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Asimov Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
TK: I can probably thank my eleven-year-old son for sparking this story. He’s a great builder of toy robots and spends a lot of his time creating these elaborate, complex figures out of plastic building sets, and they fold up in interesting ways, and have all kinds of strange body plans and moving parts. One day he was showing me what he’d built, and it was just great, this robot with all these arms and legs, and a little swiveling rib cage that opened up and had another robot inside. He asked me if I’d written any robot stories. I hadn’t, really. So I decided to write one.
I didn’t really have an idea beyond that at first, just an intention to write something about robots, at some point, but sometimes if you open yourself up to a subject, the story will just kind of unfold for you later when you’re not really thinking about it, and that’s what happened in this case. Later I got to thinking about consciousness, and the ways observation impacts quantum mechanics, and I realized that those things might have an interesting intersection with the idea of AI, so I started noodling on a beginning to see if it took me anywhere. I think I originally wanted the story to have a timeless feel to the language, which would maybe make it feel a bit like a Grimm’s fairy tale. The story went in its own weird direction once I started, and it didn’t end up anything like a fairy tale at all, really, which just shows that I’m either horrible at doing what I intend to do, or that stories have a mind of their own.
AE: Is this story part of a larger universe, or is it stand-alone?
TK: This story is a stand-alone, though now that I’ve written it, I can imagine other stories could spin off from here. It might be the kind of thing I return to again. I’m just finishing up a new story that’s actually in the same universe as a story I wrote ten years ago, so you never know.
AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
TK: I can usually relate to all the characters in a story at least a little, or I have trouble writing them. There are certain universals that are good to tap into. As a parent you have a burning fire inside you to protect your children, no matter what. And as a child, you have this desire to believe that things will be okay no matter how scary they seem. Both those conditions are things I can relate to, and they provided a kind of pivot for the story to circle.
AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
TK: Titles are tricky. This one came to me pretty quick, before I’d even finished the first page, which was a nice relief. There’s nothing worse than finishing a story and not having any idea what to call it. In this case, the odd word combo just popped into my head as I was writing, and I thought it might make a good handle for the story. When I told people the name, they didn’t hate it, so that was that. It’s nice when a title has an interesting juxtaposition of words.
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AE: What made you think of Asimov’s for this story?
TK: I read a lot of Asimov’s robots when I was a kid, so sending a robot story to Asimov’s felt pretty cool. Like coming full circle.
AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
TK: I think you just kind of stumble upon your recurrent themes when you write. I never intend to aim at certain themes, but when you stack all your stories next to each other, there they are staring back at you. And then you’re like, oh, that’s what I write about, I guess. The patterns pop out. I try not to dig into the reasons too much or I might accidentally change something.
AE: What is your process?
TK: Whatever the most efficient way to write is, I’m sure I’m not doing it. I’m pretty ADD and tend to jump around a lot, and work on multiple projects at the same time, switching between novels and short stories. At some point, I usually find myself staring at the screen, down the home stretch, and I think to myself that I’m finishing the project before I get up from the chair, no matter what. It’s like a vow. So then I switch from being pretty scattered to having this almost pathological focus. That often means that I end up writing all night, at a twelve-hour stretch, and send stuff off as a submission at seven a.m.
AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
TK: On the fiction side of things, I have a finished novel in the hopper now which I’m trying to figure out what to do with. It’s a far-future post-apocalypse that I spent a couple of years writing. I’m also writing for a video game that I’m really excited about.
AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
TK: This week, my answer would be that Mars show on Netflix. I’ve been binge watching that thing, and I’m practically overcome with grief that I was born too soon to get the chance to be a part of something like that in real life. I love the way they mix real science with the fictional aspects of that SFnal universe. It’s a tough balance to strike, but they really pulled it off.
AE: What SFnal predictions do you find yourself thinking about for the future?
TK: SFnal predictions are tough and I have a tendency to think about the negative南京易安联 SSL VPN 远程连接系统:欢 迎 使 用 远 程 访 问 系 统 软 件 用户名 密 码 是否要保存用户名 登 录
AE: What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?
TK: I’ve done a lot of different jobs over the years, starting with a paper route at age ten. I detassled corn in high school, and painted houses. I washed dishes at a truck stop, and shoveled manure in a zoo. I’ve been a steel worker in the Indiana mills—a job I did for years—and then a lab tech at a research lab, and most recently, a video game writer in Seattle. All these different jobs have had an effect on me, I’m sure, though it’s hard to say what, exactly. Work is how I tend to understand the world, so it helps me center my stories, I think, if I know the kind of work that’s being done by the characters. In some stories, that work might just be survival. But that still counts. It’s always job number one.
AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
TK: If folks would like, they can check out my website at http://tedkosmatka.us/.
I have links there to a couple of novels available, if anyone wants to try my longer fiction.
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Below, Peter Wood answers the question, “What makes an apocalypse story worth following to the ends of the Earth?” Throughout are many examples you might want to add to your reading list, but first—be sure to check out Peter’s story, “Why I’ll Never Get Tenure,” in our July/August issue [on sale now]!
by Peter Wood
Growing up, nobody liked science fiction in my house except me. My parents had exactly one science fiction book. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957). I read it in high school and, to this day, still think it’s the best book about the apocalypse ever written.
With a shout out to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Douglas Adams classic (1979).
Both have the world ending in fairly believable fashions.
What makes a great end of the world story? No preaching. Great characters. A plausible enough premise. And a plot that doesn’t insult the reader’s intelligence.
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In On the Beach, a nuclear war has wiped out the Northern Hemisphere, and radioactive winds will soon eradicate everywhere else. The residents of a small Australia town have, at most, months left. Full-fledged characters make the nightmare scenario all too real. And Shute doesn’t resort to preaching. The scene where a nuclear sub discovers that radio transmissions from North America have been caused by a soda bottle caught in a set of blinds, not survivors, speaks volumes and is a real kick in the teeth.
The movie version (1959) stars Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire and is rightfully considered a classic. Although snubbed by the Oscars, it is worth viewing still. Just read the book first.
Then there’s Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank (1959). A limited nuclear war cuts off a small Florida town from the rest of the world. Frank, though, presents the day after the holocaust as a rollicking adventure. Yeah, it’s not all peaches and cream, but Frank’s characters seem to welcome the apocalypse. They can finally achieve their potential, unfettered by civilization’s restraints.
