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My 2025 Awards Eligibility!
Christmas, the season of hope.
Across the land, the Nebulas are dusting off their shelves, and the Hugo Awards are awakening from their year-long slumber, and writers everywhere are beginning to remember that, yes, they did write things during this awful year and yes they DO deserve awards for this! And so they scurry off to their newsletters and their barren blogospheres and their half-assed websites and write posts like this one, in the slim hope that people out there have recognized their labors and appreciated them and are willing to tell their friends about their books.
Dear reader, I am one of those authors. I have had a fairly productive year! I have produced good work! So, when you are marking your Hugo or Nebula ballot or what-have-you, please remember my name and these fine tales that I put out in the world.
It’s fun! It’s a quick read! It’ll make you laugh!
Novel: If Wishes Were Retail
Publisher: Tachyon
My humorous tale of a genie trying his hand at running a retail establishment in a mall and the mayhem that follows is a little bit Caddyshack, a little bit Aladdin, and a little bit social commentary. It includes something close to 2-3 jokes on every page, has gnomes wearing athletic socks for hats, and it involves a general strike against unfair labor practices.
Unlike much of my work, this actually got a teeny-tiny bit of buzz. It was an Editor’s Pick over at Amazon! Librarian’s loved it! I got a ton of awesome blurbs from people like Sarah Beth Durst and Daniel Pinkwater. I DARE YOU to nominate it!
Novelette: “In a Desolate Garden”
This is the cover!
(I did not make the cover)
Published in: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September/October 2025 issue
This story is about the engram of a woman unhappily married to a trillionaire, suffering from depression after a miscarriage, and whose husband is offering to buy her an entire planet to be terraformed for their exclusive use. The trouble is, the planet is already occupied. This is a weird story about love and identity and discovering your own self-worth as well as being a first contact story, a story about uploading consciousness into machines, and about alternatives to human intelligence. I think it’s awesome.
I would say “go out and read it!” but it’s Analog, so…good luck with that. I’ll offer here this little excerpt, though:
She wanted to scream but didn’t feel it in her body the way she should. Didn’t feel that upswell of adrenaline and that brief moment of power before she unleashed it. She had always found screaming cathartic, but there seemed nothing to hold on to, nothing to moor her terror and frustrations.
“Why didn’t you just delete me, like the Barton engram?”
“In joining with what you call the Barton engram, I realized my error. You are not me.”
Claudia steadied herself by looking at the colorful alphabet on the wall. The letters flickered as she examined them. She closed her eyes which were not there, opened them again—at least, somehow, she could do that. “You weren’t self-aware, is what you’re saying? By eating the Barton engram, you became self-aware?”
“I was self-aware before your probe’s arrival. I was not aware of thinking things besides myself.” Not-Barton mimicked a smile, which somehow seemed more genuine than Barton’s actual smiles.
Barton smiled to get things. Barton smiled to work people in that way he did—a back slap, a good handshake, a quick joke. She used to marvel at how he would work a room of investors, have them trailing behind him like puppies, eager for his attention. Claudia liked to think she could coax the real thing out of him—Barton Song, grinning from the heart for once, out of love. She doubted all that now. Told him so a few years ago. It was maybe half the reason she—well, a copy of herself—was here now, talking to some computer program.
“What is going on?” not-Barton asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You are very noisy.”
I DOUBLE DARE YOU to nominate this novelette for a prize. Any prize.
It also has this kick-ass cover!
Story Collection: Faceless Galaxy
New Stories Contained: “Vestibular Dysfunctionality,” “Rates of Acceleration,” and “Infection Vector”
Publisher: JAB Books
I released a story collection this year, too! It’s a collection of all my Faceless stories published to date, featuring a violent and cynical little blob alien on its quest to murder people who deserve it in exchange for extravagant meals and a safe place to hide. It is a book full of weird aliens, bizarre landscapes, and neon-soaked dark alleys full of disreputable characters. I’ve been calling it “alien noir,” but you can call it cyberpunk-adjacent or dark space opera or whatever you like.
I know for a fact at least 6 (!) people have purchased and read this book, so its obvious I don’t need your help nominating it, but in case you are compelled, you cannot, in most cases, actually nominate whole story collections. You can, however, nominate some of the stories. Most of the stories here are previously published, but there are 3 brand new ones. They are:
- “Vestibular Dysfunctionality” – short story (wherein Faceless is trapped on a boat on an ocean world with his quarry and has to plot his escape)
- “Rates of Acceleration” – novelette (wherein Faceless impersonates the bodyguard to a death race contestant marked for assassination and catches some feelings)
- “Infection Vector” – short story (wherein Faceless is contracted by a grieving mother to kill the bird-scientists who engineered a deadly plague)
I TRIPLE DOG DARE YOU to nominate any or all of these stories on your awards ballots. There, see – now you have to do it. Everybody is watching. The whole internet.
