Publication: Cyborg Shark Battle

Today’s the day, my friends: time to unleash Cyborg Shark Battle (Season 4, O’ahu Frenzy) upon the world!

The anthology Cat’s Breakfast is now available for purchase in ebook, and a trade paperback will be available from that same link in a few days.

I’m thrilled to be able to share this story with you all at last. It’s got ridiculous social rituals, backstabby social dynamics, reality TV, and brain-machine interfaces. In other words, a recounting of my time in graduate school, only with more reality TV and less-dangerous animals.

As silly as this story may sound, I actually consider it hard SF. It extrapolates modern trends and technologies into entirely plausible directions of new profit…

P.S. If you sign up for my mailing list soon, the June newsletter will contain a free teaser excerpt!

Story Sale: Setting of the Sun

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve just sold “The Setting of the Sun” to Compelling Science Fiction!

Compelling is a new professional science fiction market with a focus on hard SF, and this story should fit right in: it’s full of cosmology and chronology, told from the point of view of a Dyson swarm across nine hundred million years of history.

Did I mention the story is only 1300 words long? Yeah.

Coming August 1, 2017!

Marijuana Safety

Another NeuroThursday lined up for you: this one on marijuana safety! It’s less harmful than many drugs (including alcohol binge drinking), but I wouldn’t call it Mostly Harmless.

Artificial Neural Networks

This week’s NeuroThursday is a long one, but I had a lot of cool stuff to explain. Neural networks: how they work, and what they’re all about!

Placebos and their Efficacy

For this week’s NeuroThursday, I started writing one on Elon Musk’s NeuraLink, but it only ended up being five tweets‘ worth of material. So I called that my “placebo NeuroThursday,” and followed it up with a full-length one on the placebo effect!

Threadreader link

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/867913671187419137.html

Twitter:

Deja Vu and Memory

This week’s all new, never-seen-before NeuroThursday: on déjà vu, and the details of human memory that make this phenomenon possible.

Escape Pod

I’m delighted to announce that as of this morning, I am the new Assistant Editor at Escape Pod!

This is a very exciting step up! Longtime editor Norm Sherman is stepping aside, and previous Assistant Editor S.B. Divya has stepped up to be Co-Editor, alongside the equally excellent Mur Lafferty.

As Assistant Editor, I’ll be responsible for looking at the comments of our Associate Editors (slush readers, such as I was for the past year), converting most of them into rejection letters, and sending the top few up to our editors. For those of you curious how our process works, or what our rejection letters mean, stay tuned – I plan to share my process once it becomes established and stable!

I’m thrilled to step up into this greater role & responsibilities with the amazing team at Escape Pod and the whole Escape Artists podcast family. For those of you who write, go forth and send us your best science fiction. For all of you out there, subscribe to our podcast or read the texts – we’ve got a lot of great stories for you!

Story Sale: Cyborg Sharks!

I’m thrilled to announce that my flash-length science fiction story, Cyborg Shark Battle (Season 4, O’ahu Frenzy), will be appearing in the Cat’s Breakfast anthology, coming out this summer in e-book and paper from Third Flatiron Press!

It’s a small press, but they’re a pro market, and from what I hear about the table of contents, it’s going to an amazing anthology, on the theme of Kurt Vonnegut’s style and sensibility. I think my little story will fit right in, with its dry and wicked tale of the back-stage and -stabbing shenanigans among reality TV show competitors. And cyborg sharks, naturally.

I’ll be back to tell you more about it in June when the anthology comes out!

Sleep and its Deprivation

NeuroThursday took a nap last week, but it’s returned with dreams of explaining why sleep deprivation is a thing – and why it’s probably your thing.

Audible Time Cookies

It looks like one of my stories is up at Audible.com: it’s the Time Cookie Wars, originally published in Flash Fiction Online! If you want to hear an audio version, this is your first & only place to go listen.

Be warned, if you haven’t seen this story before, it’s a wee bit darker than the blurb suggests. I’d definitely classify this as “black comedy.”