A science fiction short story published in Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, June, 2019.
In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the only things that matter are how fast your car can go and whether or not you think it’s cool to eat an entire box of kittens.
The protagonist in this story doesn’t think that is cool at all.
A science fiction short story published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2018.
In a near-future Kansas City, the police have deployed new technologies aimed at dealing with crimes committed via aerial drones. Special “Passenger” tech is used to mentally link a trained eagle and a human officer, forming a third gestalt mind. Together, they patrol the skies and deal out justice with beak and talon.
There is illicit prey in our skies. OUR SKIES! we scream, indignant. We are dimly aware of the radio chatter: “10-71,” “sniper drone,” and some frantic beat cop screaming, “The mayor is down!” These details matter little now and we push them aside to focus. There has been a violation of the law and we are called to serve. Already we’re dipping our wings and turning as our Passenger directs us gently with a feeling as if the magnetic poles of the world have shifted. We will capture our prey. We will earn commendations and the tastiest morsels of meats.
A science fiction short story published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January 2018.
How do you kill a virtual mind and take their place? What could possibly go wrong?
Cee in the Sixth Octave, daughter of Eff in the Fifth Octave, sang an invitation to her sister. A single, crystalline note rang across the private mindscapes of eight hundred sister-mothers within the bio-survey ship Agatha Bhatti.
A science fiction short story published in Lightspeed Magazine, January, 2015.
A story of near-future lefitist politics, protest movements, drones, and right-wing genetic engineering designed to end it all. When protest organizer Mara’s ex-boyfriend brutally murders his roommate, Mara is called home from college to investigate. And when fellow protesters drop out of the movement one by one, she begins to suspect a conspiracy. We […]
A science fiction short story published in Asimovs, August 2014.
This story came to me wholly formed in a dream one day. I wrote it in a white hot tear, desperate to capture all the details and emotions that had seemed so immediate in the dream. It’s about how our pets live such short lives compared to us. It’s about what happens when someone tries […]
A science fiction short story published in Lightspeed Magazine, January, 2014.
The story is about our desire to explore space. It’s about love. It’s about failure. You know, human stuff. Thom met Lilian under a Nebraska sky, stars shining through the fabric of space so intensely that he sometimes mistook them for the falling whales, burning brightly. He tended to stargaze; it was the frustrated astronomer […]
A science fiction novelette published in Giganotasaurus, 2011.
This story probably has the most accurate title I’ve ever written. It’s about families, too, though. The story features the kind of family you can’t escape, no matter how much you want that. It also features work, but not the kind of work I do; the kind of work my father and grandfather did. Work […]
A science fiction short story published in Interzone, Issue 224 September/October 2009.
This is one of my attempts at writing truly alien aliens. At least in the sense that they are hominids with bumpy foreheads, anyway. Ultimately, for believable biology, I relied heavily on the kind of thing that dwells deep below the ocean. Muskblue’s ecosystem and life is based on the concept of whalefall, and the […]
A science fiction short story published in Federations, 2009.
I was thinking to myself: What’s the difference between the Federation and the Borg, really? Both assimilate other cultures into themselves. One just does it a little more violently. I started thinking about what a realistically capitalistic federation would look like, and the story was born. The Humpty Moon vanished two days ago, devoured by […]
A science fiction short story published in Seeds of Change, 2008.
What if our social cliques weren’t just social constructs, but biological ones? Combine that with some ideas about living graffiti and you’ve got the world of arties, brainiacs, and thicknecks. A few of us arties were hanging out in Tube Station D, in the dry part that hadn’t flooded. Tin men had busted Blaze and Ransom […]