I’ll accept almost any premise for an apocalyptic tale. Virus. War. Alien invasion. I draw the line at zombies, though. I don’t understand the obsession with zombies.
The oddest take on nuclear Armageddon has to be Robert Heinlein’s Farmham’s Freehold. (1955). The bomb shelter holding tough guy Farmham and his long suffering family gets shot hundreds of years into the future somehow by the force of the exploding nuclear bombs. Don’t ask. He discovers, to his horror, that Black people now run the planet, thanks to the atomic war that largely left Africa alone. Never mind that the new ruling class has apparently had peace for dozens of generations; Farmham wants WASPs running the joint. He finds a way to travel back to the past where his goal isn’t to prevent the nuclear war. He can live with that. He just doesn’t want those uppity Africans in charge. A very racist book that has not aged well.
A plague is also a good cause for the apocalypse. Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912), George Stewart’s Earth Abides (1959), and The Stand (1978) by Stephen King are well known examples.
King’s novel might be my favorite of the plague subgenre. A fatal miscue at a military lab releases a deadly virus that kills over 99% of humanity. What’s not to like? Great characters, a slam dunk premise, and an epic battle between the massed forces of good and evil. And King avoids my least favorite trope of the fictional apocalypse. The characters neither devolve into savagery nor turn on each other. They work together and act pretty damned sensibly in trying to keep civilization afloat.
Aside from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), I can’t really think of many examples of this trope that works. Ray Bradbury pulls it off in The Smile. Maybe the Mad Max franchise. 免费全球加速器 (2012-2014), the abysmal science fiction series, would have us believe that everything would collapse and warring bands would take over just because the power stopped working. Uh huh.
The Scarlet Plague has people just lose interest in reading and learning for no apparent reason. Same with Earth Abides. Neither book justifies why people would do that except to imply that somehow it’s inevitable. This begs the question of how civilization and modern technology ever developed in the first place.
Carmac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) pulls it off. I buy his savages making life unpleasant for everything for three reasons. One, the prose is perfect. Two, the story is kinda allegory and doesn’t need to be taken seriously. And, three, he, like King, balances out the bad guys with good guys who are just trying to raise their families and keep the fires of civilization going.
Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John tells several simultaneous narratives covering from the start of the plague to the survivors trying to cope. She presents a world where people don’t turn on each other just for the hell of it. Aside from a religious cult that rocks the boat, everybody tries to get along. And to her credit, St. John presents the religious zealots as fully developed, sometimes sympathetic, characters with back stories. Imagine that.
I’ll accept almost any premise for an apocalyptic tale. Virus. War. Alien invasion. I draw the line at zombies, though. I don’t understand the obsession with zombies. A world where dead bodies can survive indefinitely without breathing or food makes about as much sense as cars tooling up and down the highways without engines or fuel.
I guess it’s unfair of me to pick on zombies when the science in most of my stories is balderdash. And Phillip Dick’s 1953 apocalyptic novella, Second Variety, has a preposterous plot when you think about it, but it’s such a masterpiece of Cold War paranoia that I don’t care.
I like the take of the film 28 days Later (2002), where survivors aren’t dealing with zombies. They’re fighting infected people who are very much alive, but act like zombies. There’s plenty of idiot plot to go around, but the film at least tries to present a plausible science.
My favorite zombie story is I am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson. The last man of Earth deals with plague victims who have mutated into zombie-like creatures. But they’re not caricatures. They can think and don’t have that 免费全球加速器 death wish of many movie and literary monsters. The hero behaves in a very logical way and, although not an educated man, he painstakingly tries to understand the science of these new humans. Don’t waste your time with the movies by the way. All three versions stupidly ignore the plot of the novella. The Vincent Price version, The Last Man on Earth (1964), comes closest, but the book is still far superior. Charlton Heston at least makes 免费全球加速器 (1971) fun. I am Legend (2007), the Will Smith version, is just insulting, with an ending that undermines the entire movie.
The characters in the novella I am Legend, even the zombies, act like people. They have backstories, flaws, and an inherent logic that made me want to keep reading. I guess that’s what it boils down to. Give me good solid characters and I’ll follow a story anywhere. Even to the end of the world.
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Deborah L. Davitt’s poem “Vintage Years” [in our July/August issue, available now], pairs regional differences between grapes with trigonometry, like a good red wine paired with—not dinner, but time. Below, Deborah talks with us about poetic form, choosing between the words “rhyme” and “rime,” the importance of contrast, and the contents of her bookshelf.
Asimov’s Editor: How did this poem come to you?
DLD: This piece is a triolet, a short, rhymed French form that I oddly find myself fond of. When you’re writing form poetry, I like to say that form is your coauthor. You have to be flexible, and you might not get quite to the place you thought you were going, but you might wind up someplace you needed to be. (Yes. Form poetry is Zen navigation, as in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.)
In this case, I started by outlining the form, and came up with the first line: “Rolling it on the tongue like red wine” and then I outlined the remaining lines with their rhyme scheme and some placeholder words that would fit that rhyme scheme.
And then I unfocused my mind a bit and started looking for what would work in the space I had. I knew I wanted to write about time—it’s a common theme for my work, whether it’s history, futurism, or how time’s passage shifts and shapes us. And once I had the wine metaphor, I figured I had to hit the kinds of things that wine-drinkers look for. Color. Taste. Mouth-feel.
I was particularly pleased when I was able to put a word like 手机网络加速器免费 (the notion that you can taste the environmental difference between grapes grown in one region, as compared to another) in the same line as sine (a mathematical concept that has to do with graphing trigonometry, in an endless pattern of waves), because contrast is one of the biggest tools in my writing toolkit, and I will use it mercilessly when I have the opportunity.
Triolets demand repetition as part of their structure; the first line repeats three times, the second twice, so you have to make them as vivid as possible, and take the opportunity to go for a major turn or shift of imagery in the second stanza.
In this case, I had the word rime as a placeholder at the end of the second stanza, and also rhyme. If I’d aimed for rhyme, the poem could have become a poem about poetry itself, and I considered that briefly, but if I’m going to go meta, I’d prefer to make the whole piece meta. So I focused on rime, an older term for ice. And still thinking about the concept of 网络加速器 time, appreciating it like some exotic cocktail, I hit on rolling it on the palate tinged with entropy. Again, I like throwing old words up against newer ones, the fantastic paired with the scientific.
Because contrast is important. Pairing concepts for new synthesis is important. It opens the mind up, at least a little, to new ideas. Also, it’s fun, which a triolet really needs to be.
AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
DLD: Poetry titles usually come after the writing is done. In this case, it was a fun little pun on the notion of a vintage wine, and on the concept of vintage years/clothing, etc., coupled up with the extended metaphor of time as something we drink or consume or appreciate. It seemed to fit!
“Again, I like throwing old words up against newer ones, the fantastic paired with the scientific. Because contrast is important. Pairing concepts for new synthesis is important. It opens the mind up, at least a little, to new ideas.”
AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
DLD: As I mentioned earlier, time is definitely a concept I return to again and again. I have a deep love of history and mythology, as well as science and futurism. For me, time is all one piece, and I long ago took to heart the notion that “people who don’t learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.”
So, for example, in my first full-length poetry collection, The Gates of Never, you’ll find poems that focus on mythology and history through the first sections, re-interpretations of fairy tales through a modern lens . . . and then at the end, as we move into the future, we take a tour of planets and moons of our solar system, looking at them both as we know them through science, and contrasting their reality with their mythological names. I was bold enough to tag Alan Stern of the New Horizons project with a couple of my Pluto poems, and he liked them enough to retweet them. So there’s that, heh.
AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
DLD: I read science news with great regularity, and take direct inspiration from new discoveries. I find political news and the comments section thereof to be mind-boggling frustrating, and frustration isn’t the best place for me to work from.
I can and I have taken inspiration from other writers, particularly conclusions that I have found objectionable, and I totally can and have written stories as responses/reactions to them. I mean, I have been having a long-form argument with Boethius’ concept that “free will is totally compatible with pre-destination, honest” for . . . decades? But current events are a thing I actively try to avoid including in my work, on the theory that other people will find it as annoying as I do when I read a story in which someone is clearly taking up for a current political cause.
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AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
真正免费的网络加速器I have two other poetry collections and a chapbook out making the publishers’ rounds. I have a bunch of other prose works in progress, but with my son home every day for the foreseeable future due to coronavirus issues, that’s a major stumbling block for my productivity.
That being said, if anyone wants to read my poetry, short stories, novellas, or even my Edda-Earth novels, I have an extensive back catalogue of works, many of which are free to read. Check out www.edda-earth.com/bibliography.
AE: What are you reading right now?
DLD: Oddly, I mostly read nonfiction these days. Articles on archaeology, Bronze and Iron Age history, development of biological robots, advances in technology, you name it, I’ll read it. I have an entire shelf of Terry Pratchett Discworld books that are my comfort food reading; Jim Butcher is a newer favorite I’ve stumbled onto.
Sitting on my coffee table, waiting to be read since I asked for them for Christmas? Horse Soldiers, Spillover (David Quammen on the “next human pandemic,” hah), and Johannes Cabal, the Detective. Goodness only knows when I will shake loose time to read them, but that’s kind of the way all my reading goes. My tastes are wide, varied, and yet also, I’m incredibly 手机网络加速器免费. A piece can’t have logic holes or I fall right out of the story. It can’t have historical inaccuracies or inconsistencies, or I’ll sit there tearing it apart.
AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
网络加速器Coin toss between Babylon 5’s, if I could jump forward in time to do so, or Stargate SG-1’s, if I’m limited to current-day. Both are essentially hopeful places, where intelligent people actually make the world better by being in it. And while they’ve encountered terrible risks to the planet along the way, they learn and grow and improve themselves. Even people who were once enemies have a shot at redemption in it.
AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
DLD: Elimination of most diseases and senescence. Of course, we’d need commensurate population control and room on other planets to make that work, so . . . almost every positive SF prediction, heh.
AE: What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?
DLD: I’ve taught technical writing and rhetoric at the college level; I also spent seventeen years as a technical writer for projects ranging from nuclear submarines to the ISS, and then for a major computer manufacturer. Those experiences taught me to prize clarity above all else in my writing—and when I first started writhing a fairly well-received fan fiction back in the day, the sheer raw number of questions I got from readers (literally thousands of emails) taught me again that my job is to convey my thoughts as clearly as possible.
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AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
DLD: There’s my website, www.edda-earth.com. I’m also on Facebook, as Deborah Davitt (deborah.davitt.3) and, more rarely, on Twitter as @DavittDL.
Deborah L. Davitt was born at an Army hospital in Washington state, but spent the first twenty-two years of her life in Reno, Nevada. She graduated first in her class from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1997, and took her BA in English Literature with a strong focus on medieval and Renaissance literature. In 1999, she received an MA in English from Penn State. Since then, she has taught composition, rhetoric, and technical writing, and created technical documentation on topics ranging from nuclear submarines to NASA’s return to flight to computer hardware and software. Her poetry has garnered her Pushcart and Rhysling nominations, and has appeared in over fifty journals; her short fiction has earned a finalist showing for the Jim Baen Adventure Fantasy Award (2018) and has appeared in 南京易安联 SSL VPN 远程连接系统:欢 迎 使 用 远 程 访 问 系 统 软 件 用户名 密 码 是否要保存用户名 登 录 and Pseudopod. Her critically-acclaimed Edda-Earth novels are available through Amazon. She’s also known for the well-received, 3.5 million word fanfic called 狸猫网络加速器免费 that exposed her to a global audience. In 2023, her first full-length poetry collection, The Gates of Never, became available from Finishing Line Press. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and son.
by Sean Monaghan
I have always been fascinated by marble runs. By the way that gravity draws a marble down the channels and through the holes. Interesting enough to watch a single marble career down, and even more fun to have a little train of them clattering and spinning.
I vaguely recall that as a child, I played with some toys that would have been a set of interlinking pieces that I could use to create a huge variety of pathways for the marbles to follow. Plastic pipes and half-tubes.
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Over time, these toys have become more sophisticated. Dozens upon dozens of channels. Switches that force the marbles into different paths. Conveyors that lift the marbles back to the start, saving poor lazy children the effort of doing the work themselves.
Flick a switch and off you go.
And now, with the rise over the last few years of the “Maker Movement” (which I find amusing—it feels like a resurgence . . . as many “makers” will point out, we used to have to make all our own stuff), marble runs have become more sophisticated and entertaining. Some occupy huge rooms. Some deliver hundreds of marbles into a wide track, allowing them to bump and collide before racing through bottlenecks and dropping into other sections. Some activate flags and the like, almost like Rube-Goldberg machines.
