Short Fiction News June 2020

Due mostly to reasons of being crazy busy, I've been pretty lax with getting news out about my short story appearances, and only now do I realise that it's been more than six months since I last posted on the subject, which is all the worse because I actually have a ton of stuff to discuss, and a lot of it really deserved to be properly promoted at the time.  Sorry, publisher folks!

Most exciting for me, because I hardly ever get the time to write and / or edit up new fiction, I've sold a couple of brand new stories.  One of those has already been out, in the first issue of the magazine Hybrid Fiction way back in February.  As the name suggests, Hybrid's gig is fiction that mashes multiple genres together, and my piece was definitely that.  Originally written on spec for an anthology of steampunk ghost stories, the editors of which I guess didn't consider it steampunky or ghosty enough, Ghost Drive ran off with that brief to some mad places, imagining an alt-historical Victorian England waging war against its former colonies and dangerously obsessed with the Matter of Britain.  There's spiritualism and dog-fighting and airships and, in retrospect, this one was probably never going to find a home except in a market that was specifically on the look-out for demented mashups, so no doubt things worked out for the best.

My other new sale is something else entirely, though I suppose it's still not exactly a story that slots neatly into a single genre.  I mean, it's going to be appearing in the fantastic Nightmare - the first market I tried, making for one of the easiest, most satisfying sales I've ever had! - so you'd assume that it's basically horror.  And sure, that's true, but in common with a lot of my horror fiction, it's much more about people and the messes they get involved in inside their own heads than it is about blood and guts.  Not Us is my take on the Invasion of the Body Snatchers template, and I dare say it's rather different from the usual approach.  Beyond that, I'd better keep schtum, because I suspect this one works better if you come at it without too much foreknowledge.  Er, not that it's out yet anyway!  More news as I have it and all that.

The rest is all reprints, but there's been a fair few of them and they're in some exciting places, so I'm not grumbling.  Top of the list has to go to Casualty of Peace - my sort-of-First-World-War sort-of-ghost story - appearing in the March issue of The Dark, in part because it was a rare occasion of being approached for a story and in part because the one I picked is high on my list of personal favourites.  Between this, its original appearance in the sixth Horror Library anthology, and popping up in Flame Tree's Lost Souls collection, I'm really pleased that it's done so well for itself - plus, this time around, it's available to read for free, so go take a look at the link above.

Elsewhere, UK zine The Future Looms has released its first-ever best of, and it contains not one but two of my stories, which happens to be the precise number of stories I've had appear in The Future Looms.  Glamorous Corpses finds reality TV taken to horrifying extremes, then mixes in a hefty dose of cyberpunk noir because why not?  And Life, Without Possibility envisages a future society that's effectively cured death and asks, what do they do with those who don't belong and who want nothing less than to live forever?  Indeed, much like life itself, they're both nasty, bleak and short - but, you know, in a good way!  Anyway, I haven't seen a copy of the collection outside of the proofs, but I've been impressed by the 'zine itself, so if you're into cyperpunk, I'm willing to bet it's worth a look.

Next up, we have my one and only crime short story in the one and only crime anthology I've appeared in - well, okay, mystery anthology, strictly speaking, what with it being called The Black Beacon Book of Mystery and everything!  And Step Light - originally picked up through some mad fluke by the excellent and venerable Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, who still send me a Christmas card to this day - is definitely a mystery, but of a rather convoluted sort.  It's actually more of a why-dunnit, and the misdeed that was misdone isn't clear until right near the end, at which point the whole shebang transforms into something else altogether.  I've only had the opportunity to glance through my contributor copy, but I was impressed by what I saw.  You can find Black Beacon Books here, and there's a brief interview here that I took part in as part of the promotion.

The next one was a real blast from the past: nearly the first magazine I was published in was The Willows, a compendium of classic-style weird tales of the sort I wrote quite a lot of in the early days (enough, anyway, to produce an entire collection out of them!)  I had three stories appear there, The Gate in the Jungle, The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma, and what ended up being titled The God Under the Church, and The Burning Room would have appeared there too had they not closed.  Anyway, out of the blue last year I got an e-mail from editor Ben Thomas asking if I wouldn't mind my three tales appearing in a reprint anthology of all the issues.  I wouldn't have been thrilled at the thought of early work being put out as was, but fortunately all of them had been rejigged in the time since, and Ben was happy to take the more recent versions.  My contributor copy got temporarily mislaid in the postal system, but that made it all the more of a treat when it eventually arrived, because it's awfully impressive.  The presentation is lovely and the thing is absolutely massive; you could bench press the paperback, so I daren't imagine what the hardback weighs!  You can grab either (or both) here, and if classic weird fiction is your bag, the collection's certainly a worthy investment.

