine while you’re struggling through a first draft? Steal her time machine for inspiration, obviously! This one should appeal to time travel fans, writers, and secret time travellers who have accidentally set causality reeling while trying to convince their former future self not to go back in time to tell their original past self to steal their original future self’s time machine.

I mean… We’ve all been there, right?

I’m joined in the table of contents by friends Aidan Doyle and L Chan, along with a bunch of other authors I’m looking forward to reading. If you have $3 to spare, please consider purchasing an ebook copy of the magazine so they can stick around and publish more issues. We need more fun SFF in our lives!

Three Tales the River Told

Next up, in Nature magazine’s “Futures” feature, is “Three Tales the River Told,” a fairly bleak little story about the effect Anthropocene climate change could have on our vital, life-giving rivers.

Siu Fan wants to be a star. But when she takes a contract that will get her new fans–and her sent to the environmentally hostile surface world to hike a dry riverbed–the experience will change far more than her follower count.

This is my fourth time in Nature and it’s always a thrill to be in such a widely-circulated, well-respected magazine. As is traditional, I wrote a blog post which talks about the inspiration for the story so be sure to give that a read after you’ve read the story itself!

“Three Tales a River Told” came from–among other places, a title. Over at Codex Writers Group, Vylar Kaftan sometimes runs a “title rummage sale,” where you pick a title supplied by another author and write a story to it. In this case, the title was written by Aimee Ogden. Thanks, Vylar and Aimee!

The Colours of Europa, the Colours of Home

“The Colours of Europa, the Colours of Home” (cw: parent dealing with death of a child) is the third new story out there, in Canadian climate change magazine Little Blue Marble.

Yihan lives on Ling-Xian station, working on a scientific mission scanning Europa’s sub-surface ocean for exotic microbes and avoiding thoughts of home as much as she can. Will a message from her mother–and another from her sole surviving daughter–finally help her put her guilt about the past at rest and return home?

Little Blue Marble is a great magazine, and relies on its supporters to keep putting out work that centers our changing climate. You can support their mission here.

What Else am I Doing?

Still plugging away at the novel, sigh! The summer was largely a wash–we sold our house and moved into a new one, and that took up a lot of time. That, and a few setbacks in terms of “Hey let’s completely change the 3rd act of the novel” and “Hey let’s also completely change the 2nd act what could happen HA HA” means I still have a lot of work to do. But I’m still aiming at the end of the year to be finished, so … buckling down!

Reprint: Proceedings from the First and Only Sixteenth Annual One-Woman Symposium on Time Manipulation

Posted on by Stewart

My weird and somewhat surreal flash fiction piece, “Proceedings from the First and Only Sixteenth Annual One-Woman Symposium on Time Manipulation,” is up today as a reprint at Flash Fiction Online!

This story first appeared late last year in Time Travel Tales, which you can buy on Amazon as an e-book or in print. The anthology has a bunch of excellent stories by other authors as well as mine, so if you like time travel, go check that out as well!

And—speaking of anthologies—a reminder that my historical fantasy story “Kuriko” is out now in Guardbridge Books’s Tales of the Sunrise Lands, and available on Amazon as well as through the Guardbridge Books website.

I have a new story out today in Chappy Fiction’s Time Travel Tales

Posted on by Stewart

Time manipulation is a delicate, difficult practice. First you’ve got to will (be/have been) get/got/getting the right verb tense (or just give up and go with simple present). And then there’s the matter of simultaneous n-breaks—a tricky tactic to stretch and twist time back on itself, allowing for multiple iterations of the same person to exist in the same room at the same time for an academic conference. Not to mention hangovers.

What am I even talking about? My latest published story, “First and Only Sixteenth Annual One-Woman Symposium on Time Manipulation,” which is out today in Chappy Fiction’s Time Travel Tales anthology.

Will Dr. Mirai and her various iterations make revolutionary breakthroughs as they tinker with time, or will they break the universe and suffer the consequences? If you want to find out, you’ll have to snag the anthology: Time Travel Tales on Amazon, available in Kindle and paperback forms!

