Stupefying Stories Magazine

Status Update • 16 February 2026

2026-02-16T07:00:00.215-06:00

With two weeks left to go until the Nebula ballot cutoff, we’re pleased to report that THE DAY WE SAID GOODBYE TO THE BIRDS has made it onto the SFWA Nebula Awards Recommended Reading list. If you’re a voting member of SFWA, you can download the full PDF text of the book for FREE at this link:

https://www.sfwa.org/reading-list-entry/the-day-we-said-goodbye-to-the-birds-by-dyen-shapiro-allan/

If you’re a mere mortal, you can buy the book pretty much anywhere ebooks or print books are sold, by following this link:

https://books2read.com/The-Day-We-Said-Goodbye-to-the-Birds

We have it on good authority that SFWA didn’t lock down the membership validation function on their download site as well as they might have and that it’s possible to bypass the check and download the PDF for free no matter who you are, but we have decided to leave figuring out how to do that as a challenge to your cyberpunk skillz. We don’t mind if you do so, but we’re not going to make it easy for you.

On the subject of cyberpunk: no, I wouldn’t call this one a “cyberpunk” book. I’d say it’s more on the order of an “ecological hopepunk” book. In looking at what other people have had to say about it I’ve found it classified as “cli-fi,” which is a category I didn’t know existed before, but I guess it does now.

I’ve also been a bit disappointed to see a few people dismiss it without reading it on the grounds that the title suggests this is a sci-fi riff on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Seriously, do you think I would publish something that thuddingly obvious? Yes, the backbone of this story is grounded in ecological bioscience, which is a subject near and dear to my heart, and yes, there are some birds in it, but if you’re thinking this is yet another story that’s going to club you over the head with an Important Ecological Message until you submit, you are way off base.

Trust me. I don’t publish sermons and screeds. I publish good stories.

On a tangentially related subject: one of the stranger questions to come in lately is whether this is a “gay” story, apparently because we got this very kind review on the QueerSciFi.com web site. Seriously? Because a gay book reviewer liked the book, that makes it suspect?

The story is set in near-future San Francisco. There are people in it; lots of people, some of them with speaking parts. This being San Francisco, some of those speaking characters are gay. So? You know, it is possible to set a story in contemporary or near-future San Francisco without having it end up in the middle of a pride parade in the Castro District, and without it turning into a sermon or screed on LGBTQ+ issues. I’m just saying.

Geez…

Finally, for those who have been wondering what’s happened since the 1 February status update: things have been developing at a remarkable rate. I’m having an outpatient procedure tomorrow, which should reveal the answers to a lot of questions, after which we’ll have a much clearer path forward. I won’t be online or answering email tomorrow, but more likely will be sedated and having sweet dreams of tiny submarines the size of microbes and a young Raquel Welch in a skin-tight wet suit.

See you next Wednesday,

~brb

Status Update • 1 February 2026

2026-02-01T06:00:00.110-06:00

The universe is taunting me.

Or if not the universe, at least Netflix.

Friday night I turned on the TV, intending to find a movie to doze off to, but got sidetracked and didn’t get straight to giving it my undivided attention. When I finally got back into the living room, I found that Netflix had wandered off into some kind of slide show mode I’d never seen before, and was sequencing through a succession of title cards for movies it thought I might like to watch. After a few minutes I realized it was more complicated than just a simple slide show; within each slide, it flew in a series of keywords, to tell me more about why I might want to watch the movie.

Oh.

You don’t say?

Okay, I’ll concede that Johnny Mnemonic earned that keyword. But the others? It seemed like every third movie Netflix showed me had that keyword, and a lot were movies I never would have associated with anything even remotely related to cyberpunk.

Hmm.

In Niven and Pournelle’s novel, Inferno, there is a special place in Hell reserved for advertising and marketing people who craft catchphrases, slogans, and earworms that are too successful. There they spend the rest of eternity suffering in misery, forever tormented by their own stupid words being flung back at them.

Is this to be my fate?

A lot of people have written lately to ask how I’m doing and what’s going on with Stupefying Stories. The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Last fall, we had a really solid plan for what we were going to publish and how we were going to finish out 2025. Then, in October, I had a really stupid accident of the self-inflicted kind involving a 24-foot aluminum extension ladder.

And then, in November, I compounded the stupidity and really ripped with living shit out of everything in my right shoulder.

Since then we’ve been on a journey of discovery, figuring out how to patch me back together and turn me into a functional human being again. For a span of some weeks I was lucky to get two hours of sleep each night, which did nothing good for my ability to think clearly. We’ve been exploring the GRAS list—the list of medications “generally recognized as safe”—trying to determine which are actually safe, at least in the dosages I need to take in order for them to be effective. I have experienced some of the most amazing allergic reactions and rashes, but at least haven’t had another Somogyi reaction in the past month. Those are truly fascinating, in retrospect. Remind me to tell you about them sometime.

People have made the observation that I appear to be active on Facebook again. If you look more closely, you’ll note that I’m not really active there. Mostly I’ve been sharing photos that amuse me, and sometimes appending a few lines of snark. There are days a few lines of snark are all I have left in me.

Progress and recovery has been slow, slow, painfully slow. There are days I’m almost able to work for a few hours. There are other days I lack the strength and coordination in my right hand to do so much as lift a cup of coffee—and if you know anything at all about my longstanding relationship with coffee, you know this is serious. Fortunately I’m left-hand dominant, so I can do most of what I need to do one-handed, but this is a right-handed world, so I’m having to relearn how to do a lot of things I’d surrendered to the pressures of the world and learned to do right-handed.

There are days when all it takes is one slightly wrong stretch or twist to leave me curled up in a ball, whimpering and waiting for the searing pain to recede.

Whimpering? Yes. I exhausted my store of profanity sometime in December.

For reference, typing on a keyboard is not a transferable skill. You can probably imagine how frustrating I find this. It’s taken me hours longer to write this post than it normally would.

In a perverse way, though, I’m lucky this happened now. As I said before, this has become a journey of discovery, involving a lot of time spent in various diagnostic imaging clinics. Along the way, quite by accident, literally on the edge of an image intended to let my doctors take a closer look at something else, they discovered—

Oh. That is not right. Which led to further follow-up appointments, more blood tests, more imaging work, and I feel quite thoroughly imaged now. During the last session I was able to look at the screen over the technician’s shoulder and could swear she was tracking the movements of a microscopic submarine as it traversed my left ventricle.

The current assessment, then, as of today, is that there is something previously undiscovered and seriously wrong with my heart. As soon as the doctor began to describe it in detail he didn’t need to, as it’s the same thing that killed my Dad thirty years ago this month. The irony of the date is not lost on me.

The advantage I have is that we’ve discovered it now, while I’m still deceptively and to all appearances healthy, and not as they found it in my Dad, when he was face-down on the floor and the paramedics were charging up the paddles. So given the advance warning we now have, we should be able to get this under control before things proceed too much further along the road to Hell in a hand-basket.

What form will this control take?

I don’t know. Ask me again in two weeks, after the next round of tests and diagnostic imaging is done.

—Bruce Bethke

“The Spheres of NilSpace” • by Rebecca A. Demarest

2025-10-13T06:00:00.046-05:00

When the first bubble appeared, in Mx. Zarblat’s regurgitation chamber, it was the size of a fruit a human might call a melon. It lasted one lunar cycle, before destabilizing and disintegrating, taking a dusty collection of shells with it in the process.

The second bubble appeared in the middle of their town, thankfully out of the way of traffic, and in a flower bed that could use some sprucing up anyway. This one was bigger, almost big enough to fit two or three humanoids, and there were cryptic glyphs and bright yellow stripes around the whole thing. This one stayed, floating in mid-air.

But the third…

The third appeared on top of old friend Grununckle, right where he was standing, lecturing the youth on their lack of standards.

One minute, haranguing. The next minute…

The scientists did all they could think of. The military fired all they had. (Sans the piegogroblaster. It was a populated area, after all.) Nothing could crack that hard metallic shell. It was cordoned off, with a two-block safety zone, monitoring being the only choice left.

Now, we all know that the military are not the brightest of bulbs in any ‘verse, but these—they left the dregs of the dregs to watch the nonexistent readings. This meant there was no one to stop the prophet from approaching with his flock.

The prophet was no green acolyte, fresh to the calling of the people. They had first led a group of believers into the wastelands as a young sprout, many years ago. And though the promised revelation was just chemically purchased, distributed via the shared water source, their pocketbook was full and the next flock beckoned.

This was exultation number five for this profitable prophet—if you were keeping track—but this one they almost believed.

Even though the three-moon night cast an amber glow across the sphere, it still glowed brighter in a white-blue hue and the prophet could not resist laying a hand on its skin.

“It’s hard, and cool!” the prophet proclaimed, running their digits over the seamless metal. “And it feels…it feels like when you scuff your tentacles across a fuzzy floor, and then—”

What else the prophet might have said is a topic hotly debated by those who watched him be chosen by the fourth such bubble of metal. At least by those who came to believe in the metal-bubble rapture.

The proportion of the population who came to believe in the prophet and their wise words about the spheres that started to appear—in increasing frequency—was much higher than the scientists would have liked. Of course, that was always the way when science failed to find an explanation.

A thriving free market sprang up, with specialists all claiming to understand the precise desires and methods of the metal spheres. Where would they appear? Who would they take?

Crime dropped as some folks favored the opinion that they had to be pure. Hatchings skyrocketed as young humanoids threw caution to the wind in the face of what might just be the end.

And the bubbles continued to appear.

Not heeding any predictions, nor any discernible pattern. In this neighborhood or that, in countries around the world. Geologists observed the formation of them in the planet’s crust. Astronomers found them in orbit.

Every so often one would wink back out of existence, but it was always three new orbs appearing to each one dissolving, with the steady growth of orbbed real estate brandished as proof of arguments on all sides.

No one ever returned.

It only took a couple of years before fully a fourth of the planet was consumed by the spheres. A decade before what remained of the population was huddled in the odd sphere-free land. The only common factor among these refuges was a high concentration of certain radiation wisping through the air, causing cancers to bubble and grow in their hosts.

Adapt or die is a universal law, which is what they tried to do, but at the end, when the last few humanoids were left keeping watch for new spheres in their heavens, they still could not help but reach out.

Touch them.

Bargain with them.

Beg them.

Chant the words upon them, which some code-breaker had long ago managed to crack before being taken:

Oh NilSpace, Limited, TR,

Hollow be your spheres.

Property of NilSpace

Let your presence bring me light

Caution: Keep Clear

Make me—

Rebecca A. Demarest (she/her) is an award-winning author, playwright, book designer, and writing instructor living in Seattle, WA with her husband and two muppets. Her short work has appeared alongside authors like Cat Rambo and dramatized for the stage and NPR. When not being held hostage by words, you can find her at her day job (working the people side of unbelievably awesome tech), tending to her indoor jungle, crafting, sewing, playtesting tabletop role playing games, and failing to teach her dogs new tricks. For more information on her work, please visit rebeccademarest.com.

“Waiting for Thermidor” • by Bruce Bethke

2025-09-24T06:00:00.141-05:00

I am a science fiction writer. I get paid to think about the future.

I do it a lot, have been doing it for decades, and have given a lot of thought to exactly how I do it. Consequently, here’s a writing tip for you. If you want to write formulaic, derivative, science fiction-flavored prose product (which I will admit, can be quite lucrative), you should read and watch nothing but other people’s science fiction. Do this for years, without fail, and you will never be at risk of accidentally having an original idea.

Case in point, all these years into the Stupefying Stories saga, I remain appalled by the amount of thinly disguised Star Trek fan fic that continues to show up in “new” science fiction. These stories bother me not because they exist, but because of the utter desolate poverty of authorial imagination they reveal. For pity’s sake, folks, if you want to write an “our navy at war in space” story, at least read the World War II Pacific theater combat history that Gene Roddenberry lived, and based his hopes and visions of the future on.

Do this, and possibly, just maybe, you might come up with an idea for a story that has not already been used and reused until it’s threadbare by every generation of SF writers for the past 80 years.

Which segues into our second writing tip for today. If you do want to think seriously about the future, and increase your odds of having an original idea once in a while and perhaps even of writing a story that might be of some consequence someday, read history. Knowing humanity’s past is not a perfect guide to imagining humanity’s future, but it’s a good place to begin.

Personally, I read a lot of history, and the more I read, the more I realize the truth of one of my favorite quotations:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

—Karl Marx

The trick when you see an historical pattern repeating itself is to figure out which it is this time: tragedy or farce?

In 1789 the French began their revolution against the ancien régime—which is to say, against pretty much everything old: the monarchy, the Catholic Church, their own history; they even revolted against the calendar, creating a new calendar composed of twelve thirty-day months divided into three 10-day weeks (décades) each. This new calendar retained none of the traditional month or day names; Year One began with the abolition of the monarchy and the founding of the Republic, on the date formerly known as 22 September 1792. Therefore, by the French revolutionary calendar, Friday, June 26, 2020, was 9 Messidor CCXXVIII—or Nonidi of décade 28, or for rural peasants who apparently weren’t thought to be capable of mastering decimal numbers, Échalote (Shallot) Messidor, each day of the year being named for a different agricultural product.

The next month in the French revolutionary calendar is Thermidor, which begins on July 19^th and runs through August 17^th.

The astute observer will note that in the revolutionary calendar a year is 360 days long, as opposed to be the more conventional 365(ish) days we know. The French were still trying to resolve this problem—along with the problems of how to get people in general to throw out their old clocks and accept dividing each day into ten 100-minute hours, and how to get workers in particular to accept only having the weekend off once every ten days—when the wheels came off the whole damned thing. Today, vestiges of the hottest month on the French revolutionary calendar survive in two things only: the name of the recipe for Lobster Thermidor, and the political concept of the Thermidorian Reaction.

A Thermidorian Reaction, in general, is the moment in nearly every revolution when some well-armed and disciplined faction, usually the nation’s army, says “Enough of this,” and steps in to restore order at bayonet point. Thermidorian Reactions are typically characterized by massacres of protesters, summary executions of revolutionary leaders, mass executions of their followers, show trials and long prison terms for those revolutionaries who survive, and the establishment of an iron-handed military dictatorship.

The original Thermadorian Reaction took place in July of 1794, when the French army finally decided it had had enough of Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety’s Reign of Terror, and decided to put a stop to it—permanently. A day later, Robespierre was a head shorter, and really most sincerely dead.

Contrary to Star Wars this did not result in an immediate flowering of peace, freedom, happiness, and democracy, but in considerably more violence, leading eventually to the rise of the Emperor Napoleon, and all that meant to the bloody history of the 19th Century.

The first Thermidorian Reaction defined the term and established the pattern, but it was only the first. Leon Trotsky described the events that led to the rise of Stalin as the “Soviet Thermidor,” and was rewarded for his observation by being murdered with an ice axe. If you’re familiar with the history of the Weimar Republic the rise of Hitler would also seem to fit the pattern, as would the brutal Soviet reactions to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Prague Spring of 1968, and the Chinese army’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

Or very nearly, some might argue, as would the events that took place on the campus of Ohio’s Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when the United States, which seemed to be teetering right on the brink of a Thermadorian Reaction, got a good clear look at what that would entail, recoiled in horror, and then found another way forward.

The events of this past month have been deeply troubling, at times horrifying, and at still other times merely profoundly saddening. Some of the conversations that have followed these events have been appalling, though. From one side of the political spectrum I’ve heard people calling for a proper Thermidorian Reaction; for the government to send in heavily armed troops to reset the world to the way it was a month ago. From the other side I’ve heard people dreading the same possibility, for fear that the United States might be just one more executive order away from becoming yet another former democracy turned tin-pot dictatorship. And from the furthest fringes of both sides of I’ve heard people actually claiming to be eager to provoke a Thermidorian Reaction, in the belief that once the rotten core of the system is exposed and everything falls apart, people will flock to their banner and they will emerge from the chaos victorious, as the people in charge.

If I have learned one thing from reading history, it’s that that last outcome almost never happens. It’s far more likely that the people trying to provoke a violent reaction, be they on the right or left, will be the first ones up against the wall once the reaction begins.

Another thing I’ve been hearing a lot in these past weeks is people saying this year has turned into 1968 all over again. As someone who clearly remembers the summer of 1968, I would say, “Close, but wrong year, and wrong country.”

If you seek a historical model for what’s happening in the United States right now, look to China, in the summer of 1966.