And to finish on a high note, I've made it into NewCon Press's Best of British Science Fiction for the second year running!  Last year was cool and all, but that story, Cat and Mouse, as much as I was fond of it and glad to see it reprinted, was an older piece and submitted primarily because it happened to be the one science fiction story I'd had out.  This time around, I got to go with a piece I legitimately think is one of the better science fiction stories I've produced and just maybe deserves to be in the sort of fabulous company these collections provide.  Parasite Art originally appeared in Interzone, and that makes sense because it's a very Interzone-y sort of story.  My good friend and beta reader Tom Rice's response to it was "You were really channelling Phillip K Dick that day!" which is either the nicest praise or the least scathing criticism I've ever had.  It's a piece about art, and creativity, and gatekeepers, and possibly me trying to work out all of my many issues with those subjects ... but, you know, it also has a bunch of weird aliens in it, because sci-fi.  The book's out in mid-July and available for pre-order, and as ever with the NewCon anthologies I've been a part of, the line-up's one I'm thrilled to be associated with.

Short Story News November 2019

I don't think I can honestly say anymore that it's been a bad year for short fiction, I've had a bit too much stuff out for that; a story a month since back in May, it seems, now that I bother to check!  Okay, it's certainly been among the less profitable, and that does suck when you're trying to keep the wolf from the door, but on the other hand I've had work in some exciting markets, and perhaps, with my focus now almost entirely on novels and novellas, that's the most I can ask for?

For example, it's hard to feel really bad about a year that included my first ever appearance in a best-of anthology; I've mentioned it before, but now that the book's actually out, I guess I get to be excited about NewCon Press's Best of British Science Fiction 2018 collection all over again, and how my story Cat and Mouse is sitting alongside tales by a bunch of the best UK writers working in the genre today.

Mind you, as much as I admire those folks, none of them can hold a candle to my favourite genre author of all time, the mighty H. G. Wells, an author I revere so highly that I basically wrote H. G. Wells fan-fiction in the shape of my (obviously unofficial!) War of the Worlds follow-up The Last of the Martians.  The story was a real labour of love; I only realised how much so when I went to try and sell it and realised how niche it was.  So thank goodness a two-volume anthology of Wells-inspired fiction should come along, and that volume one of A Tribute to H. G. Wells was devoted entirely to Wells's masterpiece.  I'm yet to get my contributor copy, but I had a glance over a friend's and it certainly seems well worth checking out.

Perhaps the thing I'm most excited by, though, is getting another story into Interzone, after my first appearance way back in the January 2014 issue.  I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that Interzone is one of the finest and longest-lived genre magazines on the planet, and it's almost unquestionably the most stunningly presented, so it's a joy to be inside its covers once again.  And I'm all the more glad that it's this story, Parasite Art, a piece I consider to be high among the best science-fiction I've written.  It's also the rare occasion where I use fiction to talk, even obliquely, about creativity; I've always been determined not to do that whole Stephen King "yes, all my protagonists are writers, but they're not me" thing, but I guess I also had some ideas that I really needed to work through around the forcedly collaborative nature of getting art out into the world, and wrapping them up amid crazy far-future SF seemed the most sensible way to go about it.

Speaking of crazy far-future SF - no, that's a rubbish link, my last story isn't crazy at all, it's just desperately bleak.  I've been struggling to unload Life Without Possibility for a long while now, not I don't think because it's rubbish but more likely because it's pretty damn unremitting.  I mean, the protagonist is in prison on multiple life sentences, for very deserved reasons, and they're if anything the victim of what takes place, something made worse by the fact that the society they inhabit imagines it's doing them a favour.  I've always been intrigued by notions of forgiveness and repentance and how that ties in (or totally doesn't) with how our punitive systems function, and this story digs into some of the least comfortable aspects of those themes.  It's not fun, but hopefully it's thought-provoking, and I was pleased indeed when UK 'zine Write Ahead / The Future Looms agreed to take it off my hands.  This is my second appearance there, after having a piece in their debut issue, and I'm pleased to report that the teething troubles I mentioned back then have definitely been sorted.  This time around was a good experience, the end result is beautifully presented, and I'm happy to recommend these guys as an exciting market to check out, both from a writerly and a readerly perspective.  Seriously, take a look!  Here's some links...

Write Ahead / The Future Looms
A Tribute to H. G. Wells anthology (on Amazon)
The Best of British Science Fiction 2018 (on Amazon)
Interzone 284 (on Amazon)