[Post updated Feb 22 with full text link for Bee/Hive]
It’s been a long year, hasn’t it my friends? Yet 2023 has also been a year of fruition: a whole lot of my past years’ work has blossomed into visible wavelengths as I signed with an agent and published 6 new short stories.
If you’re looking for some fun stories to enjoy, or you’re reading for SFF awards, check out these 2023 publications! If you don’t have the time to read all six, I’ve highlighted the ones I consider most worth your focus: “For Every Bee, a Hive” (Analog, published Dec 2023) and “The Work-Clock” (Sunday Morning Transport, Jan 2023).
Original Stories
- “For Every Bee, a Hive” (text, audio)– Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Jan/Feb 2024; available online Dec 20231 (space opera, 5200 words). Found families, AI swarms, crypto-Jewish cyborgs, human-centered neurotechnology.
- “Didn’t matter why the AI wanted to connect. Didn’t matter whether the AI wanted at all. Only mattered what she wanted.”
- This is an ambitious story that I want more people to read, so it’s my top recommendation of the year.
- “The Work-Clock” – Sunday Morning Transport (gaslamp fantasy, 3900 words). Crummy jobs, keeping the Evil One bound, for-profit temple factories.
- “Funny thing. The world would bleed and die without an apprentice inspector to keep the Temple Works running, but didn’t mean the job paid well.”
- Reviewed by Karen Burnham and Paula Guran at Locus, and Kathleen Jennings.
- Along with Bee, I consider this my best work yet, so I would love it if you read and considered this one too.
- “Development Hell” (permanent pdf link) – Nature: Futures, November 2023 (science fiction black comedy, 1000 words). Buggy digital hell, and the people who have to maintain its code. CW: all the stuff you’d expect in a black comedy about hell.
- “The third best thing about hell is explaining to the new kids why it’s so glitchy.”
- “The Things You Can Maintain Yourself” – Lightspeed, August 2023 (science fiction, 1000 words). Self-determination, biotechnology, car maintenance.
- “She’d kept Snapdragon on the road for almost twenty years, and if the world would leave her alone, she could keep him alive for five more, easy.”
- Reviewed by Camestros Felapton
- “Driftwood” – Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Sep/Oct 2023 (science fiction, 2300 words). Dubious astrobiology, economics, communication.
“Driftwood,” by Eli Bischoff, for Analog Sep/Oct 2023 - “Whatever my husband had been trying to complain about, it’d wait until tomorrow.”
- Reviewed by Mina
- “Here at the Freezing End” – Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Jul/Aug 2023 (science fiction, 3900 words). Triage, cold, work in the face of hopelessness.
- “If the Federation still had starships of any kind, they were defending the homeworld four wormholes away. Bigger empires fought over its body now, the bones not yet cold in the ground.”
- Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike
Reprints
- “Conference of the Birds” – Escape Pod, December 2023 (science fiction, 3900 words). AI and distributed minds. Another one of my neuroscience-heavy pieces, I wrote a whole article about the underlying science.
- “No program-layer could predict what a human might do, but Surveillance Hub could see everything that mattered.”
- Original publication: Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Jan/Feb 2021
- “Elegy of Carbon” – Dragon Gems Spring 2023 (science fiction, 4100 words). Self-awakening AI, service to/freedom from humankind.
- “Jewel looked out upon the Earth and could not measure why so many people loved that dull orb of mere lapis and jade, streaked with calcite white.”
- Original publication: The Internet Is Where the Robots Live Now, Nov 2018
Other Award Recommendations
If you’re nominating for the Hugo Awards, I hope you’ll consider Escape Pod for Best Semiprozine. Since I retired this past summer, the 2023 publication year is the last one where I will be part of the team. If you think we’ve put out some great stories and made the world/genre a better place, consider nominating us!
Also, please consider our co-editors Mur Lafferty & Valerie Valdes (as a two-person team) for Best Editor Short Form.
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