The Red Guards began as a student-led social movement in the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Socially conscious, ideologically driven, and very often privileged, in the sense of being the sons and daughters of Communist Party cadres, they set off on a self-appointed mission to improve their society through rigorous Marxist criticism and by rooting out intellectual elitism and bourgeois tendencies. At first denounced as radicals and suppressed—imagine that, Marxists who were too Marxist, even for the People’s Republic of China—in time they were given tolerance, then support, and ultimately political legitimacy, after which the movement quickly snowballed.

In August of 1966 the Red Guards were directed by the Central Committee to attack the “Four Olds” of Chinese society: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. While this instruction apparently was intended to produce critical and metaphorical attacks, with the acquiescence of some local police and government officials it quickly turned into the real thing. Libraries were burned, museums looted, temples and shrines destroyed, historic streets and places renamed—often by taking a hammer and chisel to ancient carvings—and archaeological sites were looted and destroyed. Cemeteries were desecrated; the remains of long-dead emperors were dragged from their tombs, defiled, and burned.

Worse, the Red Guards quickly turned on their own teachers and other intellectuals, sometimes killing them outright, other times destroying their lives and careers with accusations of politically incorrect thinking and driving them to suicide in “struggle sessions” that amounted to public torture and humiliation. Penultimately, thousands of innocent victims died at the hands of the Red Guards. This being China, the exact toll will never be known. In August and September of 1966 the Red Guards murdered nearly 2,000 people in Beijing alone, typically by beating them to death.

Ultimately, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said “Enough of this,” and stepped in to restore order at bayonet point. Thousands of Red Guards were killed resisting the PLA. Unknown numbers more were captured and then died in some of the largest mass-executions in Chinese history. In the end more than 16 million Chinese students were rounded up and exiled to the countryside, to be “re-educated” by being forced to become subsistence farmers or unskilled factory and foundry laborers. The number of students who died in the process, from starvation, disease, or harsh treatment, will never be known, but it’s believed to have been enormous.

Sixteen hundred words into this column, assuming you’re still reading and haven’t said “tl;dr” and wandered off already, you are no doubt wondering what all this history has to do with writing science fiction. As I said when I began, over the past four decades I have given a lot of thought to how I write science fiction.

Only lately have I begun to think seriously about why. Or as one of my less tactful co-workers once put it, “Why are you wasting your time writing this sci-fi crap when you could be writing real literature?”

The answer, when it finally came to me, was something of a surprise. I read, write, and enjoy science fiction because deep down, as strange as this may sound, of all the modern literary tropes and genres, science fiction is nearly unique in that it is the literature of hope.

Sometimes that hope is hard to discern. Sometimes it is found only in subtext. Sometimes the message is buried so very deeply, and overlain with so many thick and nearly impenetrable layers of grim darkness, that it is nearly lost in the background noise. But the one idea that almost all science fiction has in common is very simple, and yet incredibly important: people—people recognizably like us—are there.

That’s the core message of science fiction. Humanity has a future. Our species will survive. And not just at the basic, lowest, animalistic level, living lives that are nasty, brutish, and short: we are a work in progress, and that progress isn’t over yet. Our future doesn’t have an eschaton—a fixed end-point—at least not yet, and not anytime soon.

What message could be more hopeful than that?

Okay, you in the back there, raising your hand and waving it like a preschooler with a bladder control problem and all too eager to blurt out, “But my religion says…” Yes, yes, that message is hopeful too. The difference here is that in science fiction, humans have agency. We have free will. We are not sitting on our butts waiting or down on our knees praying for someone else to solve all our problems and make everything all better.

We have a choice.

We are not the victims of fate. We are not the pawns of callous deities. We are not mindless automatons still running the programs installed in our ancestral genes four million years ago in Olduvai Gorge. There will be setbacks, yes. We are capable of doing terrible things. We can make horrible, stupid mistakes. We can blunder about and break things and say and do things that will have miserable consequences for years to come that we can’t even begin to imagine at the time we do them.

But we are not the prisoners of our past. We can learn from our history.

We have the power to choose to be better.

Then the ever-present tentacles of contemporary news slither into my consciousness again, and I see what new atrocities and idiocies were wrought overnight, and somewhere in the back of my mind I hear the screams and gunfire in the offices of Charlie Hebdo as terrorists slaughter cartoonists and writers because they didn’t like what they were saying and were willing to kill them to make them shut up, and I feel the concussion as the Taliban dynamite the Bamiyan Buddhas, and feel the thuds of fists and feet on flesh as the Red Guards beat historians and teachers to death, and smell the smoke as the Deutsche Studentenschaft burn books in the State Opera square in Berlin, and hear the creak of the wheels and the crying of the condemned as the Jacobins drag them in tumbrels to meet the guillotine…

And I think: yes, we have a choice. Will we choose to learn from our history and be better, or will we choose to be stuck forever in Year One of the revolution? The choice is yours.

No one else’s. Yours.

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

—George Santayana

22 September 2025

2025-09-22T06:00:00.045-05:00

“Cyberpunk” has been much on my mind lately, or more accurately, in my face.

I’ve received the usual batch of fall semester queries from students writing papers, a few more requests from various publishers seeking reprint and/or translation rights—one of which was worth taking seriously, so I did, and I’ll have more to say about that book when we get closer to the publication date—and one request from an incredibly dedicated fan who had turned up a nice clean copy of the November 1983 issue of Amazing Stories and wanted me to sign it, specifically in the white space at the top of page 94.

Oh. That means I have to look at page 94 again.

Here, for your reference, is what the top of page 94 looks like. Note the introduction that George Scithers wrote more than 40 years ago for the original magazine publication of the story. Please read it closely.

And now, the story that some of you have heard or read before, but most probably have not.

___________________________

I no longer remember the name of the con. It was somewhere around 35 years ago and I want to say it was a WorldCon, but really don’t remember. What I do remember is that I was with a bunch of other mid-list, mid-life, and mid-career pros, we were in the professional SF/F writer’s natural habitat—the hotel bar—and we were having just a great old time, drinking heavily and swapping divorce horror stories. My first wife, Nancy, had just kicked me out, changed the locks, and filed for separation, and to be honest, I deserved it. In those days I was Bruce Bethke, Semi-Famous Science Fiction Writer, and I was a real jerk.

What struck me at the time was how casually everyone there took the news. It was as if it was a rite of passage, or an occupational requirement, or perhaps even a milestone on the road to success. “Okay, you’ve just sold your fifth novel. Time for your first divorce.” “Ha ha, SFWA: we put the fun in dysfunctional!” Ben Bova gave me a signed copy of his book, Survival Guide for the Suddenly Single. The then-editor of the SFWA Bulletin asked me to write an article on how to protect your intellectual property rights in a divorce. A certain editor who shall remain nameless, assuming I was broke and desperate for cash, tried to talk me into a book deal, ghostwriting for a certain well-known media personality who had a burning desire to see his name on the cover of a science fiction novel but no actual time to write, knowledge of writing, or discernible writing talent. It was a wonderful evening of back-slapping camaraderie.

Later, when I sobered up, it began to disturb me. It wasn’t just that being a writer seemed to be toxic to marriage and family: it was how readily the writers I knew (and at the time, being on the SFWA board of directors, I knew hundreds of successful writers) accepted this toxicity. I realized I could count on my fingers all the writers I knew who had intact first marriages and functional families. By and large my peers were women whose cats were their surrogate children; women who had had one or two children with male gametes supplied by one or more long-gone donors; men who would never get married and father children because they just didn’t swing that way; or worst of all, really successful male writers who had been married, but were now perfectly content to let their children be raised by their ex-wife’s next man. Or woman. Or whatever.

That’s when it struck me. The problem wasn’t that being a writer is somehow toxic to marriage and family. It was a matter of selection bias. My peer group was composed of divorced SF/F writers because we were all, every one of us, people who believed it was more important to our careers for us to be there, at that con, drinking with our fellow writers and editors in a hotel bar, than at home with our wives and families.

This, in turn, explained a nascent trend I at first thought I was only imagining I was seeing. The world of SF/F—at least, the social, con-going, dedicated fandom part of it—was not merely family-neutral, but in the process of turning actively family-hostile. And the problem wasn’t just with passing trends in genre fiction, or the idiosyncrasies of the current batch of editors who bought it, or the greedy bastard publishers who printed it. The problem was the writers.

It was too late to save my first marriage. The best I could hope for was to try to have a good post-marriage for the sake of my daughters. Later I remarried, and added a step-son and another son to the family. I worked—really worked—at being a good husband and father, and quit going to cons, unless I could go with my family. The last major con we went to was Dragon Con, and we went as a family.

Emily would have loved Dragon Con. She grew up to be a costumer, a crafter, and a devoted fan of all things Harry Potter. We lost Emily this week, 16 years ago, in late September of 2009—suddenly, from a natural cause that was undiagnosed, unpredictable, unpreventable, and apparently had been waiting years for the opportunity to kill her.

People often ask why I don’t try to put together a complete collection of all my short stories from the 1980s and 1990s. That photo at the top of this column is the reason. Whenever I try to do it, I get as far as the introduction George Scithers wrote for the original magazine publication of “Cyberpunk” and then grind to a stop. Other people look at my publication credits and see a bunch of short stories, some of them pretty good, some Nebula-nominated, some even world famous.

What I see is all the time I stole from my daughters’ childhoods and all the damage I did to my first marriage, chasing the mirage of being Bruce Bethke, Semi-Famous Science Fiction Writer.

A few people know that in 2010, when we went to Dragon Con, it was between the time Karen (my second wife) was diagnosed with breast cancer and the first round of what turned into a twelve-year odyssey of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation treatments, and then more of the same. Karen beat the odds, I guess. When she was first diagnosed she was told to expect she had two more years to live; perhaps five, tops. She fought hard against it, and survived for twelve.

What even fewer people know is that in December of 2012 my first wife, Nancy, was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma. After a five-and-a-half year battle, she left this world in August of 2018.

For those of you who ask why I don’t go to WorldCon anymore or why I really don’t give a flying fig about any of the many cat-fights and pissing contests that are forever going on inside the world of SF/F writing and fandom: seriously, are you kidding? You think that stuff is important?

Forty-two years later, we know some of the answers to the questions George Scithers posed in his introduction to “Cyberpunk.” Nancy and Emily now sleep for eternity, side-by-side in a small churchyard cemetery in rural Minnesota.

As for me? You can’t fix yesterday. But you can learn from experience, and try to pass on what you have learned.

This was my experience. Learn from it.

“Apollo 13: The Remake” • by S. Travis Brown

2025-09-08T06:00:00.004-05:00

TO: ALL HANDS

FROM: S. Travis Brown
CEO, Auteurs sans Honte ni Fierté, Intl.
Hollywood, CA 90067

STATUS: URGENT!

RE: Apollo 13: The Remake

Okay folks, I just watched a movie called Apollo 13: Survival, on Netflix. This 2024 documentary about the 1970 Apollo XIII disaster, which was pieced together from archive footage and rarely seen interviews with the participants, is pretty darn tense and captivating, right up to the final frames. What an epic story of survival! What a property it would make! And it’s all public domain, too! No agents to deal with or rights to buy!

But the more I think about it, the more I realize it has some pretty serious problems we’ll need to address before we can move forward. Good core concept, yes, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. And before anyone whines, “But that’s not historically accurate!” I have just one word for you: Hamilton.

Now, here’s my thinking.

First off, the Apollo 13 crew is not balanced. It needs to consist of a handsome young Black male hotshot Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) who’s been unfairly passed-over for promotion, a beautiful slender blonde lesbian Command Module Pilot (CMP) who tries to warn everyone about the impending disaster but is ignored because she’s a woman, and an older white guy who’s the Mission Commander (MC) because he’s old and white, but who is also the guy responsible for stupidly throwing the switch that causes the explosion that cripples the ship.

Secondly, Chief Flight Director (CFD) Gene Kranz is just all wrong, in every possible way, from the top of his brush-cut hair to the soles of his wingtip shoes. The CFD needs to be a body-positive middle-aged Black woman—I’m thinking Viola Davis, am I right?—who stomps into scenes, shouts a lot, pounds her fist on desks and tables, and motivates her team by screaming threats at them and saying things like, “Come on, people, work this problem! Give me a solution!” She’s got to treat her staff in Mission Control like they’re a bunch of minimum-wage Subway employees who would be just sitting around playing games on their computers if she wasn’t there to motivate them by shouting at them.

Third, speaking of the Mission Control staff: all those people in all those scenes were way too male and way too white. We need more women in those scenes; more Blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and Asians; at least one Russian—no wait, not Russian, better make him Ukrainian—and at least one transgender BIPOC person with a prominent speaking part who comes up with a brilliant idea at a crucial moment. Along with that, as long as we’re doing all the cutaways to the other people on the ground, what’s with this obsessive focus on Marilyn Lovell and the Lovell kids? We need a lot more cutaways to the CMP’s beautiful wife and their angelic child, anxiously waiting for word of the fate of the mission.

Hey, here’s a sidebar thought. Can we maybe get those three Black women from Hidden Figures—or they’re getting kind of old now, maybe we can get three lookalikes? Just for a cameo: say, at a crucial moment the Mission Control computer breaks down, and these three Black women step out of the shadows with legal pads in their hands and pencils tucked behind their ears, and they do the re-entry calculations in their heads. I think that’d be a real wow stand-up-and-cheer scene, don’t you?

Okay, where was I? Fourth, or is this fifth? Anyway, Nixon. You’ve got Richard Nixon in this story, and he’s completely wasted. You need at least one scene in which he’s smiling and sympathetic on TV, but then cut to him huddled in a back room with the rest of his Reichstag staff, scheming and discussing whether it will be more helpful for him in the next election if the Apollo 13 crew is killed or saved, and if killed, can they make it look like an accident?

Next, there’s no getting around this, the special effects in Apollo 13: Survival are just terrible. The movie misses so many opportunities to up the dramatic ante. When the oxygen tank in the Service Module explodes, the explosion should be louder, larger, longer, and much more colorful, with flaming crap flying everywhere, and maybe it should make the ship start tumbling, too. Then, when they slingshot around the Moon, they’re too high up: they should be skimming in so close to the surface they only make it by the skin of their teeth, and an antenna gets snapped off on a lunar peak that they just barely miss thanks to the CMP’s brilliant piloting. Finally, when they need to restart the LM engine for the Earth injection burn, it just starts, with no drama. It should fail to ignite the first couple of times, and not start until the CMP sobs, pounds her fist on the console in frustration, and gives it one more try.

Speaking of the Earth injection burn: the Apollo 13 crew members were all wearing Omega Speedmaster chronograph wristwatches. They had to time the engine burn manually and precisely, by closely watching their wristwatches. PRODUCT PLACEMENT, PEOPLE! PRODUCT PLACEMENT! Jesus, do I have to think of everything myself?

Finally, once they’ve made their last mid-course correction burn, that’s it. After that, they’re just waiting to find out if they survive. Tense, yes, but no drama. I’m thinking when they hit the atmosphere this is the perfect place for something to go horribly wrong, for the MC to freeze up, forcing the CMP to take over, and for the hotshot Black LMP to seize the controls and fly the ship in manually, wrestling with the controls and just dripping with sweat and machismo and showing off what a great big pair of mighty balls he has!

Then: happy ending. They splash down safely, the helicopters show up, we cut to them on the carrier’s deck, emerging from the capsule—only we don’t just have a bunch of Navy people standing around them, we have everybody. Think of the last scene of Independence Day. The CMP’s wife and child are there. The LMP’s husband is there. (Never reveal that your hero is gay until after his hero cred is solidly established.) The MC’s wife is there—better yet, she’s back at home, watching all this on TV with a drink in her hand and disgusted look on her face—no, wait, I’ve got it! She’s in a motel room in bed with her lover, watching all this on TV with a drink in her hand and a disgusted look on her face, saying, “Damn. I was really looking forward to being his widow.”

To sum it up: Apollo 13: Survival is a good movie. Great concept. Good story. It’s a solid “nice try.” But I think we can make the story better, and seriously, we must make it a lot better if we’re going to get Disney to green light and bankroll the remake.

Now get cracking, people! I want to see first draft script treatments on my desk by EOB Friday!

No pressure,
STB

Once upon a time, under another name, S. Travis Brown had a successful career as an SF/F writer, until the winds of taste changed direction and the kinds of fiction he liked to write became too hard to sell. When his own agent advised him, just before dropping him, to adopt yet another new pseudonym, preferably female this time, and to start his career over again as a writer of paranormal romance novels, he said, “[intercourse] this, I am not Doctor Who,” and went off to do other things that paid better.

Now comfortably retired, we don’t hear from him often, but when we do, we’re mostly happy to publish what he sends us. Mostly.

When asked to supply an author’s photo, he instead sent us this picture, with the explanation, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” We considered asking him to explain his relationship to this dog, but decided it was better not to ask.