Thank you for your attention to this matter! I now return you to your regularly scheduled internet dumpster fires.
My Recent Podcasts and Publications, Summer 2025
I’ve had a crazy busy last few months, so in the shuffle I’ve not updated all of you on some of the recent doings, so here’s your roundup:
If you hurry, it *might* still be on some shelves somewhere!
In August, I had a post up on The Astounding Analog Companion in preparation for my story, “In a Desolate Garden,” which is in the September/October 2025 Analog Science Fiction and Fact .
The article is about the inverse of the Ship of Theseus – not so much how much you can replace without changing the nature of a thing, but how much you can remove before it becomes something else. This mirrors the story, which is about engrams and isolation and emotional desolation. And also hope, and love, and the beauty of existence, too. If you’re a subscriber, I hope you liked it! If not, if you run to your local Barnes and Noble RIGHT NOW, you might just still be able to find one.
Last month, I did an interview with the Syosset Public Library on Long Island (online, of course) and you can hear that interview on their Turn the Page Podcast. It was all pertaining to my novel, If Wishes Were Retail (on sale now!) and about the importance of humor and how I developed the characters of the Jinn and Alex and so on.
All good things!
But What’s Next?
Well, I’ve got stories on submission and stories set for publication and a novel out there looking for a home (a crime solving, art-collection dragon and her Boston townie sidekick!) and so on. In the immediate future, though, I am going to be afforded the opportunity to talk books and writing and short stories with brilliant Theodora Goss when I help her launch her new story collection, Letters from an Imaginary Country, at Trident Books on Newbury Street in Boston on November 11th at 6pm!
I’ve had the privilege of reading an advance copy of this collection, and it is a beautiful book. I look forward to talking about it!
I hope to see you all there!
“That Far Uncharted Ocean” is an AnLab Finalist! Read it now!
Hello, friends!
Hot man-on-snail action!
(not really – the snail is just rude)
Even more writing news coming your way! My novelette “That Far Uncharted Ocean” (the one about a coast guard officer teaching a bunch of alien snails how to sail on an ocean planet) has been selected as a finalist for the AnLab awards over at Analog Science Fiction and Fact. While the winners won’t be revealed until the July/August 2025 issue, up until that time you have a unique opportunity to read one of my short stories for free! It’s available for download here!
Go get it!
In Genie-related News!
Pre-order now!
IF WISHES WERE RETAIL has a new cover! This is really just the old cover, but with a slight redesign from the ARC (advance reader copy). They shifted the background into something a little less, you know, pitch black and moved some elements around. I think it looks pretty good!
It also features a blurb on the cover by bestselling super-author Sarah Beth Durst! She says:
“Irresistibly fun and funny, with a ton of heart and depth! This is the kind of book that sneaks up on you and sticks with you!”
—Sarah Beth Durst, author of The Spellshop
Isn’t that awesome? I’ve actually gotten a whole BUNCH of extremely complimentary advance reviews on this book! I’ll be sharing more of them as we get closer to the pub date! Pre-order your copy today!
Announcing FACELESS GALAXY! (Pre-orders available now!)
Okay, so first of all, you should already have heard about my novel coming out in June, IF WISHES WERE RETAIL. It’s a cozy-ish madcap comedy about a genie opening a shop selling wishes in a failing suburban mall and it is just so much fun and I’ll be plugging it like crazy for the rest of the year. Go and pre-order it now!
Now, that said, say “cozy madcap comedy/fantasy” isn’t your thing. Perhaps you found me after my work in Analog Science Fiction and Fact and are like “Habershaw, what’s with the genie stuff? We want dark, gritty scifi in outer space and such!” Well, friends, WELL…
It’s coming out on August 5th!
That’s right! I have yet another project coming to print this year, and this one is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from the other one. Is this a good idea? A bad idea? Will everyone get confused? I have no idea. It’s happening anyway!
Here’s the back cover for you:
It’s just gone up for pre-order, so hurry and reserve your copy of FACELESS GALAXY now, while functionally infinite supplies last!
