There’s a lot going on this month, and here’s tomorrow night’s plan: Cole Sarar’s SciFi Reading Hour at the Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis!
That’s right, 7:00 tomorrow, cool SF stories by me and Cole Sarar, read with specially composed musical accompaniment by Martin Law! Come on out to the Bryant Lake Bowl if you’re local, it’s going to be a good time!
I’m happy to say that one of last year’s stories, “And Every Galatea Shaped Anew,” will be appearing in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year 2025. You can see the full table of contents and how to preorder here!
New story out in Strange Horizons today! Scarcely Gone is a thing I haven’t done much of: it’s a ghost story. In this case it’s a ghost story with a John Denver title: “he’d rather play his banjo in the morning when the moon is scarcely gone” from “I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado.” That makes this one of a random series of stories I’ve written from fragments of my dad’s music, which are not linked in any other way except that their titles came from singing artists Dad loved around the house.
(This is why, incidentally, “the story behind the story” is often so hard to write: because “how did you come to write this story?” often has a beginning like “well, when I was preverbal my parents listened to a bunch of James Taylor, so….”)
Anyway, hope you enjoy my foray into the world of ghost stories!
Good morning! I hope you had nice dreams last night! Here’s a new story from Sunday Morning Transport, The Seed of a New Dream. May you find your own dreams…and your own way to work around them….
As always, I am nowhere near reading everything, so please feel free to recommend more lovely things in the comments.
The Dream of Jeannie, Marie Brennan (Strange Horizons)
Expendable Me, P.A. Cornell (Gavagai)
Hell Is Empty, J.R. Dawson (Lightspeed)
This Is Not My Timeline, J.R. Dawson (Reactor)
Remade, Reshaped, Remembered, Sydney Paige Guerrero (Otherside)
The Stone’s Choice, Anaea Lay (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
obsolesce, Macey Levington (Otherside)
In the Foothills, Rajiv Moté (Reckoning)
The Best of Intentions, Mari Ness (Lightspeed)
The Mermaid Speaks of Social Justice from the Bathtub, Nico Martinez Nocito (Strange Horizons)
Once, I returned Tulip, Once I became, C.P. Nwankwo (Reckoning)
Reap the Rules, Sonya Taaffe (Reckoning)
Song, Skin, Sea, Tamara Vardomskaya (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
A Mermaid Looks at 40, Fran Wilde (Uncanny)
Welcome to Heroism, John Wiswell (Uncanny)
Immigrant Girl from the End of the World, Hannah Yang (Uncanny)
This is more partial even than usual, because I’ve had some download problems that I’ve since fixed. But we can let that filter out to the second quarter; time waits for etc. etc.
This Is Not a Love Poem, Alexandra Dawson (Reckoning)
I Met You On the Train, J. R. Dawson (Uncanny)
The Doorkeepers, A. T. Greenblatt (Uncanny)
Unsettled Nature, Jordan Kurella (Apex)
Straw Gold, Mari Ness (Small Wonders)
No Kings/No Soldiers, A.M. Tuomala (Uncanny)
Blade Through the Heart, Carrie Vaughn (Reactor)
Antediluvian, Rem Wigmore (Reckoning)
New story out in Clarkesworld: Person, Place, Thing! This was such a fun voice for me to fall into writing, and it ended up surprising me with how many Muppet references it wanted. Usually I am opposed to “I am but a servant of the muse” claptrap from writers, but when that muse is demanding aliens who have very earnestly learned from mid-to-late period Henson…well, what am I to do?
Of course I hope you’ve enjoyed my short fiction and poetry (and nonfiction!) this year. But other people have been absolutely lighting the place up as well, and here are my recommendations for speculative short fiction and poetry for 2025. Even I can’t read everything, so please do not take this as a comprehensive list! I’m sure there’s great stuff out there I’ve missed, and if you want to comment with it, that’s great. Spread the joy.