Brown has no social media presence that we know of, and says he prefers it that way.

“Presenting Ancient Humanity” • by Ruby Dae Mellinger

2025-09-01T06:00:00.144-05:00

While Wilma took her seat and the other students clapped, the teacher let out a low, quiet sigh, seeing that Timothy was next to give his presentation. She was sitting in the back, so nobody saw her, but she still felt bad about the involuntary reaction as soon as it happened. She did not pick favorites among her students, she reminded herself, waiting for them to quiet down. Timothy was not a bad student nor a stupid individual, and this presentation promised to be well-researched because—as he rarely let anyone forget—his father was among the leading experts on the customs and cultures of ancient humans. The reason he grated on Ms. Garlan’s nerves was because he was… well… she hated the terminology, but there was really no better phrase to describe Timothy than “a little shit.”

“Timothy,” she said, shuffling her papers, bringing to the top of the pile the outline he turned in a week before. “It is time for your presentation on…” she paused, trying to decipher his handwriting, or trying to remember what she had decided it said last time she read it. “It's time for your presentation.”

He made his way to the front of the room in silence and settled a stack of note cards on the podium before looking up and beginning. “As you have heard so far from my esteemed colleagues,” he said, feigning a stuffy aristocratic air and gesturing loftily to his classmates, “the peoples of antiquity were very strange, indeed.” When he said the word “indeed,” it had far more emphasis on it than necessary and caused a ripple of laughter to run through the class.

“Timothy, try to stay on topic,” Ms Garlan said, with a hint of warning in her glance.

“My humblest apologies, my lady,” he said, with a deep bow.

“Timothy.”

“Yes ma’am, sorry.” His smug grin clarified that it was a hollow apology, but they had been through this song and dance enough times for her to know that she should be happy to get any apology at all.

“Continue.”

“We’ve heard a lot about strange things they did, and I’d like to talk to you today about a strange thing they did with their mouths.”

When snickers and whispers began running through the students and Timothy’s grin widened, panic began to well up inside Ms. Garlan. Every year in her Ancient Humanity class, some student got their hands on a piece of information about the sexual exploits of ancient humans, and every year it haunted her classroom—an unaddressed ghost underlying their conversations which they didn’t think she knew about. This year it had been the practice of oral sex that had captivated them, and of course, it was Timothy who had dug that one up and introduced it to his fellow students.

“You see, they used their mouths for LOTS of things. Some of them involved relationships between two people—”

“Timothy!” she warned over the uproar of laughter that followed.

“What? I was going to say ‘like talking.’”

She gave him a pointed, knowing look. He went on.

“They used their mouths for talking like we do now, but they also did this thing called ‘eating,’ because the poor, inefficient slobs couldn’t just plug-in like we do and had to get their energy from the mechanical and chemical breakdown of organic material, which they often referred to as,” he paused briefly, glancing down at his note cards, “food.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “We already know about eating; it was a huge part of their culture and not only have we talked about it extensively in class, much of the language we still use today, being handed down from our ancestors, still reflects this infatuation. However, I wanted to talk today about a specific thing that they often ate. To demonstrate just how important food was to them, I want to demonstrate just how complicated of a process it was that they went through, to prepare this food that many of them considered simple.”

Ms. Garlan had to admit, it was actually a fairly well thought-out premise. She waited, hoping that her initial reservations would be proven to be baseless.

“We’ll start our story with a plant called…” he paused again, glancing at his notes, “Triticum aestivum. The story, however goes much further back than that. Our food-obsessed ancestors selectively bred and grew fields full of this stuff for over ten-thousand years, changing it slowly to get it to the form we are about to discuss.”

Timothy paused, and the class looked at him with large, shocked eyes. Ms. Garlan was impressed. Timothy often commanded the attention of his classmates, but it was rare that he used it for a productive purpose.

“They would pick huge amounts of this Tritic… whatever plant, then grind it up into a fine powder, and sometimes they’d even bleach it, to make it—”

“What’s a bleach?” interrupted Michael, a friend of Timothy’s who did get into trouble on occasion, but not usually without a bit of help.

“Raise your hands, please,” Ms. Garlan reminded.

“It’s a chemical used to make things look white,” answered Timothy, without even a glance towards the teacher. “Anyway, then they would mix this powdered plant with some water, sodium chloride (which they put in a lot of their food for some reason) and a few other things, like this single-celled fungus called ‘yeast.’ It was then left to sit a while so that the yeast could break down sugars and fart-out carbon dioxide.”

“What’s a fart?”

“I’m so glad you asked, Michael. A fart is—”

“Timothy, don’t you answer that question.”

“Okay Ms. Garlan.” And he actually had the nerve to wink at her before continuing. “Anyway, they’d go through all this trouble to make the stuff fluffy. They would then sprinkle it with the seeds from the… Sesamum indicum plant, then they’d put the whole thing inside a box that would heat it up a bunch, making it a very specific texture, making it dry, and killing all the yeast that they worked so hard to get in there in the first place.”

He paused here to let his glowing eyes pan over his fellow students.

“Now, you might think they’d be done at this point, but you’d be wrong. All that effort was just to make the part that goes on the outside.”

“The outside of what?” asked Wilma.

“Raise your hands, please.”

“Sorry,” replied Wilma.

“Between the pieces of post-heated plant paste, they would spread a bright red goo painstakingly made from the berry of the… Solanum lycopersicum plant, which had been mashed, mixed with a bunch more sodium-chloride, and some soluble carbohydrates, along with some other things, then heated for half a day.” Scattered mutters of astonishment could be heard around the classroom, but he talked over them, “They also sometimes included a bright yellow goo made from ground… Sinapis alba seeds that had been mixed with acid and... any guesses? That’s right, sodium chloride.”

“Why?” Michael again.

“Hands, please, Michael.”

“Just wait, it gets better. Aside from the red and yellow goop, they would put in slices of the gourd from the… Cucumis sativus plant that had been stored in weak acids with… Anethum graveolens leaves and the roots of the… Allium sativum, and that was all just extras, we haven’t even started to talk about the whole point of this food.”

More astonished mutters. Ms. Garlan had to suppress a grin. The students were really getting into this one.

“The whole point, it seems, for all the rest was as a delivery system for something, the description of which is not for the faint of heart!”

“Rein in the theatrics, please, Timothy.”

“Inside, they would put ground-up slices of ungulates!”

Cries of shock and outrage filled the room and Wilma, now horror-stricken, yelled out, “Like a giraffe?!”

“Quiet down now, kids. Timothy, a little sensitivity please.”

“I tried to warn them, but you called it ‘theatrics.’”

“They didn't really eat giraffes did they?!” asked Wilma, her little body clinking quietly as she shook.

“Wilma, feel free to step outside if you need to. Timothy, I trust you are nearing your point?” Wilma didn't move, obviously emotionally invested in whatever would come next.

“The… the lump of the… previously mentioned stuff…” he resumed with a grin, “would be burned over a fire, until it changed color and it was sometimes topped with a slice from a clump of coagulated lactation from the very same type of ungulate!”

This caused an uproar again and Wilma looked like she was going to faint.

“And they put that in their mouths?” yelled Michael.

“Settle down, now. Settle down.”

When they finally began to quiet, Timothy said, “Yes, all that effort was to gain what we get just by plugging into the wall. It really is amazing that they had time and energy enough to make us.” There were nods of agreement as he went on. “But it’s no wonder that they were so inefficient that we had to kill them all.”

Ms. Garlan smiled to herself as he made his way to his seat. Despite his antics and theatrics, it was a fairly well-done presentation, she thought, as she wrote an “A” on his outline.

Ruby Dae Mellinger is a trans woman from Monterey, California. She now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she develops data tools for a tech company. Ruby holds a Master’s degree in Physics from San Diego State University and is a big fan of soups and dogs (eating the first and cuddling the latter).

“In Fall, After the Harvest” • by S. Travis Brown

2025-08-25T06:00:00.077-05:00

The little cybernetic gadfly popped up as soon as I logged in.

“Dave Miller,” it dutifully nagged, “you are now 15 minutes overdue for your appointment with the company fitness consultant.”

Right. I clicked the ‘ignore’ button to kill the message and then continued with my morning routine.

As soon as I brought up Outlook, though, the message returned: this time in red, and with a flag. It was on my calendar. At the top of my To-Do Bar. Waiting in my email inbox and claiming to be “Urgent.” I had just about enough time to sigh and swear, and then my phone chirped. It was Heather, from HR.

“Dave—”

I cut her off. “Heather, how many times do we have to go through this? I am six-foot-four. I weigh 165 pounds. My doctor says I’m skinny as a rail but healthy as a horse. I do not want to work out, I do not want to weight-train, I do not want to join the company’s charity plod-a-thon team, and above all I do not want to take some idiotic fitness test first thing this morning and then spend the rest of the day smelling like a sweaty goat. I have a meeting with—”

This time it was her turn to cut me off. “Sorry,” she said, “but Frank set this appointment up for you personally.”

Oh, great.

Frank DeStefano, the company president and my boss’s boss, was a late-life convert to the Church of Serious Running, and since it made him feel so blasted good he’d decided to zealously inflict healthiness on the rest of us.

Wondering what I’d done to draw his attention this time—was it that Kit-Kat bar I’d sneaked during the PMT meeting last week?—I changed my status to “in a meeting,” loosened my tie, and reported to the conference room-turned-gym.

The moment I saw the fitness consultant, I hated him. Too many memories of my being the tallest, skinniest, and least-coordinated guy in my high school, I guess; too many memories of basketball and volleyball games that ended in broken eyeglasses and a bloody nose. I hated his little blue shorts and his white polo shirt. I hated the clipboard in his hands and the stopwatch on a lanyard around his thick neck. Most of all I hated his broad hairy chest, his thick hairy arms and legs, his prognathous jaw, and his five-o’clock shadow at 9 in the morning. His eyes were too close together, I decided; his nose was almost a snout, and his teeth were far too big, straight, and white for any normal man. “Good morning, Dave,” he said cheerily. I hated the way he presumed familiarity.

“Can we just get this over with?” I asked. “I’ve got a lot to do today.”

He tsk-tsked and made a little mark on his clipboard. “That’s a Type A high-stress attitude you’ve got going there, Dave. Bad for the heart, bad for the nerves, and symptomatic of repressed—”

“If you’re going to talk symptoms, I want to see your medical degree.” We were off to a rotten start.

The evaluation was long and tedious. He asked me a battery of questions about my diet and family medical history. He made me take off my shirt and then poked, prodded, and pinched me with a dial calipers. He plastered a bunch of electrodes to my back and chest and made me trot on the treadmill for twenty minutes. When we were finished, I was wheezing and drenched in sweat, and he told me I was—

“Ten pounds overweight?”

“Going strictly by your fat-to-muscle ratio, yes,” he said. “Not that I’d advise you to try to lose ten pounds. No, what you need to do is build your upper-body strength and endurance. Do that, and cut out the salt, sugar, caffeine, and saturated fats, and your weight won’t be a problem. Here’s the exercise regimen I recommend.”

Regimen was the wrong word. He should have said ordeal. Two half-hour sessions of calisthenics and weight-lifting daily, plus rowing and stair-stepper sessions every other day; I tried it for a week, and then said to hell with it and dropped out of the fitness class.

Which put me in a very awkward position. For as Spring grew into Summer, DeStefano got more and more converts to the company fitness program, and the lunchroom became a rigidly segregated place. By the time July rolled around the place was completely dominated by Healthies, grazing on their avocado salads and constantly guzzling from their omnipresent filtered-water bottles, while we poor benighted Flabbies were relegated to a few battered old tables back in one corner. By the beginning of August they’d taken the Twinkies, potato chips, and Coca-Cola out of the vending machines, and by the end of August, the vending machines themselves were gone, along with the salt packets and the unlimited free coffee. By Labor Day we were down to just four holdouts: myself; majestic Lorenz and his equally majestic stomach; Bill from IT, who claimed an allergy to sweat socks; and grizzled old Stinson, who’d been chain-smoking for thirty years and wasn’t about to quit now, even if the designated smoking area was now on the other side of the parking lot, next to the dumpster.

We had to put up with a lot, in that last month. For example, I love a good ham-and-cheese sandwich, but no matter how I timed it, there was always some sanctimonious jackass looking over my shoulder when I took my sandwich out of the microwave, and he or she never failed to say, “How can you eat that? Don’t you know what that cholesterol is doing to your arteries?” Lorenz, Bill, and Stinson got about the same treatment. We were getting very discouraged.

Until…

At first it was just a few amateur athletes, here and there. Runners, cyclists, triathletes; people who tended to work-out alone. It wasn’t until entire Jazzercise classes began disappearing that people began to take notice. Then, when half the runners in the Seattle Marathon simply vanished right before the TV cameras, it became an international crisis that had to be dealt with.

At about the same time, a confidential FBI report was leaked to the press. It seems that along with the athletes, thousands of private trainers and coaches were also disappearing. And when investigators began looking into the histories of the missing trainers, they found that 95-percent of them could not be accounted for before 2010.

The same 95-percent who were described by the people who’d known them as “thick, hairy, and prognathous.”

There are theories, rumors, and urban legends, of course. The most popular one holds that the Trainers—yes, they capitalize it, now—were transcendent beings of some sort, and the missing athletes were spirited away as a reward for their excellence, strength, winning attitude, et cetera, et cetera…

I never once heard our fitness consultant talk about any of that. What he wanted us to develop was lots of lean red meat.

It’s lucky there are four of us Flabbies left, now. Most of the card games we know work best four-handed. I spend most of my time in the lunchroom these days, drinking beer, eating junk food, playing cards, and smoking. I’ve gained thirty pounds of pure flab and have developed a real fondness for H. Upmann Cameroon Robustos. Things are very relaxed at our company these days, now that all the Healthies are gone.

We don’t miss them one bit.

Once upon a time, under another name, S. Travis Brown had a successful career as an SF/F writer, until the winds of taste changed direction and the kinds of fiction he liked to write became too hard to sell. When his own agent advised him (just before dropping him) to adopt yet another new pseudonym, preferably female this time, and to start his career over again as a writer of paranormal romance novels, he said, “[intercourse] this, I am not Doctor Who,” and went off to do other things that paid better.

Now comfortably retired, we don’t hear from him often, but when we do, we’re usually happy to publish what he sends us.

Brown has no social media presence, and likes it that way.

“Glossary” • by Allan Dyen-Shapiro

2025-08-13T06:00:00.290-05:00

Glossary of Archaic Terms used in
Monograph on Human Culture
During the Period of Conquest
(Kindle Edition)

colonist (ˈkälənəst)

The humans’ term for us.

conflict (ˈkänˌflik(t))

The tendency of humans to compete with and/or kill others thought to be threatening. In the pre-Conquest Period, conflict often involved weapons marketed by competitors of Bezos. (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) When Bezos ended material scarcity by selling products of Colonist technology from his website, his competitors ceased operations. Conflict between humans abated. Bezos minimized Colonist-human conflict by acting as our intermediary. His Oracle, named “Alexa,” prophesied a Golden Age of peace and prosperity.

job (jäb)

(Disambiguation: see Jobs, Steve, a.k.a., “The Evil One”)

A preoccupation of pre-Conquest and early-Conquest-period humans when they weren’t eating, sleeping, copulating, or defecating. Most humans performed menial tasks, creating value, which was usurped by an elite class who owned the means of production and distribution. After Colonist-technology-based automation supplanted these workers, Bezos (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) supplied all goods and services. Few regretted losing their jobs. Research commissioned by Bezos indicated that sleeping until late morning, consuming fattening foodstuffs and video-based entertainment, and copulating satisfied 98% of those surveyed. When Bezos extended Prime membership to the entire world’s population and all wishes were fulfilled within two days at no extra charge, contentment greatly increased.

pregnancy (ˈpreɡnənsē)

A physiological state formerly required for procreation. Before the Conquest, humans reproduced via fertilization and implantation of an ovum within the body of a female, followed by nine months’ gestation in utero. Females endured pain and discomfort, in part thanks to an ancient conspiracy to convince them that the experience was rewarding. Surveys performed by Bezos (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) established that nearly all females preferred the procedure He initiated: one small blood sample, and then nine months later a fully developed baby was delivered directly to the female’s doorstep. Baby delivery in this era employed self-driving trucks, rather than the primitive methods replied upon by lower placental mammals.

r-selection (ˌär səˈlekSHən)

(Disambiguation: compare to K-selection)

A reproductive strategy in which a species prioritizes producing a large number of offspring and only the growth rate governs population size. Freed from economic and biological limitations, humans behaved as if their species was r-selected, not realizing that Earth had reached its carrying capacity for humans and that behaving as a K-selected species was a more intelligent choice. To counter this trend, Bezos (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) tweaked his website’s algorithms to convince humans to order fewer babies and more video games, cell phones, and Chia Pets.

strike (strīk)

Originally a mass refusal of labor to do their jobs, guided by the belief that the owners of the means of production would change employment conditions when pressured to do so. The term broadened in usage to include any mass refusal. Pre-Conquest-Period examples of the expanded meaning include the sex strike in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Mahatma Gandhi’s hunger strikes. The Great Strike constituted humanity’s last act of attempted rebellion against us. If it had occurred earlier, some historians believe we would have been forced to make concessions to the humans who felt “robbed of their humanity.” Humans might once again have become artisans, laborers, or creatives and ceased to rely on Bezos. (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) Fortunately, the mass female refusal to provide us with blood samples for reproductive purposes happened late in the Conquest Period, and so posed only a minor inconvenience.

youth (yo͞oTH)

A term used to identify juvenile humans. The word’s usage declined following the completion of the blood-sample-derived genomic database and the establishment of parthenogenesis-competent oocyte cell cultures. Before the Conquest, “youth” were typically (but not always) raised by adult humans. Now, they mature in cages for three years, before being delivered to restaurants serving our Colonist population. Youth are shipped on ice to maintain freshness and are considered delicious when stir-fried with assorted Earth vegetables, garlic, and scallions and served on a bed of rice or vermicelli.