AND, if this isn’t your cup of tea, again I remind you that IF WISHES WERE RETAIL, the funny contemporary fantasy, is ALSO available for pre-order, and if you don’t like scifi or violence, you will probably love that one. Get it HERE!
My Awards Eligibility for 2024
It’s that time of year again, when writers of all stripes start dusting off their resumes and start putting out the word that yes, indeed, they did publish things this year and that YES, in fact, we’d love to be considered for any awards or recognition you’d like to throw our way – Hugo nominations, Nebula nods, Dragoncon recognition, book club invitations, obscure internet badges, WHATEVER IT MAY BE!
I am one of those writers! And though I know the odds of me, a relatively unknown writer with a fairly small following, getting enough people interested in my work to bother filling out an internet form and vaulting myself to fame are pretty unlikely, hope springs eternal for the hard-working author, and here is what I managed to publish this past year. All of them are good work! I recommend checking them out and, if possible, supporting the publications that put them out (and therefore the editors and staff).
“Brood Parasitism”
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2024
Short Story
Another in my series of linked shorts about the shape-shifting assassin Faceless and its adventures in the far-flung Union of Stars.
Excerpt:
She was right about that part. Most assassination jobs were public—had to be, really. If an organization hired an assassin, they announced that they’d done so. They even had to announce who they were planning to have killed. Only the assassin’s name was kept out of it. This was something that was part of the tradition—part of the code we assassins lived by. It kept us from being the target of revenge, you see. It wasn’t us who killed you, it was our employers. We were just tools. Weapons, like any other. No remorse, but no rancor, either.
That was how I felt, anyway, before I watched the city I’d lived in for years scream and die in five minutes of pure terror.
Now?
Let’s just say there was some rancor involved.
And the cover art is inspired by my story!
“The Puzzle Vault”
Baubles from Bones, Issue #2, September, 2024
Novelette
This is a story that had been shortlisted for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award many years back, but which finally made print in this new magazine dedicated to cool fantastic fiction. This story is a favorite of mine and I feel it deserves a lot of love. Please check it out!
Excerpt:
“What can we expect tomorrow? I have heard so much and yet so little about the Vault. What can you tell me?”
The flute fell silent. Beatriz looked across the fire at the other men. They were all listening now. “It is hard to explain. I can tell you that most of you will probably die, and those of you that live will blame me for what happens to the others.”
“Why? What is so fiendish that guards the treasure?” Santuva gestured towards his saddlebags. “I have antispell, wards, talismans, weapons—what could it be?”
Beatriz closed her eyes. She could picture the Vault clearly, as though it were etched in her eyelids. “The warlock king who devised the Puzzle Vault knew his enemies would seek to plunder his treasures with sorcery and brute force, so he devised a trap that uses no sorcery and cannot be overcome by force of arms. Within is a lion’s head. One of you must put your arm inside the lion’s mouth. This will open the shaft leading down to the maze and, beyond that, the treasure vault itself, but the man who puts his arm in will be trapped. Those of you who descend will have exactly three minutes to solve the maze, enter the vault, pillage what you can, and return.”
“And the man who puts his arm in? What happens to him?” The Illini asked.
Beatriz opened her eyes. “He dies.”
“Things Lost Forever”
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #419, October 2024
Novelette
This one, in the always fantastic BCS, was the result of me wondering how all those fearsome chairs of skulls and what-not get built, and resulted in this story about a woodworker living in a city ruled by vampires. You can even read it online for free (a rarity for my work, for some reason)!
Excerpt:
“It will need skulls on the armrests—fresh ones, mind you, not some yellowing, brittle things you drag out of the sewer.”
Lucas flinched as the dread vampire Adelard, one of the Harvest Lords of L’Ombre, snapped a piece of parchment taut before his eyes and those of the two other mortals kneeling in his throne room.
The parchment had an illustration of a chair on it—high-backed and forbidding, with iron spikes and bladed edges and the aforementioned skulls as armrests. Lucas got the barest glimpse of it in the flickering candlelight and did his best to commit it to memory. No doubt the terrified men kneeling on either side of him did the same.
“The chair must be menacing, you understand? This is to be my throne when I assume my new post. When I sit in it, I must appear… appear… ehhh…”
The young man next to Lucas—a furniture maker from the Chanceries named Hubert—spoke up. “Imperious, my lord?”
Adelard’s hand flashed like a blade, and Hubert crumpled to the ground, mouth open in a silent “o.” The vampire lord paused, looking down at his work, considering. “Hmmm… yes. Imperious. I suppose.”
“That Far Uncharted Ocean”
My name even made the cover!