And now, with the rise over the last few years of the “Maker Movement” (which I find amusing—it feels like a resurgence . . . as many “makers” will point out, we used to have to make all our own stuff), marble runs have become more sophisticated and entertaining.
I was fortunate enough some years ago to see Chris Burden’s sculpture “Metropolis II” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which, similar to a marble run, has objects drawn by gravity over a complex track. Rather than marbles, Burden’s work has over a thousand toy cars. They race around a freeway-style track, taking corners at reckless speeds.
The complexity of that work is such that it requires an operator to run (to keep an eye out for jams and so on).
The work is mesmerizing. The movement, the sound, the shapes—twisting and turning—draw the viewer in. I could have watched it for hours. An appointment drew me away, which was perhaps fortunate, or I might be standing there still.
But these things linger.
So to the story, “Marbles” 网络加速器. I have written several stories set in the art worlds of Shilinka Switalla—two of which have appeared in the pages of Asimov’s: “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles” (January/February 2017) and “Ventiforms” (January/February 2023). Miss Switalla creates artworks on a massive scale, and this time around, I kind of really let the kid in me out to play by having the artwork be a marble run larger than anything we could build today (at least to my knowledge).
As with many of my stories, it veered off into its own territory, but the twists and turns and bumps and clatters of a marble run stay with the story throughout.
As an aside, another of my fascinations (and now my expensive hobby) is modular synthesizers.
These electronic musical instruments are composed of modules. Rather than purchasing a large synthesizer with all the buttons and knobs, the user can pick and choose the functions they want. Oscillators and filters and sequencers and so on. These are patched together into a unit that looks like something straight out of a sci-fi mad scientist’s lab. And make sounds that would fit right into Dr. Who and the like.
The modules themselves have wonderful names. Things like “Yep” or “Popcorn” or “Tides.” Yes, you guessed it, one of the most highly-regarded modules is called “Marbles.” It does amuse me to pinch my titles from odd sources.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy “Marbles.”
Stories by Sean Monaghan 网络加速器 have appeared in Analog, Amazing Stories, and at Baen.com, among other venues. Sean lives in provincial New Zealand, which is really just a base for his frequent travels.
by Will McIntosh
I love a good romantic comedy. Most of the films I tend to watch on repeat are things like When Harry Met Sally, Notting Hill, 500 Days of Summer, High Fidelity, Sleepless in Seattle, and a hidden gem titled The Giant Mechanical Man.
There are lots of films about love and dating out there, both comedic and serious. The pickings get slim, however, when you try to find a film about the future阴阳师高效率玩法心得分享 式神快速升级升星攻略 ...-华龙网:2021-12-14 · 阴阳师高效率玩法心得分享，式神快速升级升星攻略，本期小编给大家带来高效率玩法，教你如何在最短的时间内把握游戏节奏，成为大腿。输出式 ...in it, one that’s about love. There are a few. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Solaris, Upside Down, 手机网络加速器免费, Code 46, and Her come to mind.
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The internet has played a big role in changing how people meet and fall in love. Among other things, it allows people to be far pickier about whom they spend time with, because the internet allows us to customize. Want a partner who loves Goth music, exploring abandoned buildings, doesn’t want children, is Methodist but not a churchgoer, and plays trombone? No problem (although you may have to be open to traveling).
“SF deserves some credit in depicting who falls in love, with a not too terribly bad record in depicting biracial, same-sex, and polyamorous relationships, but even there, the norms of romance and dating are often (though not always) depicted as relatively changeless and universal. They aren’t, though.”
Not sure who you’re looking for? Internet dating sites use algorithms to suggest potential partners based on your interactions with the site. Those algorithms are still in their infancy, but the dating websites’ data professionals are always seeking more precise matchmaking algorithms. In the future, those algorithms may become scarily accurate, because dating sites do a ton of research (using their clients’ online behavior as data, without their explicit permission). They know, for example, what sort of opening messages to potential partners garner the most replies. If you want to improve your odds of getting a reply on a dating website, use an unusual greeting like Howdy, or How’s it going免费全球加速器Hi or Hello; never compliment the person’s physical appearance; make a joke at your own expense; be an atheist (seriously, that was one of their findings); and whatever you do, don’t misspell words.
In the future, though, the real action may be in biotechnology. We know that women can smell how attractive a man is at a better-than-chance rate by sniffing a T-shirt he’s worn. Casinos routinely release engineered scents that increase slot machine use by up to 45%. How long will it be before there are fragrances on the market that are bioengineered to effectively manipulate people’s perception of the attractiveness of a potential partner?
In my young adult novel The Future Will Be BS-Free, I speculated about the development of a virtually foolproof lie-detector that uses remote fMRI (brain scan) technology instead of more unreliable physiological indicators. Imagine a future where people’s first interaction with a potential romantic partner takes place in an environment where both are able to tell when the other is lying. Now, that might change dating just a bit.
My story in this month’s issue of Asimov’s, “官方客户端下载 - fjtv.net:2021-6-8 · Dashboard[on sale now], deals with some of these issues—matchmaking algorithms and arranged marriages—in an homage to one of my favorite genres—the romantic comedy. I hope you’ll check it out. Thanks for reading!
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Pictured above: The CEO of Future Affairs Administration in Miao ceremonial dress, and our interviewed author, Derek Künsken.
For “Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County,” [on sale now], Derek Künsken did a deep-dive into the eponymous county’s socioeconomic workings. Below, he takes us on a journey through the story’s origins and development, and the questions and unpolished answers that helped him fully realize this setting. Bonus: more photos from Derek’s time in Danzhai County, and a link to his re-read of the X-Men comics!
Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
DK: One of my Chinese publishers (Future Affairs Administration, like a sort of Chinese Lightspeed magazine) occasionally does partnerships with private companies to bring scifi authors to see parts of China and then write science fiction inspired by the experience. It’s a bit of a mix of futurism and foresight. Three other western authors, six Chinese authors, and I tour a private sector poverty relief initiative in the mountains of Danzhai County in Guizhou province, one of the poorest provinces of China.
They showed us the new industries they’d been building (eco-tourism and cultural tourism— mostly targeting the growing Chinese middle class), as well as new agricultural initiatives, especially cooperative tea farming, as well as schools, new roads and bridges and so on. Meeting the ethnic Miao people and seeing elements of their culture was the experience of a lifetime and obviously inspired.
