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)

Kickstarting Wells

H. G. Wells is probably my favourite genre fiction author of all time, and The War of the Worlds is very possibly my favourite genre novel of all time, and I don't know that either of those facts quite explains why I felt the need - let alone the right! - to come up with a sequel to it.  I mean, I'm not, as a rule, the sort of person who feels the urge to dabble in other writers' creations, or who wonders after every dangling thread in a story I love.  What happens to the narrator of The War of the Worlds after the book ends?  I mean, who cares, right?

The answer, apparently, is that I did, and enough so to write The Last of the Martians: what my good friend and trusted proof reader referred to as a Vietnam-era sequel to Well's classic, perhaps not entirely positively.  The thing is, as powerful as the book as, as chilling as the Martians are, I can't be altogether comfortable with the concept of an enemy that's just so damn alien that there's no hope of ever rationalising with them: that sort of thinking has led us, as a species, into too many dark places over the millenia, and that's never been truer than now.  So the story I wrote was an attempt to square that circle to my own satisfaction, while at the same time staying as true as I could to Wells's style and themes; no act of angry post-modernism this!  I guess my goal was an epilogue to The War of the Worlds that Wells might conceivably have written if he'd come to think that maybe, just maybe, the Martians weren't all and every one of them quite that bad.

Why does any of this matter?  Because I sold The Last of the Martians, that's why.  And more to the point, because the two volume anthology of Wells-ian fiction that it's due to appear in is being kickstarted at this very moment, and if that kickstarter should fail to fund, my story - along with plenty of other dabblings in Wells's many worlds - might not ever see the light of day, which would suck, frankly!  I don't think it's terribly likely to happen though, since the guys at Belanger Books know what they're about, and have been successfully putting out similar (though mostly Sherlock Holmes related until now) collections for a good long while.  And at time of posting, this one's already almost hit its deadline with the better part of a month to go.  So hey, don't fund it to help me out, fund it because it's an exciting project, and because you fancy a couple of volumes' worth of tales devoted to arguably the greatest science fiction writer ever to have lived.  If that sounds at all appealing, you can find the link here.

Short Story News May 2019

As usual these days, the short story news isn't exactly coming thick and fast.  Apparently it's been six months since I had anything to say on that front!  But I figure I've gathered enough to more than justify a post, especially when there are a couple of seriously exciting bits of news to share.

If we're being honest, the two stories I had out over the Christmas period don't fall into that category.  It was nice to have new work released, but not so much so when both suffered from some rather wonky editing.  In the case of new UK-based cyberpunk magazine Write Ahead, I'm happy to put that down to teething troubles, since my story Glamorous Corpses appeared in the very first issue, and the general quality of the fiction and some lovely design work made the editorial slip-ups easier to ignore - though it was tough not to feel sorry for the author whose story appeared with line breaks inserted after every few words!  But these things happen, right?  And I sincerely hope this little 'zine sticks around, because the presentation is terrific.  There have been a couple more issues since, and I'd tentatively recommend picking them up; I get the impression that the folks behind it were keen to learn from what they hadn't got quite right.

I can't be quite so positive about the Bubble Off Plumb collection that Feral Cat Publishers put out.  Honestly, my hopes for this one were muted after some not-so-great experiences in the run up to its release, and the end result is pretty much what I was expecting - though I hadn't guessed how many of the stories would be by the editorial team, so I guess I can still be surprised!  As with any anthology, there are a few good pieces in there, though most would fare better with less typos.  At any rate, I'm hoping my story Cat and Mouse wasn't a low point, and there's a bit of evidence on that front because - and here we finally get to the legitimately good news portion of this post! - it wasn't long before it got picked up for my first ever best-of.  That would be NewCon Press's Best of British Science-Fiction anthology, which should be out pretty soon, and has one heck of a line-up: you can see the wonderful company I'm in here.

Speaking of great company, a bit of news I think I nodded toward last time but couldn't yet come out with was that I've another story in one of those gorgeous anthologies that Flame Tree Publishing keep creating.  This time it's Step Light, which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.  And as ever, the lineup is a mix of newer and classic fiction, which means that, along with numerous fantastic contemporary authors, I've now been published alongside Oscar Wilde and Fyodor Dostoevsky.  I mean, Fyodor goddamn Dostoevsky!  When you talk about wanting to appear alongside your personal favourite writers, you sort of don't expect it to include your actual literary heroes, but thanks to this series I've done awfully well on that front.  You can find the full lineup here, and if you're curious as to where we contributors that aren't long dead got our ideas from you can learn about that here, or if you'd like to discover a bit about influences and writing practices then that would be here.  Since my author copies are apparently in the post, I'm pretty certain this one's already out to buy, and I can't stress enough how fantastic and beautifully made these books are.

Speaking of classic authors, in a post that's lending itself well to neat links between paragraphs, I have managed to sell at least one original piece in recent months, rare as that's becoming, and if Dostoevsky is one of my all time literary heroes then H. G. Wells absolutely tops that list.  Want to learn how to write short genre fiction?  Then read Wells, because no one has ever done a better job of it.  There aren't many authors I'd write what amounts to fan fiction for, let alone dream of creating an unofficial sequel to one of their best known works, but I love the hell out of Wells and The War of the Worlds is one of my all time favourite novels, and somehow that led to my coming up with The Last of the Martians, a follow-up that also has the temerity to challenge some of the basic assumptions in the one of the great SF novels of all time.  Basically, if you're looking for a pacifist epilogue to a novel that literally has the word "war" right there in the title then I've got you covered.  And it'll be appearing in the A Tribute to H. G. Wells anthology from Belanger Books, somewhere toward the back end of the year, with a Kickstarter campaign coming in the meantime.

Weirdly though, given how exciting all of the above is, the sales I was most thrilled for weren't even in English.  I've had a couple of pieces out in translation - I learned recently that my story Stockholm Syndrome has made it into multiple languages, including Spanish and Korean, courtesy of John Joseph Adams and his terrific The Living Dead anthology - but it was only last year that I actually got directly approached by an overseas publisher.  So for the same to happen twice in rapid succession was definitely a shock.

First came The Only Way Out Lies Farther In, in what I take to be an Italian version of the 'zine in which the story first appeared, The Dark, appropriately named Il Buio.  And that was certainly cool, though they did change the title without asking ... I mean, Il Labirinto is fine and all, but it's not half so wordy and pretentious!  But I can't read Italian, and there's a reasonable chance I won't ever be able to read Italian, whereas I've been learning Japanese for the last year and change and I genuinely do hope that one day I'll be able to work my way through the May 2019 issue of Japanese weird fiction venue Nightland Quarterly, as published by Atelier Third.  I got a request from them out of the blue to use The Way of the Leaves, as featured in my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, and I was hardly about to say no, was I?  I've yet to see a copy, but the cover is cool, and I've already learned that my name in katakana comes out as David Terraman, which is a useful thing to know.

And that's it for the moment, though I've vague hopes of devoting a bit more time to short fiction in the second half of the year, and I'm steadily plugging away at a second collection of horror and dark fantasy, which may or may not eventually see the light of day!  I mean, it will, one way or another, I'm just not sure how I get to that point quite yet...