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2024
Novelette
This is my longest published story to date, about a USCG officer sent to a distant planet to help some alien snails (Thraad, for fans of the Faceless stories) win a sailing race on an ocean planet. Sort of like Project Hail Mary meets White Squall. It’s about sailing and first contact and technological and cultural blind-spots, and it’s a pretty good time!
Excerpt:
…that door—the door I was never, under any circumstances, sup-posed to open—opened all by itself. The aliens, it turned out, didn’t know about knocking.
I was mid-run at the time. I was so shocked at the sudden change in air pressure that I messed up my rhythm and fell right off the treadmill and smacked into the base of my bed. I wasn’t wearing my uniform. Hell, I wasn’t wearing much of anything at all—just my underpants and my running shoes—so I spent the next three seconds trying to sort out my NASA jumpsuit, which was hanging in my closet but had fallen down when I hit the wall and was now in an irritating little ball that would not sort itself out. It was in that state—me, sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to get a zipper to unzip, still panting and sweating and pale as the day I was born—when I met my first alien.
It looked like a snail. A huge, meaty snail about the size of a postal mailbox with a colorful, lacquered shell and a yellowish-green, slimy head poking out of one end. The head had two big, unblinking eyes on the end of long, muscular stalks, a wide, flat mouth, and a set of four tentacles arranged sort of like a beard beneath that mouth. It was creepy, for sure, but not half as creepy as the guys in NASA had anticipated, judging how long they’d spent telling me not to flinch and then showing me pictures of hideously deformed creatures with compound eyes and bloody fangs and skeletons on the outside of their body and stuff.
The alien stood there in the doorway for a second, a dim green corridor behind it, looking all around my living quarters with its weird little eyestalks. The eyes moved independently of each other, so this thing could look me in the face while checking out all my stuff simultaneously. It didn’t speak. Neither did I, for a second.
My training—drilled into my head for months leading up to this mission—finally kicked in. I stood up, still in my underpants, and “affected positive body language” by showing the palms of my hands and slowly waving one in an exaggerated “hello.” “Greetings! I am Lieutenant Commander Amos Tambly of Earth. I come in peace!”
The alien’s chin-tentacles adjusted some little box that was on a kind of lanyard around its neck, and then it opened its mouth and started croaking at me. The box, though, chirped out words in perfect English. “How did you know?”
Of all the dozens of potential responses I had been taught to expect, this was not one of them. “I . . . uhhh . . . what?”
Well, that’s it! I swore I was expecting others, but a couple things fell through this year, so this is all you’ve got of my work with which to shower me with praise. Go forth and nominate! (And thank you very very much for reading and liking my work!)
New Story Alert: Read “Brood Parasitism” in Mar/Apr 2024 Analog!
Hey there!
Exciting news, everyone! I’ve got a new story out in this month’s Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Titled “Brood Parasitism,” this is the seventh published story featuring Faceless, the shapeshifting assassin, in the bleak, amoral landscape of the Union of Stars. If you like Faceless, or even just like unique and unusual aliens in your short fiction, then this story is for you. In it, Faceless has taken a contract against a Lhassa patriarch on behalf of his employers, who are already dead at the patriarch’s hands. Check it out!
This is my 5th Faceless story in Analog and my 7th publication with them overall. Years ago, when I got that first acceptance letter from this venerable, respectable, BIG DEAL of a magazine (it was once Astounding – the granddaddy of all SF short fiction magazines!), I never thought I’d see my name consistently on the table of contents, but here we are. I even have another one coming from Analog later this year (“That Far Uncharted Ocean” – look for it!).
My first sale there (“Mercy, Killer,” about an AI serial killer that only kills other AIs) I felt like was a bit of a fluke, mostly because I didn’t really consider myself a “short story” author, but rather a novelist. But here I am, about 12 years later or so, with a lot more short fiction to brag about than novels. Don’t get me wrong – I’m still hard at work on novels and hope to have something to report to you all very soon – but it’s funny that my career has veered from writing epic fantasy to publishing space opera in the world premier hard SF venue.
Anyway, you can find the magazine in most Barnes and Noble bookstores (and a lot of indie bookstores as well, if they have a solid magazine rack) and you can purchase subscriptions through their website (linked above) if you’re really interested in SF in a very old-school, very Project: Hail Mary kind of way.
Happy reading!
Awards Eligibility Post, 2023!
Greetings Loyal Readers!