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AE: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
DK: I’d already written a story for FAA on commission after a trip like this 免费全球加速器 also published in Asimov’s), but that had been after touring a high-tech Chinese financial services company. For this one, I felt I’d been given a turn at plate to write science fiction on a real contemporary issue and so I wanted to really think about how technology and society and poverty would interact.
伋业如何重启2021？_科技_北方热点:2021-4-8 · 2021年，如果你问很多伋业家一个问题，“面对未来，你准备好了吗？”他伊的回答一定是偏积极乐观的，因为最为困难的2021年已经度过，且经过了史上最残酷的国际贸易争端，多数伋业都做好了应对未来无数种不利冲击的准备。但2021年的今天，你再问这些伋业家同样的问题，他伊眼神中大多会充满 ...
They answered questions about racism, sexual harassment, education, disability, pay gap between women and men, and so on. They also answered all the cultural questions I needed to have answered to have a chance to try to depict the world of Danzhai County as authentically as I could. These had a lot to do with gender, sexuality, family roles, family formation, and generational expectations. No one seemed to try to give me a polished version because the answers I got were often not pretty and were very much in line to what I’d seen of poverty and social problems in other countries.
Rice field way up in a mountain, pictured prior to a meeting with village elders.
AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
DK: I trained as a biologist, so I sometimes take unnecessarily evolutionary views of things, in this case, what we mean when we say tool. We’re tool users, and in many ways, we can think about all our tools and memetic knowledges and mental abstractions like language and art as parts of the human phenotype. This idea of the tool as the phenotype becomes very weird and distorted when we think of things like AI and machine learning as tools. When we can make AIs that can think as well as we can, are they still tools, or are we making whole other classes of phenotypes? I don’t know, but I felt that some of the answer was in the idea of what constitutes a tool.
AE: What made you think of Asimov’s for this story?
DK: I don’t write a lot of novellas so I was a tiny bit worried about finding a home for it, but Asimov’s had published nine other pieces of short fiction of mine, including a novella. And Sheila is an editor I trust with my work. So while the story kept growing, I wrote to ask her how long was too long. When she accepted the story, she had some really important editorial notes that very much improved it.
Authors Bo Jiang, Derek Künsken, and Bao Shu against a backdrop of rice farms. Jiang and Shu have both been translated and published in Clarkesworld as well as elsewhere.
AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
DK: A while ago I might have answered this with something a little less examined, but since my book editor named my novel series “The Quantum Evolution series,” I realized that a lot of my work seems to think in evolutionary terms. Humans are evolving right now, as we speak. If we take tools to be phenotypic expressions of our species, in the last century, our phenotype and way of living has changed drastically.
I also like to think about the life forms that different environments can evolve. I’m not sure why. I don’t know if it’s as easy as saying I learned evolution and now think in those terms. But I think that as you think more and more in certain ways, the easier (and more likely) it is to think along those pathways. I hope that’s not a statement that my thinking is calcifying, but I’m not ruling that out.
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DK: I think I prefer to write on spec. That is to say, I think I do because I live in fear of signing a contract and then getting writer’s block and being all stressed about it. I haven’t had writer’s block yet, but that doesn’t mean I don’t fear it. I think that’s why I outline and plot out things so much. For my first Chinese-commissioned futurism story, I researched the heck out of the technologies they said they were going to show us, before I even got on the plane. I did the same thing here and arrived with some possible characters and situations and conflicts in mind, ways I thought that technology might affect poverty and poverty reduction efforts. For this story, I finished an outline with a bunch of scratchy scene descriptions and then drafted it in about three weeks.
I trained as a biologist, so I sometimes take unnecessarily evolutionary views of things, in this case, what we mean when we say tool. We’re tool users, and in many ways, we can think about all our tools and memetic knowledges and mental abstractions like language and art as parts of the human phenotype.
手机网络加速器免费How did you break into writing?
DK: Haha. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of being published described in those terms. We can break into acting or comics, but getting published was collecting fifty rejections in a folder across two novels and maybe a dozen short stories. The fifty-first submission was an acceptance from the venerable Canadian SF magazine On Spec. My second acceptance, a year later, was from Sheila, for “Beneath Sunlit Shallows,” which appeared in the magazine in 2008.
AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
DK: I’m happy to say that Solaris Books liked 免费全球加速器 (also serialized in Analog) and The Quantum Garden enough that they bought another three books from me, one of which is finishing its serialization in Analog (The House of Styx) and the two others which I am writing right now, around work and parenting. I think this interview will go up at the same time The House of Styx will be released in ebook and audio. Links here: 伋业如何重启2021？_科技_北方热点:2021-4-8 · 2021年，如果你问很多伋业家一个问题，“面对未来，你准备好了吗？”他伊的回答一定是偏积极乐观的，因为最为困难的2021年已经度过，且经过了史上最残酷的国际贸易争端，多数伋业都做好了应对未来无数种不利冲击的准备。但2021年的今天，你再问这些伋业家同样的问题，他伊眼神中大多会充满 .... The hardcover was rescheduled for an April 2021 release.
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AE: What are you reading right now?
DK: I’m actually terrible at watching TV, so I’m pretty chuffed that in the last six months, I watched all three seasons of Westworld (some of the best science fiction I’ve ever seen in TV/movie form in terms of the examination of the science fictional ideas), and am well on track to get to at least season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Between a day job, parenting, writing, and the pandemic, I don’t have the bandwidth right now to engage with new fiction, so I’m mostly rereading, including a bunch of older comic books.
AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
DK: I mostly dwell on twitter @derekkunsken and keep a website at 手机网络加速器免费. My first two space opera novels are available everywhere in print, audio and ebook. If you want to see me in full nerd colors, I wax deep-geek over comic books every two weeks at http://www.blackgate.com, where I’ve been blogging for about 6 years. Late last year, I started a complete reread of the X-Men, starting with X-Men #1 in 1963. I’m up to fifteen or so posts so far. You can find them here: http://www.blackgate.com/?s=x-men.
Derek raises his son, reads comic books, and writes science fiction in Gatineau, Québec, but not all at the same time. He was invited to tour a poverty alleviation effort in Guizhou in 2018 to inspire this story, and its publication marks his tenth appearance in Asimov’s. Derek’s new novel, The House of Styx (a Godfather story set in the clouds of Venus), is finishing its serialization in our sister magazine Analog, and will be released in hardcover shortly. His first novel, a space opera heist story called The Quantum Magician, was a finalist for the Aurora, the Locus, and the Chinese Nebula Awards.