Allan Dyen-Shapiro is a Ph.D. biochemist currently working as an educator. He’s sold stories to numerous markets, including Flash Fiction Online (where he is a First Reader), Dark Matter Magazine, Grantville Gazette, Small Wonders, Factor Four, Stupefying Stories, and many anthologies. You can fi nd his blog and links to his stories at allandyenshapiro.com, or find him on social media at the following links.

https://www.facebook.com/allandyenshapiro.
author

https://www.goodreads.com/AllanDyen-Shapiro

http://www.twitter.com/Allan_author_SF

https://wandering.shop/@Allan_author_SF (Mastodon)

https://bsky.app/pro file/allandyenshapiro.bsky.social (Bluesky)

Writing 101 • How I Did It, by Karl K. Gallagher

2025-08-11T06:00:00.098-05:00

I started writing my first novel in 2013.

After some work by a wonderful editor, I sent it off to a publisher I liked and set to work on the sequel. Nine months later I received the rejection note. I didn’t want to lose years waiting for other publishers to make up their minds, so I found an artist to do a cover for it, learned how to do proper formatting, and put it up on Amazon in December 2015.

It sold about two thousand copies over the next four months. It’s still selling a trickle of copies, and the omnibus of the whole trilogy sells in a somewhat larger trickle. I’d shown up at what I call ‘the end of the gold rush.’

When Kindle publishing started, a bunch of people bought e-readers and there weren’t many e-books out there for them to enjoy, so any good book would have desperate readers grabbing copies. I made a sale before I’d told anyone about posting it; even my mother (I was trying to fix a formatting problem).

With so much demand, more writers piled in, and trad publishers began to budge on letting their books have electronic editions. Writers reclaimed the rights to their backlists and released e-book versions. Publishers followed along.

At some point, I’m guessing 2016 or 2017, this new e-book supply exceeded the demand. Writers were now competing for readers’ attention. Bowker estimates over three million books were published in 2023, five/sixths of them indie, and that doesn’t include the e-book-only publications. (1)

How am I doing in this flood of new books? I’m treading water. I’m up to twelve novels in three different series and two story collections. My Amazon sales are declining. Part of that is I haven’t kept up with the advertising algorithm changes, so my ads aren’t bringing in as many sales. Someday I need to spend a bunch of time revising my ads, but I’d rather be writing.

There are other ways I’ve been bringing in money:

I have a Substack where I post short stories and samples from my novels in progress. The paid subscribers are providing me more support than Amazon.
Local craft fairs, comic shows, and science fiction conventions are chances to sell in person. I wouldn’t recommend this to someone with only a few books, but with fourteen titles I have a better chance to pitch a book that matches someone’s interests. Not every event is worth selling at—make sure you match the theme.
Running a Kickstarter let me fund covers for my two story collections, and was a chance to sell higher-end books (hardcovers of my first trilogy) to long-time readers. One supporter went for the $300 pledge to pick a topic for me to write a story about.

Can I quit my day job? No. But I’m making a modest profit, or put another way, subsidizing my habit of going to science fiction conventions. My most recent book was #7 in a nine-book space opera series. My hope is that when the series is finished, readers burned by GRRM and other unfinished series will pick it up, so once #9 is out there will be a big sales spike.

Do I recommend doing this? Nah. It’s an experiment, one that’s taking years at my writing speed, and I don’t know if it will work. Indie publishing is like that.

So what do I recommend?

First, I advise against chasing trad pub contracts. The big publishing companies are in the mating dinosaurs phase of their lifecycle—merging and dying. You don’t want to commit your career to a publisher who may be bankrupt or auctioned off in a few years. As their cash flow constricts, the big houses are making their contracts nastier, demanding extra rights and sometimes not allowing termination clauses. Kris Rusch is a long-time writer who’s tracked these trends at her site (2).

For the multinational corporations that own the big publishing houses, the real value of a book may not be its sales, but valuing it as an intellectual property asset and then depreciating it to balance income in other parts of the corporation (3). If that’s what they want a book for, they’re not going to put much effort into marketing it.

The people who do get trad publishing contracts tend to fall into the buckets of:

Those with large followings who can be counted on to buy the book. They’d probably be better off going with Kickstarter.
People with good connections to agents, editors, or publishers. Nobody coming to a blog post for advice is in this category.
Anyone who’s the proper demographic or ideological flavor-of-the-month in Manhattan. A fickle game, alas.
Someone with a one-in-a-million superb book. Good luck.

If not trad, what do I recommend?

First, get good at writing. Write a lot of words. Fanfic (under a pen name!) is a great writing exercise. Blog. Write essays. Do stories for practice. Before I started a novel, I’d written probably over a hundred-thousand words of RPG adventures, white papers, operations orders, and wargame scenarios. It’s a skill. You improve it by practicing.

When you’re good enough (alas, only readers can tell you, and you have to publish stuff for them to give feedback on), write something to be published. Find an editor, maybe more than one. You need someone who can spot problems with the story structure and one who can spot typos, continuity errors, etc. If you find them in the same person, bless them.

You need a good artist to do a book cover. Might be you, if you have the skill. The cover shouldn’t just be a pretty picture. It has to say “This is a book of sub-genre X.” If it looks like a mystery but it’s actually space opera, you will get unhappy readers.

Amazon is the big gorilla of publishing. You can go directly there. Doing that gives you a link you can start promoting on social media and with advertising. How to do that? Sorry, I’m not good at that part of the game.

There are other outfits you can put your book on (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, etc.) but they won’t sell as much as Amazon. If you go Amazon exclusive, your book is available to Kindle Unlimited readers. Some months I get more from KU than from sales; usually it’s about a third of my Amazon revenue. If Amazon ever cancels my account, I will be screwed, so it’s a gamble.

A mailing list (Substack, MailChimp, many others) will let you keep in touch with your core readers, the people who can be counted onto buy all your books. Make yourself visible—social media, conventions, in-person sales. Recruiting readers one at a time is slow, but gets you people who will read everything you write. Substack has the advantage that instead of charging you for sending emails, they offer subscribers a chance to pay you (while Substack takes a cut, of course).

The Amazon algorithm rewards publishing fast. I’ve seen writers succeed by putting out a new book every month. Some authors have teamed up to write in shared universes so they can jointly feed the algorithm. I don’t write fast enough to do that, but if you can do it without burning out, Amazon will reward you.

Kickstarter is a good way to bypass Amazon and the other e-book platforms, to contact readers directly. An “event” lets you attract attention. You can have a range of pledge levels from cheap e-books to autographed hardcover sets, to bring in readers with different incomes. You can also offer huge pledge levels to hook “whales” among your fans.

If you’re going “wide” (not exclusive to Amazon), you can build a website of your own to sell books directly. That’s more labor, but you keep the highest percentage that way. I know an indie writer who’s become so successful that her husband quit his day job to handle shipping for her books.

For an introvert like me, selling in person is hard. I got better with some advice from fellow author Chris Schmitz (4). This is another thing practice helps with. Meeting readers in person is another way to add to your following.

It’s not easy being writer. It’s not a great way to make money unless you’re both good and lucky. But if you work hard, you can do your part in changing that three million new books a year to four million new books a year.

If you want to see what I’ve done, you can check out my books on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Karl-K-Gallagher/author/B0195ZEOO8

And my short stories on Substack:

https://gallagherstories.substack.com/t/shortstory

Footnotes:

Karl K. Gallagher is a systems engineer, currently performing data analysis for a major aerospace company. In the past he calculated trajectories for a commercial launch rocket start-up, operated satellites as a US Air Force officer, and selected orbits for government and commercial satellites. Karl lives in Minnesota with his family.

ATTENTION, AUTHORS!

Are you a successful self-published or non-trad published author? Have you had a self-published, small-press published, or other non-traditional-published book released within the last three years? Are you willing to share what you learned from the experience with other writers? If so, we’d like to hear from you, and to share your story with our readers.

Query first, please, to stupefyingstories@gmail.com, subject “Success Story.”

We’re most interested in hearing what worked for you, and what didn’t. Is there one thing you did that really worked well, and that you’d recommend that others do? Conversely, is there something you did that you really wish you hadn’t, and would caution others to avoid?

Yes, of course you can use this opportunity to shamelessly promote yourself and your own books.

Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem: an RFP

2025-08-10T13:00:00.004-05:00

Continued from: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Supplemental reading: How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

RFP: It’s engineer-speak for “Call for Submissions”

Rather than continuing to charge ahead with what’s turned into a series of posts, I’ve decided to pause, take a step back, and really think about where we’re going with this.

Understand, I came into publishing in the 1980s, when the objective was to make enough pro market short story sales to draw the attention of a traditional publisher, and then to land a book deal. I have had such book deals, for mass-market paperback, trade paperback, and hardcover books with major publishers, and have had my books win awards and make bestseller lists, at a time when a mid-list book sold 50- to 80,000 copies and a bestseller moved six figures or more.

In 2000 I got fed up with dealing with traditional publishers and went back into working in software development, where I was mostly happy for the next 20 years. In 2010 we launched Rampant Loon Press and Stupefying Stories, in part out of intellectual curiosity and a desire to explore this brave new world of electronic publishing (which always made more sense to me than did the wasteful economics of trad publishing), and in larger part to help promote the careers of up-and-coming writers.

In the 20-teens we did moderately well, publishing e-books that sometimes flopped but more often sold, and sometimes sold thousands of copies. To my surprise I learned that a title that moved a few thousand copies was a bestseller, in this 21st century small-press e-book world, and that every time I thought I had the market all figured out, the rules changed.

The rules really changed with the COVID pandemic.

Since the pandemic, while we have released books that have gotten great reviews and even been short-listed for major awards—and when I compare the hardcover of The Princess Scout to that original first issue of Stupefying Stories, I am astonished by how rapidly the quality of the books we can produce has evolved—

We have not had a bestseller since the pandemic.

The closest thing we have to a bestseller in the current catalog is The Midnight Ground, by Eric Dontigney, and we released that one before the pandemic. It’s getting a lot of attention now, but it had a long, sputtering, slow-burning fuse before it finally took off. The lessons we learned from this one are idiosyncratic, and not readily applicable to anything else.

Hence this RFP. I am not looking for fiction submissions at this time. What I am looking for are success stories. So my questions are:

Have you self-published or small-press published a book within the past three years?
Has the book sold well? (No need to disclose numbers.)
Are you willing to share what you learned from your experience with other writers?
Can you think of one thing you did that really paid off and that you’d recommend others do?
Can you think of one thing you did that you really wish you hadn’t and want to warn others off of doing?

Again, remembering that the entire point of Stupefying Stories is to help promote the careers of up-and-coming writers, I am looking for success stories, not OMFG failure stories. (I have enough of those of my own already, thank you.) Ideally, I’d like like to run a series of guest columns, along the lines of—

If this idea gets your interest, drop me a line at stupefyingstories@gmail.com, and let’s talk.

Thanks,
Bruce Bethke
Executive Cat-Herder in Chief, Stupefying Stories

P. S. Yes, of course you can use your guest column to shamelessly promote your own book.

In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem, Part 3

2025-08-07T14:02:00.004-05:00

Continued from: Part 1 | Part 2
Supplemental reading: How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

This is where things get sticky.

I would have a lot more confidence in what I’m about to say if we’d had a big hit bestseller recently. We’ve had hit bestsellers. We’ve had books that made a plethora of Top 10 lists, been nominated for awards, and sold thousands of copies.

But not within the last three years. And here in StreamingWorld, more than three years ago is ancient history. That’s, like, forever ago.

I put the link to How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers! in Part 2 with a certain sense of snark and irony. There are a lot of good ideas in that column, if you don’t mind that it’s dripping with cynicism. But I wrote that column 15 months ago, and parts of it are already obsolete. The idea of building your readership by serializing your novel on Kindle Vella, for example—

A few months later Amazon cancelled that program. You say it was a crucial part of your marketing plan? Tough. It’s gone. tb;ss. Too bad, so sad.

The first crucial thing to remember is that Amazon doesn’t care.

If they cared, they wouldn’t sell all the A.I.-generated slop that’s already out there, with more being added every day.

The second crucial thing to remember is that it’s far easier to sell people more of what they already like than to get them to take a chance on something truly new.

On this foundation is the mighty Amazon commerce empire built. But in fairness, we can’t blame this on Amazon. Publishers have always used the, “If you liked [that], you’ll love [this]!” sales pitch. As the blind poet Homer wandered ancient Greece, I have to imagine he was preceded by an advance man shouting, “If you liked The Iliad, you’ll love The Odyssey!”

Take another look, if you will, at my inverted funnels sketch. It’s easy to see it as a stack of challenges, frustrations, and obstacles, through which you must fight uphill every step of the way to reach The Land of Happy Readers. Every writer who undertakes this quest sooner or later starts to think, “There must be an easier way! Some short cut no one else has discovered…”

What isn’t on the sketch is this: that at every step along the way there are hordes of Gríma Wormtongues, all eager to tell you that yes, there is an easier way, the shortcut does exist, and they will be happy to show you exactly what and where it is—

All you need to do is buy their self-help book. Or enroll in their webinar. Or hire them to write your book blurbs. The secret to success lies is Amazon advertising. No, it’s in Facebook advertising. No, it’s BookTok! It’s in posting videos on social media! It’s in learning to master the arcane secrets of Amazon Kindle keywords and having a great quote from Kirkus Reviews!

Did you know you have to buy book reviews from Kirkus? And if you want to quote their review in your advertising, that costs you even more?

The secret is, there is no secret shortcut to success. There is no foolproof way to game the system. No amount of money spent on advertising and courting the favor of social media influencers can push a bad book uphill. The big publishers have proven that repeatedly, every time they’ve bought a novel by a “celebrity”—unless you want to do what Putnam did with William Shatner’s TekWar series, and hire Ron Goulart to actually write the books.

I’ll assume you don’t have the resources to do either: to hire a well-known actor to be the public face of your books, or to hire someone else to actually write them. But know this: you can spend a lot of your own money trying to chase shortcuts and push your book uphill, if you listen to all the Grímas you will meet along the way.

The Best Option: Traditional Publishing

The best option for most authors remains what it has been for decades: to try to get a book deal with a major publishing house. They’re the ones with the resources to pay authors significant on-signing advances; to buy professional cover art and editorial and book design services; and to buy ad placements on Amazon. Getting a deal with a major publishing house is also the ticket to getting physical books into those few brick-and-mortar bookstores as still exist. If you can get a book deal with a major publisher, it’s still the way to go.

However, seeking a book deal with a major publishing house is not for the impatient, and the aperture of entry is tighter than a frog’s sphincter. Also, once you’ve landed a book deal there are still a multitude of ways in which it can go to Hell in a handbasket, and I’ve explored most of them.

MY ADVICE: Never ask a publisher what they want to see. The answer invariably is either something just like whatever was their most recent big bestseller, or else something just like whatever was a competitor's most recent and even bigger bestseller. You can save time and answer that question yourself, with about five minutes’ research.

Never ask an editor what they want to see. They’ll just tell you what their publisher told them to look for.

Never ask an agent what they want to see. They’ll just parrot whatever they heard from the last editor or publisher they spoke with most recently.