Shirking work on this, the last day before Thanksgiving? Sitting in an airport as John Candy explains shower curtain ring sales to you? Sitting in the den, scrolling your phone so you don’t need to talk to your racist Aunt Julia? Good news! I have here a list of the things I’ve published this year for you to read, ponder, record, and then remember whenever you get around to voting for awards.
Taking notes? Okay, let’s begin. I’ve published 4 short stories this year (excluding reprints), and here they are from most recent to least:
“The Laugh Machine” in The Digital Aesthete: Human Musings on the Intersection between Art and AI
This antho is TOP NOTCH – get it ASAP!
This anthology, edited by Alex Shvartsman, is smart, funny, topical, and just so, so good – you should get it right now.
My story, “The Laugh Machine” is about an AI stand-up comic and its struggle with the one patron it can’t get to laugh. I like to think its funny and poignant and very current and I hope you like/liked it.
I am a self-aware entertainment expert system, designed to per-
form stand-up comedy. I was activated in Del Rio’s Bar and Grill at 6:32 p.m. on May 17th, 2042. Mathematically speaking, I am very funny. I elicit a laughs-per-minute average of 2.68, with each laugh lasting an average of 3.41 seconds. I have been
programmed with the humorous antics and comic stylings of 6,573 comedians, clowns, buffoons, pranksters, jokers, and at least one satirist, though nobody ever laughs at his stuff, so he has been archived in my databanks for years. For some reason, nobody laughs at Donald Rumsfeld jokes in the year 2056.That was a joke (TOPICAL Ref #2399-8). I told you it wasn’t
funny.
Go get the Nov/Dec 2023 issue now!
“Tool Consciousness” in the Nov/Dec issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Also coming in at the tail-end of the year is yet another story of Faceless the shape-shifting assassin in the pages of Analog. Our intrepid blob is living the life of a professional killer and finds itself…bored. It starts to wonder if it is being used to its full potential or if it has, instead, begun to be taken for granted.
Bad things happen thereafter.
Thraad consortiums governed according to a kind of genetic inertia—whoever had the most disciples got to dictate to other consortiums what was done. If there were lots of consortiums and no clear hegemony, they combined into larger and larger consortiums until one of the newly coalesced consortiums had clear authority. At some point, I was given to understand, this would all break down into chaos and then the various members of the consortiums would wander off and form new ones. And so on and so forth.
The only reason I knew all this garbage about how the snails arranged their society is that I was now an integral part of their stupid plans.
I love this character, I love this world, and I hope readers love it too!
“The Left Hand of Giordino” in Dragonesque
Publisher Zombies Need Brains released their yearly anthologies back in May, and I was lucky enough to score a story in this anthology all about dragons from the dragon’s point of view.
In this one, I introduce a couple characters I hope I’ll have the opportunity to write for again: the art-hording dragon Angharad and her human henchman, Sam. My homage to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories, Sam is the man about town and Angharad? She’s the brains (and the brawn, if it comes to that).
I walked into Grodin’s Auction House with a kind of swagger that was new to me. New as the blue suit I was wearing; new as the convertible roadster I was driving. The swagger that comes with waltzing into a new place with a new job and a magic ticket in your pocket that says
you get what you want or they answer to the boss. I’d been wearing this suit for three months, driving the car for two, and I didn’t think it would ever get old.
It’s a fun (if brief) little mystery story with a dragon in it, and I hope you like it!
“Planned Obsolescence” in Galaxy’s Edge #62
You can still read my story for free on their website – check it out!
I published 3 stories in GE before it returned to its chrysalis earlier this year to change into something new. This is the third, privileged to grace the pages of their last issue as a magazine.
This is another Faceless story, this one much further along in the little blob’s timeline, yet ironically one I wrote a long time before most of the more recently published ones. It’s also one of my favorites, set on the subterranean planet of Sadura and dealing with its people, the giant arachnids known as the Quinix.
I climbed down into the dark canyons of Sadura with Hito Ghiasi’s head in a mesh sack.
This far down into the frontier planet’s abyssal crevasses, only a vestige of civilization was in evidence. Indelible spray paint marked the stone walls in Dryth characters—signs for construction crews, planetary geologists, and so on. Here and there was a seismic sensor spiked into a fault line—a little nub of steel with a blinking green light, reminding the locals that they were no longer alone.
I’m proud of this story and it has the distinction of being one of the few stories of mine that has appeared on the web as free to read – I encourage you all to read it!