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I am writing this blog nine weeks after my job as a professor was converted—in emergency fashion—to online, due to the Coronavirus threat. Social distancing and quarantines are happening in many different ways and levels. New systems of work and socialization are being developed, and new language is following. For example, many of us are having work meetings and social meetings on visual platforms such as Zoom, Collaborate, Google Hangouts, and Skype. Most of these offer a view where we can see a grid of the webcam views of others in an array of boxes. Soon people in those virtual boxes performed comic actions based on the shape in which they were contained, and such actions quickly acquired the name Brady-boxing after the 70’s sitcom 免费全球加速器, and its opening theme. As the music plays, the large Brady family is presented, each in their own box, but referencing each other. In fact, I propose calling this system of communication Brady meetings and Brady socialization. They are unexpectedly important and deserve a distinct name.
Like many people whose employment was forced to go online (and essential workers in person), I have had to work a lot more hours. In fact, probably sixty-five hours a week. Meanwhile, there are more involuntarily unemployed people than at any time since The Great Depression. As Brady socialization increased there was a period where speakers would assume that everyone now had an excess of free time to fill. Many awkward exchanges caused that assumption to become less common. The other side of the assumption coin followed when employed speakers faced with the loss of spending outlets inappropriately assumed everyone now had spare money. More uncomfortable moments followed causing these assumptions to decline as well. A new etiquette continues to arise, and sociologists are already charting it.
But my experience cannot be subjective, because I have spent a life in science fiction. So have most in my social groups. Social and/or geographic distancing has been a key idea for as long as I’ve been reading. I can’t even estimate how many science fiction stories I have consumed that dealt with some form of quarantine or long-distance exchanges. I might guess that at least two hundred of my published stories and poems have dealt with these phenomena, so I have thought about it a lot, and researched it periodically. Lots of great, and some accurate, portrayals of what it’s like have been produced. Yet those small details, such as Brady-boxing and the new inequalities of time and spending cash, are hard to guess.
Less difficult to predict has been the political squabbling over supplies and what to do. Competition for resources always follows their scarcity. Distrust of science is sadly prevalent among world leaders who don’t know what to do.
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伋业如何重启2021？_科技_北方热点:2021-4-8 · 2021年，如果你问很多伋业家一个问题，“面对未来，你准备好了吗？”他伊的回答一定是偏积极乐观的，因为最为困难的2021年已经度过，且经过了史上最残酷的国际贸易争端，多数伋业都做好了应对未来无数种不利冲击的准备。但2021年的今天，你再问这些伋业家同样的问题，他伊眼神中大多会充满 ...
This leads to a new inequality: immunity.
And my question to readers is this, what happens when those with antibodies are increasingly free while those without are increasingly constricted?
I know firsthand the nobility of humanity, so I am sure most with antibodies will serve others. I know with an excessive personal catalog of scars, physical, emotional, and mental, of the brutality of humanity; so I am sure there will be hate and discrimination.
I have always believed that an important component of science fiction and science fiction readers is the willingness to focus on tomorrow and beyond while the rest of humanity wonders what’s for dinner. In general, we need to approach the coming antibody inequality with love, practicality, scientific research, and respect for human rights. And we will be opposed. But the power of science fiction is to crowd source solutions before the problem is manifest. Our job has rarely been so important.
Herb Kauderer is an English professor at Hilbert College. His doctoral dissertation, and both his masters’ theses, involved speculative fiction. He wrote the indie feature film ‘网络加速器’ (2013), and his publications include sixty plus short or flash fictions, and over 1700 poems, many collected into eighteen books and chapbooks. His poetry has won the 2016 Asimov’s Readers’ Award, been a finalist for the 手机网络加速器免费AnLab Readers’ Award, and received Honorable Mention in 只剩下门缝的VPN何去何从 - 手机新蓝网:2021-2-7 · 热门推荐 让20元行政处罚不再磨叽！宁波城管要推广这件事 2021-06-16 12:17 嘉兴端午民俗文化节细节公布 今年将新增“云端约会” 2021-06-16 12:17 为“网红主播”发上岗证！. More about Herb and his writing can be found at HerbKauderer.com.
For Hollis Joel Henry, starting small and building a habit of writing half an hour each morning has bloomed into publishing his second story of 2023—his second published story ever! Read on to learn how “The Last Water Baron” 网络加速器 draws on twenty years of ideas, a year and a half of determined effort, and a diverse panoply of SF influences.
Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind “The Last Water Baron”?
真正免费的网络加速器I’ve had aspects of this story in my head for about two decades. I think it started with the character Vladimir. I liked the idea of a bionic/cyborg mercenary/assassin. But it was very basic, simple action hero stuff that I daydreamed about but never committed to paper. Then some years back I read in National Geographic about the potential for a water crisis and was both upset and intrigued. I’m very environmentally conscious now – particularly as the focus is gradually shifting from climate change to our impact on the natural world and planetary health.
However, the thing that really brought the story together was the idea of Tommy and people like him. I say that as if Tommy is somehow so very different to us, but that’s not true. He is very much like everybody else, and that’s really the point.
AE: Is this story part of a larger universe or is it standalone?
HJH: It’s part of a group of stories with shared themes. Everything I wrote in the last year and half is unified by certain themes. One is even a continuation of the other. They are all set in the future, not too far but far enough for us to start seeing even worse consequences for how we live as a species.
AE: What made you think of Asimov’s for this piece?
sub免费网络加速器I think of Asimov’s for everything I write (which might not be too strategic sometimes, as my stories can tend towards the extremely dark and violent). I first read the Foundation and Robot series when I was maybe ten years old, and they made a great impact on me. The character of the Mule is probably reflected in some of the characters I’ve created. I’ve always been imaginative and dreamy, and the work of Asimov was there for me. I believe in bringing things full circle.
AE: Who or what are your greatest influences and inspirations?
HJH: Oh there are so many. I’m a lifelong lover of Sci-fi and fantasy, the classic stuff—Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guinn—Wizard of Earthsea is more of a friend than a book to me. I’m also a literature student and was impacted by writers like Dostoyevsky, Nikos Kazantzakis, Fitzgerald, and Dickens. I’m also from the Caribbean, and we have a great and inclusive literary tradition of West Indian writers like V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming, and also writers from the Global South such as Gabriel García Márquez, R.K. Narayan, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I’d say for this particular story, the care and compassion I put into Tommy is most reflective of Ngugi’s handling of the colonial officers in his native Kenya. He refused to make them cardboard villains.