The Worst Option: Totally DIY Self-Publishing

Have you ever been wandering around Netflix or Amazon Prime late at night and decided to take a chance on a movie you’d never heard of before, because the poster art and description looked promising? Then, once you started to watch, the credits were something like—

Starring
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Directed by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Produced by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Screenplay by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Based on a story by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Catering by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Mr. Schwartz’s wardrobe by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Have you ever seen such a movie that was actually good? (Okay, Bambi Meets Godzilla. That’s one.) Or even watched such a movie for more than a few minutes before giving up on it?

This is what you’re up against when you decide to bypass everything and go the totally DIY route, straight from yourself to The World: the perception that anything published this way is very likely to be total crap. That perception may be wrong. Your book might be the one brilliant exception; the Bambi Meets Godzilla, as it were. But so many have trod this path before you and so thoroughly befouled it that you’re never going to make more than a few pity sales, no matter how much of your own money you hand over to all the Grímas you meet along the way who are eager to assure you that you are doing the right thing, and you’re sure to succeed, if only you take your spending to the next level and give them more.

MY ADVICE: This is the worst option. Don’t do it. All you will accomplish is to waste your time, money, and energy, and fray the nerves of your friends and relatives. Don’t do it!

And don’t think saying “Vince Flynn” is a meaningful rebuttal. (Self-pub evangelists love to do that.) As happens I have a signed, first edition, first-printing copy of Term Limits right here, and know quite a bit about how Flynn parlayed that self-published book into a lucrative deal with Pocket Books and NY Times Bestsellerdom. Suffice to say, it was a one-of-a-kind never-to-be-repeated exception, not a model you can emulate.

The Chaotic Good Option: Assisted Self-Publishing

And on this note I’m out of time to write today, so I guess this is going to roll over into a fourth column after all. See you tomorrow!

~brb

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem, Part 2

2025-08-05T16:31:00.015-05:00

Continued from Part 1

Funny thing about time. It always moves forward.

Never slows, never pauses—if anything, it seems to accelerate as you get older—and absolutely never flows backward.

I sometimes wonder if our perception of the passage of time is at the root of our urge to read and write science fiction and fantasy. We long to imagine what it might be like to live in the future, or to have lived in the past, or frankly, to live anywhere else except in the boring and grubby confines of our personal here and now. We want to imagine living a life beyond our biologically allotted fourscore and ten.

I’m pretty sure our perception of time is what’s responsible for the catastrophic / apocalyptic /survivalist themes the science fiction. Unable to imagine what the future might really hold, some writers say, “Aw, screw it,” and decide to destroy the world instead, so they can start over again with telling stories set in the Stone Age.

Slightly attenuated, this impulse might explain how steampunk was able to erase the 20^th Century and try to start science fiction all over again, beginning in the 19^th Century, with Jules Verne.

This column has proven more difficult to write than I’d expected. I left off last week with a promised confrontation with the Great Boss Monster, Guardian of The Critical Chokepoint.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I feel as if I’m biting the hand that’s fed us. Longtime readers know Stupefying Stories simply would not exist were it not for that first Kindle I bought for my late wife, when she first began chemotherapy and found her customary book bag too heavy to carry. That Kindle was a godsend for her, and on the RLP side of the house Amazon literally opened the world for us, making it possible for us to reach readers we had no hope of ever reaching before.

(And I will add, right from the start, dealing with Kindle Direct Publishing was always orders of magnitude better than dealing directly with Barnes & Noble Nook or Apple iBook publishing.)

Then again, the business relationship is essentially parasitic. Amazon’s business model seems predicated on convincing enormous numbers of people to pour their time, energy, blood, sweat, toil and tears into developing new markets and creating new products that make Amazon’s platform more valuable. Then, once a new market has been proven to exist, they change the rules and make it impossible for third parties to make a profit—at least, not without giving Amazon a bigger cut.

It’s difficult to think objectively about Amazon without becoming cynical. I base this not just on my long experience with Rampant Loon Press, but on our even longer experience with K&B Booksellers. If you are lucky enough to get in early on some new opportunity, they will do a good job of feigning being your partner, at first. Eventually, though, they will either undercut you and devour your business, or else simply kill off the program entirely, if they don’t find it profitable enough. If it’s a program you built your business around: tough.

The essential thing to remember is that Amazon doesn’t care what they sell. They only care that they sell, and skim a percentage off the top. They’re a conduit to customers, that’s all. Amazon would sell used baby diapers and outdated gray-market medical supplies if they could—and in fact they have, but that’s another story.

The problem for the rest of us is that Amazon has had years in which to develop their conduit, and they have gotten very, very good at it. As far as fiction publishers are concerned, Amazon is the world, and the world is Amazon’s. There are some fringe distribution channels left, but only because Amazon has not yet found it worthwhile to devour them. Whenever publishers and publishing-adjacent people get together, one topic keeps coming up: When is the pendulum going to swing back? When will we start to go back to the way things were before Amazon?

Answers: never, and we’re not. Time keeps moving forward, remember? That friendly neighborhood indie bookstore you remember so fondly? It’s not coming back. Spinner racks in convenience stories loaded with mass-market paperbacks? Not coming back. Magazine racks and newsstands? Nope.

You are in Streaming World now, and if it isn’t electronic and online, it’s not going to sell in more than boutique numbers. Movie industry people will complain about this long and loud, if you let them. Now, when a new movie is released, it’s not just competing against all the other new releases coming out at about the same time. It’s competing against almost every other movie ever made, now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Ditto for books. We writers have always sensed this, that we’re competing with our predecessors, which perhaps explains why each generation of writers seems to truly hate the generation that came before it. Mark Twain hated James Fennimore Cooper, after all. But now, you’re not just competing against all the other books currently on the shelves in your local bookstore. You’re competing against practically every book ever published.

So how do you break through that enormous inert mass?

Remember my inverted funnel sketch from Part 1? To recap, at the top is The World, the wonderful place where readers live. The World is huge, and thanks to the Internet in general and Amazon in particular, it’s much larger and more densely populated than ever before.

At the bottom is Author Space, which actually is a subset of The World, but it’s hard to express that in a two-dimensional pencil sketch. Thanks to the Internet, Author Space is also much more densely populated than ever before, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that there are a lot of writers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America who can tell an engaging story much better than can someone who is fresh out of an American college with a newly minted BA or MFA in Creative Writing. My current theory as to why this is so is that the latter tend to be stuck firmly in Author Space, with minds so loaded full of received wisdom about writing qua writing that they have forgotten that their purpose is to entertain readers by telling them a story.

Emphasize those words. Entertain. Readers.

Basic theory tells us that communication consists of three elements:

A transmitter (you)
Sending information (your idea)
To a receiver (the readers)

All else is noise, filtering, attenuation, encoding protocols, or other characteristics of the transmitter’s chosen medium. Without receivers, all else is meaningless. Or to paraphrase Mark Twain: ‘Writing alone purely for your own pleasure is like having sex alone purely for your own pleasure, and a practice you should stop before reaching adulthood.’

So the first step in breaking through to The World is to consider your orientation. Are you looking at this challenge from the perspective of Author Space concerns, or from the point of view of Readers?

If you’ve been focusing on Author Space concerns and finding yourself going nowhere, perhaps you need to adjust your frame of reference.

An aside before we continue: another thing hard to convey in a 2D pencil sketch are the 4^th dimensions of both Author Space and The World. Out in The World, most people seem to live inside a bubble about ten years long. Five years ago is ancient history. (“You mean, like, before the Pandemic?”) Five years in the future too far away to imagine. I sometimes think ten years might even be optimistic, and six years more accurate.

In Author Space, on the other hand, writers tend to live inside much larger temporal envelopes. They read; they remember. Writers tend to take a longer view of history, and a more far-sighted view of the future. But they also forget: most other people don’t.

Both populations are constantly turning over. Writers, I’ve observed, have a half-life of about ten years, between the time they decide to get serious about their craft and the time they get fed up and quit. The reading population turns over much more quickly: about six years, I’d say, between the time they decide to get serious about reading and the time their tastes have ossified; they’ve found their favorite authors and styles and aren’t open to trying anything new unless it’s very much like something they already know and like. The readers of today are not the same readers of even five years ago. Whenever publishing-adjacent people ask: When is the pendulum going to swing back? When will we start to go back to the way things were before Amazon?

It can’t. There is no “there” to go back to. Those readers are gone. They’ve aged out of the marketplace and been replaced. And for the new readers who have come in to replace the old ones, the way things are now is the way things have always been.

Geez, you’d think people who routinely write about orbital mechanics and relativistic time-dilation would grasp that.

Thus we return to The Pass of Ultimate Glory or Failure, to find ourselves standing once more before The Critical Chokepoint, considering how best to deal with its guardian, The Great Boss Monster, Amazonas.

And at this point we must pause, because this planned 750-word post has already ballooned up to 1,500 words and I’m nowhere the end, and yet out of time to write today. I’ll try to wrap it up tomorrow, then.

In the meantime, your homework assignment is to read this:

How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

...to be concluded...

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem

2025-07-29T09:00:00.246-05:00

I know I said I was going to let Writing 101 rest a while, but a few recent conversations have made this post seem necessary. Lately I’ve run into quite a few young writers who seem to be lacking very rudimentary knowledge of how the publishing business works.

I wish we could meet in person. If we could do that, in a room with a big white board and a nice assortment of colored markers, I could lay it all out for you in a single image, and then we could have a conversation about it. Since we don’t have that luxury, you’ll have to settle for this crude and hastily sketched-out scribble, with some comments.

Think of publishing as an inverted funnel: a stack of ascending and ever narrower chokepoints. I use an inverted funnel because this way a.) it looks less like Dante’s map of Hell, and b.) at the top, you find—

THE WORLD

The world is a wonderful place. It’s big, and beautiful, and full of readers, who are the people you want to reach. If you’re not writing with the objective of reaching readers, you are setting yourself up for frustration from the start.

The World is actually much bigger than it used to be. When I began to write for publication, “The World” basically meant the North American English-language market, with some potential crossover into the U.K. market. Now, it truly does mean the world, as in the entire population of the planet Earth. This presents both challenges and opportunities.

The foremost challenge for you as a writer is to fight your way up through this stack of ever-tighter funnels, to get your work out into The World and into the hands of the readers who live there. All else is subsidiary to this goal.

THE CRITICAL CHOKEPOINT

This is in hot pink because I couldn’t find a way to make it flash in some even worse eyesore of a color. We’ll get back to this in a minute, but think of this as the final challenge: the Boss Monster you will face on the last step your hero’s journey.

This boss monster has a name, and it’s name is Amazon, and it will pretend to be your friend, but really, it wants to drink your blood.

PUBLISHERS

This should be more of a wide, smeared, and cloudy bar, as there are a lot of different publishers of different sizes and with different agendas, but making it a smaller bar emphasizes the constricting nature of the funnel. There are a few large publishers, who can afford to pay authors large advances and put major marketing muscle behind new book releases, but there are fewer of these every day, as companies merge and consolidate. There are a plethora of smaller publishers, many of whom serve some religious or quasi-religious agenda, or else that are more directly coupled with their ownership, and thus are typically short on resources and funding.

With the exception of religious and/or grant-funded/non-profit publishers, all publishers work for the owners of their organizations and have the same job. It is to acquire content and put it out into the world, with the intention of moving a large enough number of copies of that content to make a profit by doing so. This means publishers have a built-in aversion to taking risks, and a bias towards making conservative choices when acquiring content. They want content they can get as cheaply as possible, and that will require as little production and marketing expenditure as possible, while immediately appealing to the largest clearly identified audience known.

The green dashed lines represent paths to the world that publishers used to have available to them—e.g., through independent distributors, direct sales, or independent bookstores—but that are increasingly more difficult to use now, if not completely defunct. Most publishers now depend on passing through the Critical Chokepoint to reach the World.

EDITORS

Editors work for publishers. There are many different kinds of editors, but the ones we are interested in are the ones who have the power to acquire content for their publisher. Their success depends on their being able to present their publisher with content that can be published profitably, on-time and on or under budget, with as little time and money as possible being invested into making it publishable. Therefore editors have a built-in bias towards considering submissions that “look professional” and buying work that aligns with their publisher’s current marketing goals.

AGENTS

Writers have a lot of misconceptions about literary agents. You don’t need to have an agent to break into publishing. True, some agents do function as pre-filters for editors, as certain editors and publishers will work only with literary agents. Basically, though, if you are not already famous, either for your previous books or for your accomplishments in some other field, this doesn’t apply to you. You are unlikely to attract the attention of one of these kinds of agents.

At heart, reputable literary agents are essentially commissioned salespeople. They make their money by taking a percentage off the top when they sell an author’s work to a publisher. As such, they have a built-in bias towards representing works they believe they can move very quickly, for as much cash up-front as possible—which means novels, not short stories. Some reputable agents will handle shorter work, but usually just as a courtesy, and only for someone for whom they are also selling novels.

I use the qualifier “reputable” because there are a lot of people out there who claim to be agents but really are parasites, feeding off the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers, and it is really easy to attract the attention of these kinds of agents. Remember: the money always flows to the writer. Any so-called agent who wants money from you in order to represent you is a creature to be avoided.

AUTHORS (YOU)

At last, we come to the place where most writers begin: with thinking about themselves and their writing. By inverting the funnel, I hope this helps you to think of publishing as a game, through which you, the writer, must keep striving to level-up until you at last achieve victory.

I made the Authors cloud messy and chaotic because for most writers, it is. A lot of aspiring authors write like mad, but go nowhere. Some get stuck in loops and keep repeating the same self-defeating mistakes. Looking at the drawing now, I should have drawn at least a few lines that went straight to ground, because I’ve seen so many authors do that.

Some authors believe they need an Agent to take them to the next level, but in the early stages of your writing career, you don’t. At this stage, the best an agent can do for you is to help you negotiate better contract terms, if you have written a novel and succeeded in getting a publisher interested in it. For most writers, though, time spent chasing after signing with an agent is time wasted.

For most aspiring writers (speaking in sweeping generalities again), the best path forward is to work on developing good relationships with Editors. Don’t get too attached to any particular one, as editors serve at the pleasure of their publishers, who serve at the pleasure of their owners, who can change their marketing direction at the merest whim of the Great Boss Monster. But in general, learning to work well with editors is the most useful skill you can develop early in your writing career. Editors are typically the gatekeepers controlling access to publishers.

I have seen writers bypass editors and go straight to Publishers. It doesn’t happen often, and it succeeds even less often, but to my astonishment, I have seen it work, once in a rare while. I have even seen writers bypass publishers entirely and go directly to The World, but that succeeds even less often.

The greatest danger at this level of the game is this. An author will look at their ever-growing collection of form rejections; look at all the traps and obstacles still lying in wait before them, and especially at all the conservative biases built into the game—

[N.B. I don’t mean “conservative” in the political or social sense. In this context it means, “What’s the safe choice? What’s going to be most profitable for the least effort? What is everyone else doing?” Depending on the zeitgeist, “conservative” might very well mean publishing yet another fangporn vampire romance with an LGBTQ+ protagonist.]
—and declare, “SCREW THIS! I’LL BECOME MY OWN PUBLISHER!”

Whereupon they hurl themselves with all their might into The Critical Chokepoint…

And the Great Boss Monster feasts on their blood.

BUT WAIT! THERE IS YET CAUSE FOR HOPE!

COMING NEXT:
“The Great Boss Monster, and What Lies Beyond”

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

It’s Amazon’s world. We just rent space in it.

2025-07-28T09:00:00.228-05:00

I got a query from an old friend the other day.

And by old, I mean old: this is someone I’ve known for more than fifty years. After a long and successful career as a teacher and writer of non-fiction books, he retired, and decided to try his hand at writing a novel. In the fullness of time he actually finished his novel, and then, to compound the miracle, found a publisher who liked it well enough to accept it for publication and pay him a modest advance. After another fullness of time spent working through the developmental editing, copy editing, proofreading, dust-jacket marketing copy development, etc., etc., etc., his novel was at last released…

Whereupon it promptly sank without a ripple. Not even a nice satisfying ker-ploonk! as it hit the surface of the literary world and went under. Two weeks after the gala release party, it was as if his novel had never existed.

Prompting his query to me:

Here in the 21st century, how in the Hell do you get your book noticed?

The truth is, I don’t know. I’m a time traveler from the past as well. I began my career as a fiction writer in the 1970s and am intimately familiar with the way the fiction publishing business used to work. But in the here and now? Here, in the year 2025? (♪If man is still aliiiiive…♫)

Beats me.