The anthology has a lot of other great stories on offer, as well, from the metafictional to the traditional, the academic to the adventurous.

Just take a gander at the names which grace the table of contents:

Brian Trent, Catherine Wells, Sean Williams, Stewart C Baker, Robert Silverberg, HL Fullerton, Auston Habershaw, Brenda Anderson, SL Huang, Tony Pi, Steve Simpson, K Kazul Wolf, Rasheedah Phillips, Martin L Shoemaker, Alter Reiss, David Steffen, John A Frochio, Alisa Alering, Desmond Warzel, and Rosemary Claire Smith.

Two new stories and one reprint out this month

Posted on by Stewart

I’ve somehow neglected to post about this, but I have two original science fiction stories and one reprint out this month (plus a translation of the reprint, interestingly enough).

The first story is “Just Another Night at the Abandoned Draft Bar and Grill” in the May issue of Galaxy’s Edge. This story is a meta-fictional dig at some of the harmful, clichéd stereotypes which tend to permeate less-than-stellar writing—it features a woman named Mary-Sue, a black man named Alphonse, and a Chinese man who’s so much of a stereotype he barely exists beyond his peasant hat.

You can read “Just Another Night at the Abandoned Draft Bar and Grill” at Galaxy’s Edge for free through the end of June, along with stories by Tina Gower, George RR Martin(!!), Kij Johnson(!!!), and many other super-talented writers.

The second original piece is my story “Images Across a Shattered Sea,” which was my first-place story from Writers of the Future volume 32! I like to tell people it’s an anti-war story about post-apocalyptic Morocco, time travel, and the Open Access movement. (Wait, what?!)

Here’s a teaser:

The air on the cliffs above the Shattered Sea was hot as a furnace and twice as dry. Still, Driss couldn’t suppress a shiver at the way the shimmering message-globe moved through the sky, dozens of meters above the churning, black waves of the sea.

He had seen the globes before, of course, but only after they’d been captured and put on display in the village’s little museum. It didn’t quite seem real, the way the little ball bobbed and danced on the breeze, drifting ever so slowly towards Fatima where she stood atop a heap of boulders at the edge of the cliff.

“Here it comes,” she said, waving her net back and forth as she hopped from foot to foot.

Her eagerness just made the dangers of the place worse, Driss thought. It was as if she didn’t care that one misstep would send her tumbling to her death. He himself would have been happy never to have seen the coast in person. It had always been a deadly, desolate place, even in the days when the message-globes blew across the sea in huge clouds which blotted out the sun. And those days were long since past: They had seen only three globes during their two week hike, and this was the first that had come anywhere near them.

“Gotcha!” Fatima leapt into the air, hooking the bubble-like ball in her net and pulling it down from the sky. “What do you think is in it?”

The story (like all others in the anthology) is gorgeously illustrated, in my case by the talented Seattleite Paul Otteni.

You can buy a copy of Writers of the Future through various retailers, all listed at http://www.wotf32.com along with information about the anthology’s writers and illustrators. If you want to try it out before you buy, I have electronic samplers to give away. E-mail me and I’ll send you one! :)

On the reprint front, my Nature story “Love and Relativity” is now up at Flash Fiction Online, along with three wonderful original stories by Gary Emmette Chandler, Lynette Mejía, and Evan Dicken.

“Love and Relativity” is also due to be translated into Croatian by fanzine Eridu later this month, which is pretty cool.

What the Time Traveller Said When She Appeared on Her Own Doorstep (“Last Words” Series)

Posted on by Stewart

We’ve all been there. Sitting at home, minding our own business, when someone knocks at the door and turns out to be a future version of yourself who’s dead or dying.

Er, wait. What?!

What the Time Traveller Said When She Appeared on Her Own Doorstep Half-Drowned and Bleeding from Three Stab Wounds, Six Gunshot Wounds, with Her Clothing on Fire

by Stewart C Baker

“You must never go to—!”

Let this be a lesson to us all: When you’re time travelling back to the past to warn yourself of your impending doom, don’t bother with full sentences in case you die before you finish them.