Heritage/Speaker | Hablante/Herencia, Angela Acosta (Samovar)
The Witch and the Wyrm, Elizabeth Bear (Reactor)
Thirteen Swords That Made a Prince: Highlights From the Arms & Armory Collection, Sharang Biswas (Strange Horizons)
Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River Hymn), Leah Bobet (Reckoning)
Watching Migrations, Keyan Bowes (Strange Horizons)
Bestla, James Joseph Brown (Kaleidotrope)
Mail Order Magic, Stephanie Burgis (Sunday Morning Transport)
With Only a Razor Between, Martin Cahill (Reactor)
As Safe As Fear, Beth Cato (Daikajuzine)
And the Planet Loved Him, L. Chan (Clarkesworld)
“To Reap, to Sow,” Lyndsey Croal (Analog Mar/Apr 25)
Atomic, Jennifer Crow (Kaleidotrope)
Flower and Root, J. R. Dawson (Sunday Morning Transport)
Six People to Revise You, J. R. Dawson (Uncanny)
The Place I Came To, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (Lightspeed)
Understudies, Greg Egan (Clarkesworld)
All That Means or Mourns, Ruthanna Emrys (Reactor)
Holly on the Mantel, Blood on the Hearth, Kate Francia (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
The Jacarandas Are Unimpressed By Your Show of Force, Gwynne Garfinkle (Strange Horizons)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gorgon, Gwynne Garfinkle (Penumbric)
The Otter Woman’s Daughter, Eleanor Glewwe (Cast of Wonders)
In the Shells of Broken Things, A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld)
In Connorville, Kathleen Jennings (Reactor)
Michelle C. Jin, Imperfect Simulations (Clarkesworld)
What I Saw Before the War, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Reactor)
The Name Ziya, Wen-yi Lee (Reactor)
Barbershops of the Floating City, Angela Liu (Uncanny)
Kaiju Agonistes, Scott Lynch (Uncanny)
The Loaf in the Woods, David Marino (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
One by One, Lindz McLeod (Apex)
10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills (Uncanny)
Everyone Keeps Saying Probably, Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)
Liecraft, Anita Moskát (trans. Austin Wagner) (Apex)
The Orchard Village Catalog, Parker Peevyhouse (Strange Horizons)
Lies From a Roadside Vagabond, Aaron Perry (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
Last Tuesday, for Eternity, Vinny Rose Pinto (Imagine 2200)
The Horrible Conceit of Night and Death, J. A. Prentice (Apex)
The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed (Reactor)
Ghost Rock Posers F**k Off, Margaret Ronald (Sunday Morning Transport)
Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way, Benjamin Rosenbaum (Reactor)
No One Dies of Longing, Anjali Sachdeva (Strange Horizons)
Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything, Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots)
Orders, Grace Seybold (Augur)
Unbeaten, Grace Seybold (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens, Rachel Swirsky (Reactor)
“Holy Fools,” Adrian Tchaikovsky (Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers)
A Random Walk Through the Goblin Library, Chris Willrich (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“An Asexual Succubus,” John Wiswell (Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers)
Phantom View, John Wiswell (Reactor)
Brooklyn Beijing, Hannah Yang (Uncanny)
Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War, Caroline Yoachim (Uncanny)
Coming up on the end of the year, and here’s what I’ve enjoyed in short fiction and poetry! Year end summation post to come.
Heritage/Speaker | Hablante/Herencia, Angela Acosta (Samovar)
Bestla, James Joseph Brown (Kaleidotrope)
Atomic, Jennifer Crow (Kaleidotrope)
Flower and Root, J. R. Dawson (Sunday Morning Transport)
The Place I Came To, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (Lightspeed)
Understudies, Greg Egan (Clarkesworld)
All That Means or Mourns, Ruthanna Emrys (Reactor)
Michelle C. Jin, Imperfect Simulations (Clarkesworld)
The Loaf in the Woods, David Marino (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
Liecraft, Anita Moskát (trans. Austin Wagner) (Apex)
The Orchard Village Catalog, Parker Peevyhouse (Strange Horizons)
The Horrible Conceit of Night and Death, J. A. Prentice (Apex)
Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way, Benjamin Rosenbaum (Reactor)
No One Dies of Longing, Anjali Sachdeva (Strange Horizons)
A Random Walk Through the Goblin Library, Chris Willrich (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
Phantom View, John Wiswell (Reactor)
I’ve mentioned here before that one of my big projects this year is my involvement with The Vertigo Project, which now has a webpage so the rest of you can see what we’ve been doing. Earlier today I facilitated the first creative therapy-style writing workshop through that group, and it was really lovely–and is just the tip of the iceberg on what this group is doing.
Specifically, you can now read all the new work they’ve commissioned from me! Friends, it’s a lot. It’s journaling prompts for people who would like to use writing to process some of their own vertigo experiences. But also it’s the following stories and poems:
Advice for Wormhole Travelers (story), safe conduct through strange new worlds
Club Planet Vertigo (poem), this is not the dance I wanted to do
Greetings from Innerspace (poem), my orbits are eccentric
The Nature of Nemesis (poem), me and Clark Kent know what’s what
On the Way Down (poem), falling hard
Preparation (poem), sometimes we’re just literal, okay
She Wavers But She Does Not Weaken (story), when the waves hit you even on dry land, it’s good to have someone who’s willing to swim against the current for you
The Torn Map (story), rewriting the pieces of the former world into something new
The main page also has links to some of the other aspects of the project, which includes a nonfiction book, dance, puppetry, a podcast with a physical therapist, and more. Please feel welcome to explore it all.