It used to be hard to get published. Now it’s easy to get published, but really hard to get anyone to notice or care. When Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous, but only for fifteen minutes, he was perhaps being unreasonably optimistic: fifteen nanoseconds seems more like it. Here in AmazonWorld—or as I prefer to call its electronic manifestation, NatterSpace™—ADHD seems to be a communicable disease, and the question of how to catch and hold someone’s attention for longer than the three seconds it takes them to glance at a tweet or “like” a cute photo of an annoyed cat in a pink bunny costume—

Well, that is the challenge, isn’t it?

It doesn’t help that your every step in NatterSpace is tracked, your every like and dislike recorded, studied, analyzed, and turned into data to drive further push-marketing. The Amazonification of the marketplace has reached its apotheosis. You live your online life surrounded by a cloud of tiny invisible digital spies, servants, and gnats and gadflies, all eager to push you into buying lots more of whatever it is you’ve already proven you will buy. If it seems to you there is a certain dreary sameness in the recommendations you see every time you go online…

There is. You are in the process of being bored to death by robots. Not out of malice, or even out of misguided virtue, but simply because that is the easiest way for their human masters to take your money. There is probably a great SF story hiding in this idea, waiting to be written.

But where would you get it published?

In 2005, a fairly bright person said in an interview—

I think it’s a mistake to talk about the “genre” as if it were a monolith. There may have been a time when it was possible for a dedicated fan to read a good sampling of all the new SF being published, but that time—if it ever really was—was long ago. What we’ve been going through for at least the last 30 years has been a sort of literary cladogenesis, with “the genre” fragmenting into dozens of related but distinct daughter-genres and microgenres.

The interesting part of this is that, between print-on-demand publishing, e-publishing, web publishing, and all the other emerging technologies, it’s now at least semi-practical to publish fiction that has no hope of ever appealing to a mass audience. If you wanted to, say, launch an e-zine devoted exclusively to publishing stories about promiscuous centaurs living in trailer parks in Alabama, you could do it, and do a very professional-looking job of it. Not only that, but thanks to the Internet, you would actually stand a pretty fair chance of reaching the 500 people in the world who want to read nothing but stories about promiscuous centaurs living in trailer parks in Alabama. So there’s more fiction being published than ever before.

The downside for the writer, though, is that there’s no money in it. The general interest magazines appear to be following the general interest anthologies into extinction, and extreme specialization and small-niche marketing seem to be the shape of things to come. Readers now have unprecedented power to find only exactly the types of fiction they want to read, without risk of accidental exposure to anything else. I suppose they’ve always had this power—I can think of entire years when I subscribed to Asimov’s and only read two or three stories in each issue—but at least with a general interest magazine, there was always the possibility that after you’d read the Michael Swanwick and Lucius Shepard stories, you might take a chance on Karen Joy Fowler.

But this trend towards extreme narrowcasting—it’s both fascinating and disturbing. When the reader can exercise such fine control over the input he receives, how does a writer crack through that protective shell?

Quelle surprise! The person who said that was me!

Twenty years later, the problem not only remains but has intensified exponentially: how do you get readers to take a look at fiction that does not conform to Amazon’s algorithmic predictions of what they should like?

I honestly do not know. In a sense we began Stupefying Stories magazine and this web site as an effort to seek the answer to this question, but instead have spent the past 15 years watching the market for original SF/F get ever smaller, narrower, and worse for writers, as it spirals down to extinction. The established general interest “pro” magazines are on their last legs, if not already dead and shuffling around like zombies. The new owners of Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Hitchcock’s, and Ellery Queen—yes, they’re all owned by the same parent company now—have introduced a new standard publication contract that is so bad for writers, at least one writer’s market resource has decided Analog is no longer a pro market and de-listed it.

Yet as one established writer I know put it, “It’s not like people are lining up to buy my stuff, so I would probably sign it.”

Thus we return to my old friend’s question:

Here in the 21st century, how in the Hell do you get your book noticed?

I don’t know the answer, but am open to suggestions. I’d love to hear what’s working for you, assuming something is. Remember, I’m a time traveler. I come from the past, where they do things differently. I am eager to learn the ways of this strange new world.

Over to you.

In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spend most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

An earlier version of this column was published in 2017. Since then, the situation has not improved.

Status Update • 27 July 2025

2025-07-27T14:07:00.010-05:00

Enough people have asked that it’s time for me to respond. Where have I been for the past two weeks?

Answer: Busy. Really, really busy.

Rather than chatter, then, let’s get right to the agenda.

Item #1: REMINDER: You have five days left in which to recommend your favorite stories for inclusion in The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge. You’ll find the (mostly) complete list of PWC stories here.

Nominate your favorites either by commenting on this post or in an email message to stupefyingstories @ gmail [dot] com.

ANOTHER REMINDER: Do not bother to comment in the comments sections of the stories themselves. Because of aggressive spambot activity, we’ve had to lock down commenting on old posts. Comments or recommendations made on older posts, as well as on social media, very likely will be overlooked.

Item #2: HENRY VOGEL just won an Imadjinn Award for Best Graphic Novel, for The Complete X-Thieves. Sadly, his most recent RLP novel, The Princess Scout, was only a finalist and didn’t win in its category. Henry writes good books, most of which we’ve published. You should check them out.

I sometimes complain that people only seem to care about stories and books I wrote thirty years ago. Henry is finally starting to get awards and recognition for comic books he scripted in the 1980s. In some perverse way, this makes me feel better.

Item #3: ALLAN DYEN-SHAPIRO’s novelette, The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, is at last out in paperback on Barnes & Noble. There are slight differences between the Amazon and Barnes & Noble (Ingram) editions, mostly in that Ingram did a much better job of printing the cover art, used a better grade of paper for the interior, and made the binding tighter and more durable. I don’t care which version you buy: we make more money off the Amazon edition, but the Ingram edition is a better book. Just, take a look at the thing, will you?

Note that the e-book is available on pretty much every e-reader platform there is, and the Ingram print edition is slowly trickling out to stores and e-commerce sites. This is what we’ll be doing going forward: releasing our e-books on every platform we can reach. This makes some difference in how we deal with Amazon, most notably in that we will no longer be putting new releases on Kindle Unlimited. KU sells novels—THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, by Eric Dontigney, is doing particularly well on KU—but KU totally cannibalizes sales of short story collections. So we’re going to stop using it.

Item #4: in the meantime, Stupefying Stories issues #23, #24, #25, and #26 remain available FREE to read on Kindle Unlimited.

If you have any interest at all in what we’re doing here, beyond how much we pay and when we’re going to reopen to submissions, please, please, please take a look at any or all of these four books. You’re sure to find something you like in them. Maybe even something you think worth mentioning to your friends. And you can’t beat the price.

Item #5: I recently rejoined SFWA. It was an eye-opening experience.

Mind you, I did this not for my own benefit, but in hopes of learning some things about the SF/F market as it exists today, so that I might better promote the writers whose work I am publishing. Instead, what I learned was… disheartening.

First off, I was sad to see a lot of names I recognized on the In Memoriam page. Some of these people were good friends, back in the day. Some were even people whose work I’ve published. In particular, finding Zoe Kaplan’s name there was heart-breaking. She was too young to be gone already.

Second, I was shocked to see how SFWA has had to adjust their admission requirements downward. When I first joined—

No, never mind. That was then. This is now. But as a reflection of the general health of the SF/F market, it was disturbing to see. And the deeper I looked, the more disturbed I became, and perhaps I’ll have more to say about that another time. But right now I want to move on to—

Item #6: Getting back to The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge:

We’ve already found that two of the candidates for that book can’t be republished, because the authors have since died and left no contact information.

Perhaps I’m just morose because of what I learned when I rejoined SFWA, but this is an important point. As an author, you own your copyrights, and they might someday have some value. I know it’s no fun to think about this, but you really do need to plan for someone to be responsible for your literary estate after you’re gone. Otherwise all your works will go to The Land of Orphaned Copyrights…

And then Google* will find a way to make money off them. You don’t want that to happen, do you?

* Probably under the well-known legal principle, “The dead can’t sue.” Someday I’m going to find a way to slip that line into a story. I just need to come up with a character loathsome enough to say it.

~brb

The Never-ending FAQ • Addendum, 11 July 2025

2025-07-11T12:00:00.341-05:00

Following up on the 9 July Never-ending FAQ post…

Q: Pete Wood asks: “How come there are no questions in the FAQ?”

A: Because I’m really busy right now and trying to get a lot done in a very short amount of time, and something had to give. I got the three most important items out in Wednesday’s post: that I want people to look at the candidates for The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge, I want people to know that The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds is now out in print and ebook, and that the author, Allan Dyen-Shapiro, will be at Readercon 34 next weekend with books to sign.

That, and a lot of the questions that have come in lately have been on the order of this one:

Q: An anonymous commenter asks: [question redacted]

A: Never mind. I will not repeat the comment, nor will I send a private reply. I will only say this: “Trust me, pal, the world will seem like a much better place to you if you just keep taking your Lexapro as prescribed.”

Geez, I wish I’d used a pseudonym for everything I’d ever written for public consumption. Everything.

Q: Another commenter asks: I tried to comment on a story for The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge, but my comment never showed up. What happened?

A: To repeat: we had to impose strict moderation on comments because of the aggressive junk commenting by A.I. spambots. Comments made on posts go into the moderation queue, and we do see them—eventually—but if you want to recommend a story for The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge, please do so either in the comments section of the index post or in an email to our submissions address. Comments and recommendations made anywhere else—on Twitter/X, Bluesky, or the Stupefying Stories facebook page—will very likely be lost.

Q: Oh, come on. Is the spam commenting problem really that bad?

A: Yes.

It’s a pity. When we began, the comments section of this web page was a good place to have an intelligent conversation with writers and readers. Now, between the A.I. spambots and the certifiable lunatics, it’s a moderation nightmare.

Q: How long are the Pete Wood Challenge stories going to remain readable by the public?

A: Until September 30, 2025. We are in the process of selectively unpublishing other content now, to discourage A.I. bots and content trawlers. All of the Pete Wood Challenge stories will be removed from this site after September 30.

The plan is to cut over to a new web site on October 1st. The exact nature of the new site is still being determined. It might be behind a paywall, or require registration to comment. It might not allow commenting at all.

Q: That’s the plan, huh?

A: Yes. I have become wary of announcing our plans as they have a way of becoming recipreversexclusons. Whenever we announce plans, the universe seems intent on dreaming up some new way to thwart them. (Last summer’s oak tree limb through the roof of the house was pretty impressive, as thwarting goes.)

At the risk of drawing the attention of some capricious and malign Fate, the plan is still to get four more issues of Stupefying Stories out this year. This being mid-July already, though, doing so will require some creative thinking.

Q: Does this mean you’ll be reopening to submissions?

A: Not before mid-September at the earliest. It may be a limited or “by invitation only” submission window. Our first priority is to honor the contracts we have signed and publish the stories we already have in-hand. Whether we will need more stories to complete the books we have in mind remains to be determined.

Q: What’s going on with Writing 101?

A: I’ve had to rethink that. My original idea for the column was twofold:

1.) To force myself to get back into the habit of writing daily.

2.) To begin a conversation on what makes for good writing, and how to do it.

It was never my intention to do a series of lectures. I don’t do lectures. (Here in my mind’s eye I see my daughter rolling her eyes.) I was more interested in having a Socratic dialogue in which we could discover the answers together.

Since I began, though, two things have become apparent. The first is that I can either be a writer or an editor/publisher, but have a lot of trouble trying to be both at the same time. The second is that the comments section of a blogspot site is a really lousy place to try to have an intelligent dialogue. May as well be trying to do so in a St. Paul Skyway food court while the crazy shouting homeless people are on the loose.

Writing 101 may return, in some new form, but again, not before September.

And once again, time’s up. See you next week.

~Bruce Bethke

The Never-ending FAQ • 9 July 2025

2025-07-09T13:00:00.026-05:00

Questions have been piling up while I’ve been busy with Otogu, so this is going to be a combination FAQ and status update. Quick, Robin, to the Bat-Agenda!

First item: The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge

This is just a reminder that we’re soliciting reader input for a proposed short story collection, to be drawn from the hundreds of Pete Wood Challenge stories we’ve published over the past four years. You’ll find the details and links to all the stories here: https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2025/07/its-time-to-nominate-your-favorite.html

Remember, if you want to vote for a story, put your comments in the above post or send them to our submissions email address. We’ve had to lock-down commenting on older posts because of the spam. If you try to comment on an older story, your comment won’t be lost, but it will go into the moderation queue, and we’ll see it… eventually.

Second item: The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds

Another reminder, that Allan Dyen-Shapiro’s novelette, The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, is now out on just about every ebook platform there is, and in trade paperback, too. Allan will be at Readercon 34 next week, with print copies hot off the presses and ready to sign. If you’re going to Readercon, be sure to stop by and say hi.

While the Amazon-specific print edition is available now, the Ingram print edition seems to be taking a longer than usual time to wend its way through the distribution pipeline. The Amazon edition is available now and slightly cheaper. The Ingram edition is better-quality and will in time be available in wide distribution, but at this time is available only directly from Ingram. (Or from Allan, at Readercon.)

The truly dedicated fan will want both, of course.

Third item: the growing A.I. menace

As you should be able to see from the photo at the top of this page but can’t, the black raspberries are ripe, and the red raspberries are just coming into being ripe. I’ve been unable to get a good photo of the black raspberries, though, because the “we’re going to make you use A.I. whether you want it or not” image filter in my cell phone’s camera software apparently recognizes them as being raspberries, and thus insists they must be red and keeps tinkering with the image to turn the berries red. I mean, everyone knows ripe raspberries are red, right?

This to me is the greatest menace of ubiquitous A.I.: millions of tiny A.I. algorithms out there all suffering from galloping Dunning-Kruger Effect, quietly and constantly editing all that we see, hear, and read to reflect what “everybody knows,” and thus in reality reflecting the original programmer’s unconscious biases and unthinking assumptions. The collective effect on human cognition and critical discernment will be suffocating.

This is no mere jeremiad. It’s already happening in music, where creators are complaining that “AI-Generated Music Is Starting to Crowd Out the Real Stuff on Streaming Platforms.” (Heh. “…a wasteland of unchecked beatspam.” Great description. Wish I’d written that.)

Don’t shrug it off as, “So what? It’s hip-hop.” This is coming soon to your favorite ebook platform. Yes, I know, people are putting lots of low-grade A.I.-generated crap out there already, but such books are not getting much traction… yet. Right now, most readers are smart enough and discerning enough to recognize dim-witted A.I.-generated slop when they see it.

The coming change will not be that A.I.-generated books will get better. It’s that the people who buy books will get stupider.

This is where you come into the story. This is your challenge. Educate your readers. Make them smarter. Don’t succumb to the temptation to write down to the lowest common denominator. Write the best books you can write, and train your readers to expect better.

I know. This sounds like work. But your future depends on there being intelligent, discerning, and literate readers who want to read your work, and who won’t settle for A.I.-generated wordspam.

</jeremiad>

Fourth item: the end of the world as we know it

While the robins in the nest under the deck have hatched, the raspberries are doing well, scattering used coffee grounds in the garden seems to be discouraging the deer from conducting any more midnight raids on my beans and tomatoes, and the plum trees are showing promise of producing ripe fruit in the fall, the mulberry trees have completely failed. They were loaded with flowers in the spring, a few weeks after the plums trees bloomed, but they’re barren now.

I blame the suburban obsession with having a smooth, manicured, weed-free lawn. In the early spring, my yard and garden were full of bees. I counted six different species. Then the lawn service trucks came through my neighborhood, and the bees vanished. Any vegetable plant or fruit tree that blossomed after Extermination Day is barren now.

The entire human food chain depends on insect pollinators, my friends. Be kind to them. Don’t spread toxic shit* on your lawns. Tolerate the clover and dig up the dandelions if you must, but don’t poison the bees!

I suppose this explains why “Bootleg Bees,” by Laura Jane Swanson, remains one of my favorite stories, of all the stories I’ve ever published on this web site.

* One of the more perversely amusing lawn service signs I saw on one of my neighbor’s lawns boasted that they used “only organic chemicals.” Well, rattlesnake venom is an organic chemical, too, but I sure wouldn’t want to walk barefoot across a lawn that’s been freshly sprayed with it.

Fifth item: the future of Stupefying Stories in general and this web site in particular

Quite a few questions have come in lately asking when we’re going to be reopening for submissions, how long stories on this site are going to remain available to readers, when the next issue is coming out, when is Writing 101 going to resume, etc., etc., etc.