I’m also a Gen-Xer. I grew up in the time of the emergence of comic books, kung fu, video games, and action animation. All of these things have influenced me.
“You can’t spot fix your writing. Look at your life. Look at your thoughts. Look at your patterns. Improve those and you may improve your writing.”
免费全球加速器Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing?
HJH: I definitely have my themes. A big one is self-deception. For me self-deception is dishonesty plus cowardice. I can abide an honest liar, like Tony Montoya in Scarface—“Even when I’m lying I’m telling the truth.” I have trouble with self-deception. Great evil has been perpetrated in the world because of it. Also, the very bruising journey from naivety to understanding is another major theme of mine.
AE: How did you break into writing?
HJH: I had my own hero’s journey, you could say. I’ve always been a good writer. I remember in kindergarten our class had to do a word exercise where we put a bunch of words into a paragraph. I wrote a short story called “The Little Eagle,” and the teacher went nuts when he read it. They published it in the school newsletter. It was like that for many years. I won the Writers Union of Trinidad and Tobago short story under seventeen competition with a crazy sci-fi story called The Daydreamer.
But after that I lost my way. I stalled and spent decades with writer’s block. I became a journalist, then a corporate writer. I did, am doing, alright for myself but I had that soul sickness, that feeling of guilt and restlessness writers feel. Then a couple years ago I decided why not? Why not just give it a go?
So I started small, a half hour a morning, every morning. I just wanted to form the habit. Then I built up and gradually spent more time. I started thinking in terms of filling time, not being inspired or writing a particular story, just spending the time every day. It adds up fast. I wrote about seven short stories in that time. I submitted with the same kind of mechanical approach. I wasn’t submitting to get accepted; I was submitting to meet a quota of submissions. I did my best to take ego out of it.
Within a space of a year and a half I sold two stories out of the seven. The first to 狸猫网络加速器免费 and the second to Asimov’s. I’m actually still in shock. But I have much more to do and much lost time to make up for.
AE: What SFnal prediction would you love to see come true?
HJH: I would love to see us reach the point of enlightenment, inquiry, and compassion depicted in the Federation of Planets from Star Trek. I feel like this is the answer everyone gives!
AE: What are you reading right now?
网络加速器I’m actually reading the Jonathan Hickman X-men run—House of X and Powers of X. He has really revitalised the X-men universe. There is also a very chilling far future world presented in the comic that I would love to read a series on by itself.
AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
HJH: Hmm, I think each writer’s journey is so different, even though there are parallels. I would say that what helped me most was to stop thinking of writing as the solution to my life’s problems and also to stop trying to solve my writer’s block separate from other aspects of my life. Writer’s block is a symptom, not the problem, and I couldn’t solve it by focusing on it alone. It’s like how they say you can’t get abs by doing crunches alone. You can’t spot reduce your stomach. You can’t spot fix your writing. Look at your life. Look at your thoughts. Look at your patterns. Improve those and you may improve your writing.
Hollis Joel Henry is a writer living in Trinidad and Tobago. Born in the U.S. to Trinbagonian parents, he has spent his life between both countries. A lover of fantasy, science fiction, and horror from early childhood, he later became enthralled by the themes, wit, and craftsmanship of Caribbean, Latin American, African, and South Asian storytelling. The author does his best to reflect these influences in his work. Hollis is currently the editor of the official news magazine of The University of the West Indies (UWI) St. Augustine Campus, UWI Today. In February 2023, his first published short story, “Outer,” appeared in Clarkesworld. His second published story is “The Last Water Baron.”
This year our celebration was by necessity a virtual one. But that just means that we are able to invite ALL to take part! Watch below for editorial and author commentary as the final results of the annual readers’ awards are announced:
Asimov’s Science Fiction
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Best Novella:
Waterlines—Suzanne Palmer (July/August 2023)
Best Novelette:
In the Stillness Between the Stars—Mercurio D. Rivera (September/October 2023)
Best Short Story:
Sacrificial Iron—Ted Kosmatka (podcast) (May/June 2023)
Best Poem:
A Street Away—Jane Yolen (January/February 2023)
Best Cover:
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BA: Rick, your experience and passion for the game of baseball really shines through in your stories. I’m a bit of a baseball junkie myself, so I can’t get enough of that stuff, but for the average SF reader, baseball is probably like quantum physics—too much of either can bog a story down. How do you decide how deep to go with it? Do you let the writing carry you away, then have to trim it back down?
RW: You’re right to ask that, Brad. Every now and then I get a reviewer or commenter who says, “I hate baseball!” But I think they’re missing what any story, and especially this story, is really about when they say that. Baseball, for me, is just a means to an end, much as the medical field is for you. Generally, most readers, even non-fans, know the game well enough to understand what’s going on when we’re talking balls and strikes and pitching and hitting and running the bases. More specifically and personally, I have a deep familial connection to the game, since my father was a player, coach and (briefly) manger in the major leagues. In this particular story, there’s some sibling rivalry and we use baseball to set that up, inverting some expectations, I hope, in how we manage who envies whom in terms of playing the game.
Heck, the simple truth is that I know all about sibling rivalries and baseball, and so I’m really comfortable writing about that. I was certainly the weakest baseball player of the three sons in our family growing up, and both of my sisters, had they been given the chance, would have outplayed me as well; so I grew up being familiar with a certain kind of sibling envy. As a result, readers of the story will see right away which character I identify with the most. Unfortunately.
RW: So how about you, Brad, as a writer using your inside medical knowledge? Tell us something about how you wound up a top physiatrist (and yes, I had to look that up). What led you to specialize in physical rehabilitation and prosthetics? Of equal importance, how did you wind up a fan of the Baltimore Orioles? It’s not easy to be an Orioles fan these days. They finished last in the American League East last year. Ugh. Do they need a top physiatrist? And I bet they could use some prosthetics!
