Fiction

Hypertext or print, it's all about science fiction.

Looking for educational materials? Over on the edu page.

Latest

memento mori

Landing page of memento moriThe January 2020 Newport MFA residency focused on writing about grief and loss. During the week-long workshop, led by Ann Hood, students focused on exploring this most difficult subject across the genres of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. The work that my fellow students produced was both breathtakingly beautiful and heartrending; I'm honored to be working with such a talented group of writers. Here's the piece I did. (CW: Non-graphic description of settings surrounding death.)

Read the full text here.


The Ceremony Of Innocence

Glastonbury Tor and Egg StoneAt just 1,700 words, this is the shortest piece I've ever written; that didn't make it any easier to place. After almost two years on submission across a variety of print and online venues, my son, Jack, outbid the remaining markets and requested immediate publication. So, it's still technically a sale :)

Read the full text here.


Standing By The Wall

48-Hour Hypertext ChallengeWritten for the ACM Hypertext 2019 "48-Hour Hypertext Challenge" (this took about 30 hours). You can read it at Eastgate.com.


Explore the backlist...

We Knew The Glass Man

Cream City Review coverPrint/Interactive hybrid science fiction short appearing in Cream City Review #43.1 and its online companion, I/O. You can read for free at the I/O site.

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Umbrella Men

F&SF coverAn 8,800-worder that appeared on the cover of the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Not entirely sure whether it's my first fantasy story, secret history, magic realism, or hard sf.

Read the full text here.

There's also a web site out there that may have some relationship to the text...

And what a beautiful cover painting by Mark Evans. You can see more of Evans' work at his web site, including some of his working sketches for this cover. Very cool. cloudmover.net

Coverage in RI media: ProJo, Sakonnet Times, Portsmouth Patch

(Nothing But) Flowers
Actually, this one is not so much a story as an occasional fiction, written for a very specific audience, halfway between homage and pastiche and larded with sly winks and intertextual references. My plan after using it for its intended purpose was to make only the most cursory attempt at selling it (as one is obligated to, if one follows Heinlen's Five Rules) and then cc-license it, which is the only appropriate thing to do with something written as a wedding present for Cory Doctorow and Alice Taylor.

You can read it online or download as rich text here.

What? You haven't read Cory Doctorow's work? Don't waste another minute here. Go download some of his amazing stories.

Keyboard Practice...
F&SF The January 2005 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction featured a novelette, Keyboard Practice, consisting of an Aria with diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with two Manuals. Set in a near-future with ubiquitous podcasting, the story chronicles a classical piano competition and borrows structural elements from from Bach's Goldberg Variations and American Idol. Oh, and there's an artificially intelligent piano, a canon, an NTSB transcript, and maybe — just maybe — a ghost.

This story was a finalst for the Sturgeon Award, appeared on the 2005 preliminary Nebula® ballot, and was a Locus Magazine recommended read. Read it online here.

Prefer audiobooks? You can now download it here. (It's a novelette, so even with good encoding, this two-hour clip is still about 60mb.)

You can read an interview with me on SciFiChannel.com: 'Keyboard' Channels Bach.

The Ashbazu Effect
ReVisions Cover A short story called The Ashbazu Effect appeared in the DAW Books anthology ReVisions in August, 2004. Edited by Julie Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel, ReVisions is a collection of alternate histories of technology, including stories by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, Mike Resnick, and Peter Watts. Check it out at Amazon.com

Drawing on the work of media theorists Marshall McLuhan, Robert Logan, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, Ashbazu explores what might have happened if the printing press were invented somewhat earlier than 1456.

Read it here.


Jigoku no mokushiroku
Winner of the 1996 Theodore Sturgeon Award for best sf short story, Jigoku has been translated into several languages. The title, which loosely means "the symbolic revelation of the Apocalyse" was suggested by the Japanese movie poster for Apocalypse Now

Read it here.

Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse
Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse One of the earliest hypertext novels published by Eastgate Systems, the Funhouse was a finalist for the 1993 NewMedia INVISION Award. Read the New York Times Review (8/29/93) by Robert Coover. There is a version available on the Internet Archive.

Other links:
This is an amazing review, 25 years after publication, in The Obscuritory. And here's my favorite non-review "review" of the Funhouse by a reader who came to it without any of the background, and...well, read for yourself.
Here's the press release from the Electronic Literature Organization announcing that they've received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to preserve and study the Funhouse, among other early digital texts. NEH/ELO grant coverage in EastBay Papers, RI Future, Portsmouth Patch
You can download a press kit.
Here's some google results where you can find some of the commentary and criticism.

Visit Eastgate Systems »


The Planes, a decoupled monomeric hypernarrative
Originally written as a series of lexia to be included in a collaborative hypertext in a special issue of the journal Writing On the Edge, the story is available on-line in a compilation of early hyperfictions.
Check it out in The New Media Reader »

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