The answer to all of these questions is, “We’re working on it. We’ll have better answers next week.” But right at the moment I’ve run out of time for today, so must stop writing now and hit the Publish button.

See you next week, then.

Ask Dr. Cyberpunk • with your host, Bruce Bethke

2025-07-05T06:00:00.090-05:00

This being the Independence Day holiday weekend, we’re running The Best of Ask Dr. Cyberpunk today. This column was originally posted on February 19, 2021.

One of the weirder things about being known the world over as “the guy who wrote ‘Cyberpunk’” is that people seem to think I am some sort of judge, arbiter, or elder spokesman for the genre.

On the face of it, the idea of there being any sort of elder anything for cyberpunk is a contradiction in terms. What part of punk don’t you get?

Nonetheless, the questions keep coming in, so I may as well get some value from this smelly dead albatross I’m wearing and turn it into a regular feature. Friday seems as good a day as any for it, so beginning today, the lines are open. Have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me about that story? Post it here, email it to me at brucebethke.cybrpnk @ gmail.com, send it to me in an IM—or what the hell, think it at me, really hard. But be advised that I am absolutely immune to telepathy, so I probably won’t answer.

Today’s question comes from Adrian, who asks: What comes between atompunk and cyberpunk, timeline-wise?

The answer, obviously, is “beepunk:” stories of tech-savvy rebel gardeners hacking the genomes of common backyard pollinators in order to fight the agribusiness megacorporations and stick it to the man. Like this one:

SHOWCASE: “Bootleg Bees,” by Laura Jane Swanson

Somewhat more seriously: cyberpunk began as a self-conscious attempt to apply 1970s punk rock anomie to the emerging 1980s high tech scene, and then to extrapolate what might happen next and take it forward from there. I have always been more interested in what comes next than in what’s already been done, and figured that—

Well, it doesn’t matter what I figured, because that book was never written.

In the meantime, while almost every other young sci-fi writer around was writing Bill Gibson fanfic and every agent and publisher in the business was scrambling to find another book “just like Neuromancer only different,” Paul Di Filippo took a really good crack at “what’s next?” in Ribofunk, and essentially invented biopunk.

Unfortunately, Gibson & Sterling had a much bigger hit with The Difference Engine, and thus invented steampunk.

I thought the basic idea of The Difference Engine was fairly clever—that Charles Babbage’s analog computers had actually worked, and therefore the computer revolution hit western civilization a century earlier than it actually did—but what most everyone else seemed to seize on was the Victorian Era costumes, trappings, and set dressings. Instead of going forward and thinking about what might be next, it was as if science fiction as a whole suddenly took a great leap backward, and started over again, with Jules Verne.

Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. Steampunk begat clockpunk—and gods below, I grew to hate clockpunk. Seemed like every week one of the major publishers was launching a new series with the word “clockwork” in the title: The Clockwork King, The Clockwork Crowbar, The Clockwork Assassin, The Clockwork Toaster, The Clockwork Schlockwork…

Nota bene: A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, is not a steampunk novel.

Steampunk begat dieselpunk, which begat raypunk, which begat atompunk, which begat solarpunk, which begat… Oh, I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few more in there. The point is, science fiction is now cluttered with dozens of *.punk microgenres, all of which suffer from such paucity of imagination that they can’t even think of a word to describe themselves that does not end in punk. Speaking ex cathedra, Doctor Cyberpunkenstein heartily wishes that all these eager young writers would find their own damn names for their new genres!

Ahem. Excuse me.

So, to answer the initial question: if atompunk is a sort of refurbished atom-age SF of the 1940s~1950s as derived by way of steampunk, and cyberpunk began in the 1970s, then what falls between them in the timeline would be…

Hippiepunk? Except hippiepunk is an oxymoron, as punk rock was first and foremost a rebellion against hippies in general and the pompous dinosaur arena bands that evolved in the 1960s in particular, so let’s call it, oh—

Acidpunk. Stories of society’s rebels and outcasts fighting the pharmaceutical megacorporations and sticking it to the man by hacking the chemistry lab and cooking up new psychedelic drugs.

While listening to The Doors and Jefferson Airplane? Suddenly this all begins to seem terribly familiar to me. I suppose, just as William Burroughs and Alfred Bester were the points of departure for so many of the early cyberpunk writers, this means your points of departure for acidpunk would be Ken Kesey, Thomas Wolfe, and Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories. Considering that out here in the Real World we seem to be stuck recapitulating 1968 through 1973 right now, this is also probably exactly the right time to be revisiting Kurt Vonnegut’s early novels, with an eye towards giving Vonnegut’s ideas a punk style facelift. If I were to do this, I think I’d start by rereading Cat’s Cradle.

Over to you.

—Bruce Bethke

In lieu of an author’s bio, Bruce Bethke would like to direct your attention to this very short story:

“On the Conservation of Historical Momentum”

After you’ve read it—and “Bootleg Bees,” don’t forget that story, too—why not take a look at Allan Dyen-Shapiro’s “The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds,” for a nice big heaping helping of hopepunk.

Going to Readercon 24? (Plus, our 4th of July Sale!)

2025-07-03T12:00:00.146-05:00

Allan Dyen-Shapiro will be at Readercon 34, July 17-20!

Better yet, he’ll be there with print copies of The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, fresh off the presses and ready to sign! If you’re going to Readercon, be sure to find him and say hi!

If you aren’t going to Readercon, you can still get the book, either in ebook or paperback. It’s now out on a plethora of ebook platforms, all of which you’ll find at this link:

https://books2read.com/The-Day-We-Said-Goodbye-to-the-Birds

As for getting a print copy, the Amazon-exclusive version has been out for about two weeks now and looks fine, but we now have a link to the new IngramSpark edition, which is going into wider distribution and will be available (soon, we hope) through outlets such as Barnes & Noble, etc. The books Allan will have to sign at Readercon will be the IngramSpark edition.

We also have a QR code for the IngramSpark edition, which is something entirely new to us. If someone who is familiar with QR codes would be so kind as to do whatever it is one does with QR codes to this incomprehensible glob, and let us know what it does, we’d greatly appreciate it.

Why two print editions, you ask? Because while Amazon is much faster, the IngramSpark edition is just all-around better, in a variety of subtle ways. Better paper, better alignment of the interior content to the trim size, better color printing on the cover, and a tighter and more durable binding. The most important difference, though, is that while Amazon can in theory put the book into wider distribution, Ingram actually does get our books into real honest-to-God bookstores, most notably Barnes & Noble.

The astute observer will also note that as of today, the Amazon print edition is priced at $7.99 USD, while the Ingram edition is priced at $8.99. This is a temporary difference. While the Ingram edition is slightly more expensive to produce, it’s a lot more expensive to distribute. Thus, we had to set a slightly higher MSRP.

Consider this an inadvertent and unplanned Fourth of July Sale. Through the coming weekend, you can buy the Amazon print version for just $7.99.

By Monday, we should have the two versions fully synced, and then the Amazon price will go up to $8.99 USD, to match the IngramSpark price.

It’s Time To Nominate Your Favorite Stories!

2025-07-01T12:00:00.275-05:00

All good things must end someday, and this includes The Pete Wood Challenge. After a four-year run and more than 230 published stories, it’s time to close the circus, strike the big top, pay off the roustabouts, and send the elephants off to their well-deserved retirements in The Elephant Sanctuary.

However…

Before we go, there is just one more thing we need you to do.

Four years. More than 230 published stories. That’s a lot. Looking back on it all, it seems like the only fitting way to wrap up The Pete Wood Challenge would be by putting together a book:

The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge

What I’d like to do is a reprint collection, putting together in some kind of meaningful order the stories that represent the very best of all the work that has come through the PWC in the past four years. The problem is: how do we define the best?

I can’t ask Pete to do it. He’d want to reprint everything. I can’t afford to do that.

(Yes, the selected authors will be paid for reprint rights.)

I can’t go by site metrics. These are wildly skewed and more than a little suspect. If we went strictly by readership numbers, the single most-read story would be “King of Chrome,” by Travis Burnham, which has drawn more than 3,400 reads!

Or has it? Considering that it’s also drawn thousands of spam comments, I have to think there is something in that story that really appeals to the algorithms of spambots, much as there are things in “Canned Kraken” by Tobias Backman or “Pink Marble” by Zoe Kaplan that continue to draw spam comments galore.

(I will confess, even with all possible spam filters engaged, having to moderate the comments section has taken a lot of the fun out of running this web site.)

Ruling out the obvious spam magnets, it appears the all-time most read stories in the Pete Wood Challenge have been “For Sale: Used Time Machine. No Refunds!” by Roxana Arama and “Songbird, Jailbird,” by Pauline Barmby. But a host of other factors have also affected the readership numbers over time and from challenge to challenge, and so it seemed unfair to me to pick the stories for the collection based solely on metrics. The list would skew towards older stories, as they’ve had more time to rack up reads. Deserving gems might be overlooked, because they were published at a bad time. Less-deserving stories might be included, solely because their authors had really great social media presences. Selecting the very best stories was beginning to seem like an insoluble problem, until I had a thought…

Why not ask you?

And thus, we come to:

The Final Pete Wood Challenge

Here is the complete (we hope) list of every story we have published in the past four years as part of the Pete Wood Challenge. What we want you to do is skim through this list, read anything that catches your interest, and then—this is the tricky part—nominate your choices for stories to be included in the ‘Best of’ collection!

Don’t comment on the stories themselves. I’ve had to lock-down commenting on older posts because of the ever-growing spambot menace. Put your comments in this post, if you don’t mind their being public, or in an email to our submissions mailbox, if you’d rather they were private.

The nominations period closes July 31st. If there are a lot of nominations we may do a run-off to pick the finalists, but I’ll be surprised if that’s necessary. We’re doing this by Chicago Rules: vote early and vote often! Campaigning and log-rolling allowed! Bribes appreciated but not necessary!

Tell your friends! Tell your fans! Tell the people you know who aren’t such good friends but can be cajoled into voting for you anyway! But most of all: READ THE STORIES!

And share the link. Remember, likes and hearts are nice, but shares and retweets get the message out.

Thanks,

Bruce Bethke
Stupefying Stories

Challenge #38: “Happy Trails”

All good things must end eventually, and this includes the Pete Wood Challenge. After a four-year run and more than 230 published stories, the final Pete Wood Challenge was to write a flash fiction story of up to 150 words in length, inspired by the prompt, “Happy Trails.”

First Place: “The Marks in the Walls” • by Sophie Sparrow

Second Place: “Farther Galaxy’s Choose Your Own Adventure” • by C. L. Sidell

Third Place: “The Unicorn Farm” • by Carol Scheina

Honorable Mentions:

“May Your Path Be Blessed Forever” • by Jeff Currier

“Flashes” • by Gideon P. Smith

Challenge #37: “Out of Gas”

The challenge was to write a flash fiction story of up to 150 words in length, inspired by the prompt, “out of gas.”

First Place: “Scavenger Hunt” • by Jeff Currier

Second Place: “Visions in the Jar” • by Sophie Sparrow

Third Place: “A Visit to the Recycling Center” • by Christopher Degni

Honorable Mentions:

“Panne d'Essence” • by Andrew Jensen

“Once With a Blue Moose” • by Lori Jensen

“Parting Ways” • by C. L. Sidell

“What Fuels Us” • by Richard Zwicker

“Do Not Go Gentle” • by Karin Terebessy

Challenge #36: “Pick Two”

The challenge was to write a story of up to 150 words in length, keying off two of the following words: turkey, parade, football, fir tree, stocking, or cranberry. However, the story could not be about a holiday, a meal, or a gathering of relatives.

First Place: “When the Wind Changes,” by Tobias Backman

Second Place: “Anders in Exile,” by Andrew Jensen

Third Place: “Outside,” by C. L. Sidell

Honorable Mentions:

“The Most Dangerous Game,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“Bitter Return,” by Pauline Barmby

“Talking Turkey with Tom,” by Richard Zwicker

“Hunters,” by Jason P. Burnham

Challenge #35: “The Offseason”

“Not a Fan” • by Pete Wood

“The Offs” • by Ted Macaluso (1st Place Winner)

“Reflections on Carnival-by-the-Sea” • by Christopher Degni (2nd Place)

“Dangerouser and Dangerouser” • by Sophie Sparrow (3rd Place)

Honorable Mentions:

“Tonight, We Embrace the Dark” • by Gideon P. Smith

“Efficiency Optimization” • by Jeff Currier

“Planting” • by C. L. Sidell

“Footprints” • by Robin Blasberg

Challenge #34: “Homeless”

“Proper Witch’s Home” • by Carol Scheina

“The Sky Will Fall” • by Tobias Backman

“The Ghost of Moscow” • by Sophie Sparrow

“Wandering the Cosmos” • by D.A. Xiaolin Spires

“Towerless” • by Lorraine Schein

Challenge #33: Space: 1999!

INTRODUCTION:
The Space: 1999 story contest wasn’t officially a Pete Wood Challenge competition, but there was enough overlap that we decided to include those stories in this index.

Space $19.99! (The initial announcement of the competition)

Follow-up Questions about the Contest

The winning stories, in publication order:

“Today in London History” • by Judith Field

“Pulling Up the Moon” • by Karl Dandenell

“Waxing Crescent” • by Andrew Jensen

“Fathom” • by Made in DNA

“Chasing the Moon” • by Karin Terebessy

“A Curse and a Blessing” • by Jeff Currier

“Must Have Been Moonglow” • by Jeanne Van Slyke

“Happy Anniversary?” • by Andrew Jensen

Challenge #32: “Punchline”

“Wielder of Wit” • by Ian Li

“A Behemoth Problem” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“Cruel, Unusual, and Optional” • by Gustavo Bondoni

“Green Shoots” • by Christopher Degni

“Punch Flavored Punch” • by Yelena Crane

Challenge #31: “The story must be set on the island of Tristan Da Cunha”

“The Potato Singer” • by Ian Li

“The Sirens’ Salvation” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“A Quiet Where Magic Can Grow” • by Kai Holmwood

“A Snail’s Pace” • by Pete Wood

“Floating Light Over the Waves” • by Brandon Case

“Canned Kraken” • by Tobias Backman

Challenge #30: “Hike”

“When the Woman in the Forest Says, ‘Please, You Must Help’” • by Elis Montgomery

“Astronaut Countdown” • by Brandon Case

“Summit, in Memory” • by Ian Li

“Like Clockwork” • by Yelena Crane

“Argentina, Before Barcode Scanners” • by Gustavo Bondoni

Challenge #29: “Draft”

“A Jackass Walks into a Bar” • by Pete Wood

“Forgetting on Draft” • by Elis Montgomery

“The Triennial Igneous Tri-Partite Competition” • by Pauline Barmby

“Service With a Smile” • by Gustavo Bondoni

“The Draft Horse Doesn’t Leave the Stable at Night Anymore” • by Jason P. Burnham

Challenge #28: Pick two: cat, poker, storm, sandwich

“Ante Up” • by Pete Wood

“To Hell and Back” • by Kai Delmas

“Hosting a Tempest” • by Ian Li

“The Hand That Feeds” • by Tobias Backman

“How to Win at Cards When You’re Sick of Being Queen,” by Elis Montgomery

“The New Familiar” • by Lorraine Schein

Challenge #27: “You Need to Make New Friends”

“Don’t Ignore Your Television’s Captioning” • by Carol Scheina

“Honeybunny and the Embroidery Witch” • by Brandon Case

“Literally” • by Yelena Crane

“Watch Over Me” • by Addison Smith

“It’s Alive!” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

Challenge #26: “Nine Lives”

“There is Only One Black Cat” • by Pauline Barmby

“Forced Perspective” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“The Moments Between” • by Elis Montgomery

“Runt of the Litter” • by Gustavo Bondoni

Challenge #25: “Desert”

“Internal Combustion” • by Gustavo Bondoni

“Rain Dancer” • by Sylvia Heike

“No Justice for Deserters” • by Pauline Barmby

“Treasure Hunting in the Old City” • by Christopher Degni

“Egg Disputes Beneath the Desert’s Quietest Erg” • by Jason P. Burnham

Challenge #24: “Outpost”

“Ivy’s Tower,” by Gretchen Tessmer

“Sending Love,” by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“Lunar Ghosts,” by Sylvia Heike

“Anagram Ed,” by Ron Ferguson

“Trash-Talking Space Honky Trips Over the Finish Line,” by Brandon Case

“Roadside Stand,” by Pete Wood

Challenge #23: “Static”

“The Nightingale Sings,” by Sylvia Heike

“Angels,” by Sophie Sparrow

“My Name is Static,” by Christopher Degni

“Symmetry,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“Sound Affects,” by Kimberly Ann Smiley

Challenge #22: “Writer’s Block”

INTRODUCTION:
This week we hand the SHOWCASE microphone over to Pete Wood, to present the results of another Pete Wood Challenge. Normally participation in The Pete Wood Challenge is restricted to members of the CODEX online writing group, but this time Pete decided to extend the invitation to participate to the members of the Stupefying Stories Secret Inner Circle as well. His challenge was to write a 125-word flash fiction piece inspired by the words, “writer’s block,” whatever you might interpret them to mean.