Well, that’s it! I did have a few additional acceptances this year (and published one reprint), but nothing has made it to print yet (if it does, I’ll let you know here!). More is to come, I assure you. As for 2023, I know well enough that I’m not likely going to pull an award for any of this, but I’m proud of the work I’ve done and I hope you’ve enjoyed it as well. Good luck to everyone as Awards Season kicks in, and I will hopefully see you all at a con sometime in the near future!
Happy Thanksgiving (to you Americans) and have a peaceful week in late November (for everyone else)!
New Story Out: Read “Tool Consciousness” in Analog!
Hi, everyone!
Go get the Nov/Dec 2023 issue now!
I’ve got a new story out this month! “Tool Consciousness” is the latest in my series of linked scifi short stories featuring Faceless, the shape-shifting assassin, and it’s bleak trek across the amoral universe of the Union of Stars. This time, it is immersed in the opaque politics of the Thraad Consortiums:
Thraad consortiums governed according to a kind of genetic inertia—whoever had the most disciples got to dictate to other consortiums what was done. If there were lots of consortiums and no clear hegemony, they combined into larger and larger consortiums until one of the newly coalesced consortiums had clear authority. At some point, I was given to understand, this would all break down into chaos and then the various members of the consortiums would wander off and form new ones. And so on and so forth.
The only reason I knew all this garbage about how the snails arranged their society is that I was now an integral part of their stupid plans. It involved sneaking into a Thraad hatchery, disguising myself as an egg, and irradiating a specific percentage of the real eggs there with a rad-gun so that they wouldn’t ever hatch and, thereby, strengthen their parent consortium.
This is the 4th Faceless story to appear in Analog and the 6th to be published overall. There are more coming, too – “Brood Parasitism” should be published in Analog sometime next year, and I’m working on collecting an anthology of Faceless tales to be published in its own right, as well (including some new stories!), but that might be a while yet.
Anyway, if you’ve got a subscription to Analog, go check it out! Leave a review somewhere! If you don’t have any such subscription, get one! Analog is the place for hard scifi and classic space opera adventure, and if those are your cup of tea, you can’t miss!
In the meantime, if/when I have any more publishing news to share, I’ll be sure to let you all know here! Onward and upward, friends!
The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3, Featuring “Proof of Concept!”
Hi, everyone!
Snazzy cover, eh?
Another writing update!
My short story “Proof of Concept” (first published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in May of 2022) had been reprinted in this snazzy new best-of anthology from Infinivox SF. The anthology is called The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 3 and it features my own work plus that of 11 other very talented authors writing on the very cutting edge of science fiction. Check it out!
In other news…
I have sold another Faceless story to Analog! “Brood Parasitism” will be appearing in a future issue. There will be more Faceless content before that, too, in a story titled “Tool Consciousness” which should be coming out (also in Analog) sometime before the end of the year (I think). Lots of moody, shape-shifting blob assassin stuff coming your way!
Finding Me on Social Media
If any of you out there have been following me on Twitter, know that I’ve cut back my activity there by a lot thanks to, well, you know. These days you can find me regularly on Bluesky (assuming you have an invite) at aahabershaw.bsky.social. See you in the sky!
Read “Proof of Concept,” my scifi novelette on Locus’s Recommended List!
Hi, everyone!
So, big-time exciting news (and somewhat belated, as it happened a couple weeks back), but one of the novelettes I published in 2022, “Proof of Concept,” made the Locus Recommended Reading List! For those of you who don’t know, Locus is the SFF trade publication of record, and each year around the time when people are nominating for various
Want to read this? Click on the link in this article!
awards (the Hugos, the Nebulas, etc.), they list off what they think was the best stuff from that year to give people a guide for what to read and (potentially) nominate. AND I MADE THE LIST! Yay me!
Now, this doesn’t actually mean I’m going to get nominated for something. In fact, I highly doubt it – I’m not particularly well known and the field is extremely competitive, but it is really nice to know that some people out there who know their stuff think I deserve some attention.
Additionally, the magazine that published “Proof of Concept,” Analog Science Fiction and Fact, has elected to make the story free to read (for a limited time, I imagine). You can download it HERE, so check it out! It’s a story about weird aliens, memory holes, exploitation, and literal self-discovery. Another way of putting it is that it is a scifi survival horror story from the point of view of the monster. This story is part of a linked series of stories I’ve been publishing with Analog for the last year or two, with the fourth in that series due out sometime later this year. So check it out!
And thanks to everyone – reviewers, fans, and friends – who gave this story some love and got me on that list. Here’s hoping I can place one there next year, too!
Auston Habershaw 