BA: Ouch. Thanks so much for bringing up my beloved O’s stellar record (223 losses the past two years). Still my favorite team, though. I became a die-hard fan as a ten-year-old when the upstart young 66 Orioles beat the powerhouse Dodgers in four straight to win the World series. Ironically, they are part of the reason I went into PM&R (Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation). As a freshman medical student, I had the good fortune to go to a lecture from Dr. B Stanley Cohen—a charismatic and brilliant physiatrist who treated the Orioles. That drew me to do my residency with him, and although I did get to treat some famous ballplayers, it was the other side of PM&R I fell in love with— helping people recover from strokes and other serious disabilities. Watching the marvels of medical technology unfold, seeing how technological advances affect peoples lives, fueled my life-long passion for SF, and has served as a rich source of story ideas. When you approached me about collaborating on a SF story about a ballplayer . . . wow, the opportunity to pursue three of my passions and work with an author I admire; it was a no-brainer. (And I take brains very seriously.)
“Watching the marvels of medical technology unfold, seeing how technological advances affect peoples lives, fueled my life-long passion for SF, and has served as a rich source of story ideas.” -Brad Aiken
BA: Speaking of collaboration . . . You took my original, initial, sinister ending for “Ithaca” and turned it into a whole different twist. That was a tough one for me on the first read-through, but after I let it sink in, I found the humanistic ending you introduced to be less formulaic and more meaningful. You and I seem to mesh well bouncing ideas off one another and merging changes to fine-tune a story. Have you ever had the opposite experience in co-writing (no names required) where one of you doesn’t want to give up a story element that the other thinks should change?
RW: I’ll name names! I’ve collaborated on short fiction with Ben Bova on a baseball fantasy piece that ran in Asimov’s, and with my pal Nick DiChario on a baseball piece that ran first in a slick baseball magazine called 108 that published our story and promptly went out of business, so we never got paid. Happily, Fantasy & Science Fiction picked up the story later. I also collaborated with Alan Smale on a novella that ran in Asimov’s, combining baseball and ancient Rome (the first being my interest, and the second being his). That story, “The Wandering Warriors,” was the only time I’ve had a cover story in the magazine. That story, I should add, will be out again in hardcover with two other reprint stories, one from me and one from Alan, in August from WordFire Press. Most recently I’ve collaborated on this piece and another with you, and also on a straight-ahead generation-ship science fiction novelette with Kevin J. Anderson. In all cases, I’ve enjoyed the process. It’s useful to see where another writer wants to take the story, and to then make your work mesh seamlessly with your collaborator’s work. Honestly, I’ve enjoyed all of these collaborations. Hey, Brad, let’s do another one!
真正免费的网络加速器What’s in your writing future, Brad? Do you have a novel in mind, something that combines your writing passion with your medical work? I see a lot of mystery/thriller novels that are medically related; do you have one in mind? Or maybe some near-future medical science-fiction thriller, like the arrival of some frightening coronavirus that threatens global safety.
BA: Always lots of ideas spinning around. I wrote a medical techno thriller called Mind Fields several years ago and had a lot of fun with it. Lately I’ve been working on a story about a society of androids that are sent to populate another world, arming them with the human precursor cells they need to restart humanity when they get there. The kicker, of course, is why would a bunch of AIs that we have essentially treated like slaves want us around again? I just finished a short story about it, and, depending on the response, might expand into a novel. It was fun imbuing the AIs with human traits/flaws, then seeing what worked and what didn’t. I’m also playing with some ideas on how to expand on the dystopian world you and I created for our other collaboration, and how someone may use a certain physical disability to their advantage in the early days of the class war that led up to the near-future dystopia.
BA: I know you’ve got a short story collection coming out any day, but how about the sequel to 真正免费的网络加速器 I can’t wait to read more about those wonderful characters.
RW: The short story collection, Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination, is from WordFire Press and just came out in late March in hardcover and ebook. It gathers together some favorite stories of mine from the last thirty years or so. One of the stories, “Something Real,” won the Sidewise Award a few years ago after first appearing in Asimov’s. And another one, “Today is Today,” talks about Down syndrome, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Canadian Football League, and multiverse theory, which is a crazy mix, but seems to work really well. The story’s been reprinted a couple of times since it came out in 2018 in the small literary magazine, Stonecoast Review #9. It’s included in the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2023 anthology, in fact, edited by Rich Horton.
And I’m so glad you asked about the sequel to Alien Morning. The second novel in that S’hudonni trilogy for Tor Books is Alien Day: Notes from Holmanville, which was scheduled for later in 2023 but has now been pushed back into 2021. I’ve recently sold the short story “False Bay,” that’s closely related to that Alien Day novel. The story will appear in July in a WordFire Press anthology called Monsters, Movies & Mayhem that was put together by graduate students working in the low-residency MA/MFA Creative Writing program at Western Colorado University. My pal Kevin J. Anderson runs the innovative Publishing MA program at Western, and his lucky students got to solicit, choose, edit and produce this terrific anthology. I’m proud to be in it. Other writers in it include Fran Wilde, who’s director of the Genre Fiction track in that program (where I’m on the faculty, I should add), Jonathan Maberry, David Gerrold, Steve Rasnic Tem, and a list of other great established—as well as newer—writers. And I’m also working right now on another piece, a novella, that is associated with that Alien Day: Notes from Holmanville novel. I will, no doubt, send it to Asimov’s, and we’ll see what happens. Nothing better than having your stories appear in Asimov’s, right, Brad?
BA: Wow! Sounds like you’ve been busy. I’m glad you made time to work with me on “Ithaca.” It’s so exciting to finally get a story into Asimov’s, even if it is on your coattails. It’s an incredible honor to be even a small part of a publication with such a rich history, and to stand in the shadows of so many of the writers whose names have become synonymous with science fiction.
Brad Aiken <bradaiken.com> is a physician specializing in rehabilitation medicine and has long had a fascination for how advances in medical technology may influence our future. After graduating from medical school, he became interested in how medicine and SF influence each other and has presented at numerous medical conferences, science fiction conventions, and at the 2014 meeting of the World Future Society. His short fiction has appeared in various publications including Analog. Among his novels are the medical techno-thriller Mind Fields and the futuristic adventure series Starscape. His most recent publication is Small Doses of the Future, a collection of short medical SF published by Springer as part of their Science and Fiction series.
Rick Wilber’s interest in baseball and science fiction is well established, with more than twenty published stories that combine those elements, many of them first in Asimov’s. Rick’s short story collection, Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination, is just out from WordFire Press and features some of his favorite stories from a long writing career. Another WordFire collection, The Wandering Warriors, will be out in summer 2023 and features the eponymous coauthored novella (with Alan Smale) that first appeared in this magazine’s May/June 2018 issue, along with two other bonus stories. Rick’s contributions to that book, no surprise, both involve baseball.