Unfortunately Pete interrupted me with this idea while I was in the midst of doing a very important crossword puzzle, so instead of a flash fiction story all I was able to give him was yet another rejection letter, as I have sent him so many before.

___________________

Dear Mr. Wood,

Thank you for your inquiry. Yes, there is a medical treatment for the condition commonly known as "Writer's Block," but I would advise against pursuing it. The treatment is a rarely performed neurosurgical operation called the "Faulkner Procedure," but it has potentially deadly side effects. In a small but significant percentage of patients the procedure at first appears to be successful, but then the patient develops "Joyce Syndrome," which is, tragically, irreversible. After that the only humane option remaining is euthanasia. Unfortunately your stated limit of 125 words is far too short to capture the full horror of seeing someone who was once an intelligent and articulate human being reduced to babbling idiocy by the onset of Joyce Syndrome.

Sincerely,
Dr. Bruce Bethke
Mayo Clinic, Rochester MN

___________________

“Songbird, Jailbird” • by Pauline Barmby

“A 125-Word Story About Writer’s Block in the Style of Italo Calvino,” by Christopher Degni

“Writer’s Blockchain” • by Gustavo Bondoni

“Upon the Writers’ Block” • by Addison Smith

“A New Emancipation Proclamation” • by Chana Kohl

“Androids and Keyboards” • by Marco Cultrera

“Writers Strike Reaches the Office of Predestination,” by Brandon Case

“Inspiration” • by Guy Stewart

“The Hero” • by Eric Dontigney

“A Giant Problem” • by Judith Field

“There Goes the Neighborhood” • by Pete Wood

Challenge #21: “Nepotism”

“The Greatest Generation” • by Matt Krizan

“Jimboree” • by Christopher Degni

“Power Limits” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“Leave the Plasma Gun, Take the Cannoli” • by Brandon Case

“Holding the Fort” • by Gustavo Bondoni

Challenge #20: “Rain”

“Wyrm-collecting After a Morning Storm” • by Allison Mulder

“Party Trick” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“All the Colors of the Rain” • by Gustavo Bondoni

“Rain Falls on (Almost) Everyone” • by Jason Burnham

“A Prayer in the Sand” • by Matt Krizan

“Scarlet Rain” • by Eric Fomley

“Divided Sky, Stolen Life” • by Brandon Case

Challenge #19: “Thanks for Nothing”

“Bittersweet Potato Rolls,” by Jason Burnham

“Upgrade,” by Christopher Degni

“Dry Spell,” by Eric Fomley

“Solution,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“The Intergalactic Pocket Phrasebook,” by Mark Vandersluis

Challenge #18: “[character] had never heard of [title of a movie]”

“The Stories We Tell Each Other,” by Matt Krizan

“S’mores Therapy,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“The No-Win Scenario,” by Patricia Miller

“Open the Deck-7 Airlock!” by Jason Burnham

“You Live Long Enough,” by Christopher Blake

Challenge #17: “Reservation”

“Preservation Reservation,” by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“The Bargain,” by Eric Fomley

“Providing for his Family,” by Matt Krizan

“Signs of Life,” by Christopher Degni

Challenge #16: “Haunting Memories”

“Merry-Go-Round,” by Christopher Degni

“Inheritance,” by Ephiny Gale

“The View from the Old Ship,” by Carol Scheina

“Goons,” by Christopher Blake

“Mother Noodges Best,” by Allan Dyen-Shapiro

“Every Day the Music Died,” by Jenna Hanchey

“The First Stage,” by Matt Krizan

Challenge #15: "Ice"

“Inheritance,” by Carol Scheina

“The Message,” by Helen French

“Restoration,” by Ephiny Gale

“Ice Hearts,” by Kai Delmas

Challenge #14: “Breakdown”

“Love’s Labors, Lost,” by Jenna Hanchey

“Kickstarting Fate,” by Patricia Miller

“Mr. Giz,” by Marc A. Criley

“It’s What You Think,” by Bob McHugh

“Support Issues,” by Mark Vandersluis

“Plight,” by Eric Fomley

Challenge #13: “Second Contact”

“The Smuggler,” by Eric Fomley

“Working His Way Back to Her,” by Matt Krizan

“Terms of Agreement,” by Bob McHugh

“To Boldly Go,” by Carol Scheina

“Warranty Claim,” by Gustavo Bondoni

Challenge #12: The story must take place on a train

“The Difficulty of Disembarking,” by Carol Scheina

“Siren,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“End Program,” by Eric Fomley

“The Trees Blow By,” by Jason Burnham

Challenge #11: It must center on something that is second-hand

“The Conflict at Hand,” by A.L. Blacklyn

“Secondhand Hugs Still Have All the Warmth,” by Carol Scheina

“Middle School Heartbreak,” by Roxana Arama

“Disgruntled,” by Lorraine Schein

“From Soulless to Soulful,” by Jenna Hanchey

“Secondhand Planet,” by Wendy Nikel

“Ties That Bind,” by Melissa Mead

Challenge #10: “[character] could have gone to [event] on New Year’s Eve, but instead, thanks to [other_character], [he|she|they] had been waiting in line for hours.”

“Worth It,” by Keyan Bowes

“That Darn, Dear Cat,” by Melissa Mead

“Old Friends, Across Galaxies and the Space Between,” by Jenna Hanchey

“The Annual Times Square Paint Dry,” by Larry Hodges

Challenge #9: “After naughty and nice, Santa had a third list”

“Christmas Collections,” by Matt Krizan

“You Better Watch Out,” by Jason Burnham

“Santa’s List,” by Melissa Mead

“The Santa Paradox,” by Mark Vandersluis

“The Undeliverables,” by Allison Mulder

“The Santa Heist,” by Carol Scheina

Challenge #8: “The Cafeteria Plan Challenge”

“When Good Salad Bars Go Bad,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“Bargaining Power,” by Mary Berman

“Out With the Old,” by Eric Fomley

“King of Chrome,” by Travis Burnham

The Caferteria Plan Challenge, as described by Pete Wood

Challenge #7: “Incompetent Archaeology”

“The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb,” by Ray Daley

“Still Life with Elderberries,” by Anatoly Belilovsky

“Getting Performance Up to Par,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“Clowning Around,” by Carol Scheina

“The Memory Excavator,” by Adriana Kantcheva

“Sleeping Beauty,” by Roxana Arama

Challenge #6: “It’s Too Darn Hot”

“Loki, Sipping Mai Tais on Daytona Beach,” by Duke Kimball

“At Wit’s End,” by Roxana Arama

“The Secret to a Happy Marriage,” by Carol Scheina

“Me Time,” by Lorraine Schein

“Too Hot to Handle,” by Ray Daley

“What’s a Monster to Do?” by Melissa Mead

“The Summer of Phoenix Spotting,” by Sylvia Heike

Challenge #5: “I’m Pretty Sure He Wasn’t Our Waiter”

“Calling the Cloud,” by Roxana Arama

“Just Like Before,” by Carol Scheina

“When Thieves Give You Lemons,” by Duke Kimball

“First Date Magic,” by Sylvia Heike

“Metamorphosis,” by Jonathan Worlde

“Alone,” by Novae Caelum

“Merger,” by Eric Fomley

Challenge #4: “Tourist Trap”

“Crush Depth,” by Hayley Stone

“Far Side of the Moon,” by Zack Lux

“How Not to Save Your Marriage,” by Cécile Cristofari

“Roy’s Playland — Half-price on Weekdays!” by Eric Fomley

“Day Trips to Purgatory: Buy the Total Experience Package!” by Alicia Hilton

“History is Alive and Well,” by Roxana Arama

“Have Earthlings, Will Travel,” by Jonathan Worlde

“The Family Business,” by Carol Scheina

Challenge #3: “For Sale: Used Time Machine. No Refunds!”

#1: by Roxana Arama

#2: by Vivek Mittal

#3: by Duke Kimball

#4: by Gustavo Bondoni

#5: by Ray Daley

#6: by Carol Scheina

Challenge #2: “Wish You Were Here”

“Welcome to the Funhouse,” by Alicia Hilton

“The Message,” by Ray Daley

“Two lost souls and a fishbowl,” by Cécile Cristofari

“My Fair Claritin Lady,” by Gretchen Tessmer

“O, Brother,” by Filip Wiltgren

“Wish You Were Here,” by D. M. Beucler

“Long-Distance Relationship,” by Carol Scheina

“Worlds Enough and Time,” by Jonathan Edelstein

“Are There Cats on Mars?” by Jonathan Worlde

“Machine Learning,” by Sylvia Heike

Challenge #1: “Would you like fries with that?”

“Fixing Broken Dreams,” by Ray Daley

“Outcast,” by Eric Fomley

“Untitled,” by Pete Wood

“The Dying Pool,” by Melissa Mead

“High School Drama,” by Paul Celmer

“Untitled,” by Travis Burnham

“Two All-Meat Zombies,” by Gretchen Tessmer

“Untitled,” by Carol Scheina

“Untitled,” by K. S. O’Neill

“Untitled,” by Anatoly Belilovsky

“Ringing in Her Ears,” by Ephiny Gale

# # #

“The Marks in the Walls” • by Sophie Sparrow

2025-06-27T06:00:00.038-05:00

When someone is miserable for a long time, it leaves an aura, a trace that seeps into the walls.

You feel it viewing property: some places ache, uncared for. Others inexplicably feel like home.

Mark died, and I couldn’t do anything anymore. The flat was full of ghosts, memories that hovered around my head while I tried to obliterate myself with reality TV and vodka.

His voice. His smile. Cuddles on the sofa, into which I was now slowly rotting.

Enough. I had to move.

I viewed houses, all bland white corners. Dumps with huge gardens. An apartment so high up I felt dizzy.

Then, a cozy flat by the station.

The constant presence of passing trains could keep me company in the small hours. But mostly it was a feeling, a resonance… the people who lived here before me had been happy.

Maybe, in time, I could be, too.

Sophie Sparrow writes fantasy fiction and humour. Her work has appeared in PseudoPod, Arsenika, Mad Scientist Journal, (Dis)Ability: An Anthology, and previously in Stupefying Stories, in “Angels,” “The Ghost of Moscow,” “Visions in the Jar,” and “Dangerouser and Dangerouser.”

She has worked as a content writer, transcriptionist, and software tester, speaks Russian and French, has previously been paid to wander around film sets, and is now quite tired of writing about herself in the third person. She likes cats and red wine, though not in the same glass. Keep up to date with what she's doing at www.writersophiesparrow.com

The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. For each contest Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than 150 words in length inspired by the words: “Happy Trails.”

SUPPORT STUPEFYING STORIES! BUY OUR BOOKS!

“Farther Galaxy’s Choose Your Own Adventure” • by C. L. Sidell

2025-06-26T06:00:00.065-05:00

Cam and Becca begin the interactive activity. Signs flicker above the first three-pronged fork they encounter.

red // blue // WHITE

Unlacing fingers, they choose separate options.

blade // CLOUD // pool

Doors click. Hallways lead to new choices. Farther Galaxy promised up to twenty-one doors, depending on selections. Everything’s identical…

BONE // wood // metal

It promised thrills beyond belief.

PAGE // wheel // hammer

“I’m so ready for the bar.”

staff // static // BIRDSONG

Cam stumbles into the parking lot. Jogs back to the entrance. “Where’s the waiting room? I can’t find my girlfriend.”

“Did you read the contract?” the gum-popping clerk asks.

Scrolling through the document, Cam discovers the fine print:

Participate at your own risk! This attraction contains one-way portals that may reroute you to less-populated planets! No returns! No exceptions!

They’ve always said they know each other better than they know themselves.

Heart racing, Cam opens his wallet.

“I’ll take another ticket.”

A native Floridian, C. L. Sidell grew up playing with toads in the rain and indulging in speculative fiction. Her work appears in Baffling, The Cosmic Background, Dark Moments, Dread Machine, Factor Four Magazine, Impossible Worlds, Martian Magazine, Stupefying Stories, Weird Christmas, and more. She’s thrilled to share that her novel, Repetition, will be released by Graveside Press on July 4, 2025. You can find her on various social media platforms @sidellwrites

If you liked this story, you might also enjoy:

“It’s In His Kiss”

Go ahead. Kiss the frog. What could it hurt?

“Long Distance Call”

She’d discarded everything after the funeral, except his phone…

“Release Me”

Carrie and Vanessa just wanted to find a good spooky story
to tell on Halloween. They got more than they bargained for…

“Planting”

Things planted in the offseason here
grow up real different, they truly do.

“Parting Ways”

Some places can only be found when you’re lost.

“Outside”

“I don’t need an umbrella,” you think.
Then it starts to rain…

SUPPORT STUPEFYING STORIES! BUY OUR BOOKS!

“The Unicorn Farm” • by Carol Scheina

2025-06-25T06:00:00.022-05:00

Mellie was seven when she discovered the unicorn farm.

The unicorns’ brilliant coats glistened like sunbeams through raindrops. Manes floated like misty clouds.

She imagined riding a unicorn along forest trails, but a fence, crackling with magic, penned them in. She couldn’t even pet them.

From a distance, Mellie gave her best neigh. One neighed back.

Later, she learned the farm shaved down the magical horns, selling pieces for potions. Over the years, their horns grew short and jagged, their eyes pooling with sadness.

Mellie poured over spellbooks. At age 11, she left for magic school.

Seven years later, Mellie returned and whispered the spell she’d practiced. The crackling fence vanished. Mellie neighed, urging freedom, and unicorns galloped away, misty manes vanishing into the nearby woods. All except one, which neighed and bowed its head.

Mellie hopped onto its back, and she was seven again. The dream was finally real.

Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative author whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, Stupefying Stories, and others. Her writing has been recognized on the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fiction Longlist, and she has become a fan favorite here for her finely crafted flash fiction pieces on the Stupefying Stories website. You can find more of her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com.

It’s impossible to overstate how crucial Carol has been behind the scenes here, for all her help with The Pete Wood Challenge, The Odin Chronicles, Tales from the Brahma, and more. Therefore, if you haven’t already read it, you really should check out “Six Questions for… Carol Scheina,” if for no other reason than to get the complete (we think) list of everything by her that we’ve published in the past four years.

If you don’t have time for that, though, you should at the very least read “How to Return an Overdue Book to the Summer Library.”

SUPPORT STUPEFYING STORIES! BUY OUR BOOKS!

“May Your Path Be Blessed Forever” • by Jeff Currier

2025-06-24T06:00:00.035-05:00

Nyota Njeri strained to decouple the ruptured hose, her slippers sliding through pooling biogel.

“Dr. Njeri, primary burn cannot be delayed further,” MUMBI said. “Nairobi Station insists you enter your stasis pod.”

Nyota ignored the sleeper ship’s AI as the nozzle popped free. She inserted the hose trailing from the neighbouring pod into the socket and locked down the seal.

The ship vibrated, fusion engines flaring.

“MUMBI, initiate biogel transfer.”

“Dr. Njeri, your survival is mission-critical.”

“That’s why my pod has a secondary biogel supply. I won’t let Lakia die before our journey even begins. Authorization Alpha, Alpha, One.”

“Confirmed.”

The vibration and pressure increased.

“Doctor, your pod please!”

“Not until I’m sure she’s safe.”

Njeri wiped away obscuring condensation. Inside the pod, biogel slowly encased her granddaughter’s tranquil form. The pod’s diagnostic icons turned green. Njeri smiled and whispered her own great-grandmother’s parting prayer:

Njia yako ibarikiwe milele

Jeff Currier works too many jobs, so has little time to write, but the words kept screaming for release. Jeff finally relented and set them free—in very small batches. Now they’ve run amok with no telling what mischief they’ve caused. You can find them roaming in various anthologies or in Sci Phi Journal, Stupefying Stories Showcase, Dark Moments, and Flash Point SF. Find links to more of his published stories at @jffcurrier on X or Jeff Currier Writes on Facebook.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read:

“A Curse and a Blessing”
If nothing else, read this one!

“The Fate of Time Travelers”

“Scavenger Hunt”

“Temporal Avoidance Game”

“The Foulest of Them All”

“Stories You Probably Missed”

“Visionary”

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