Category: Short stories

SFF, Short stories

Year’s Best: Pollen and Salt

OJ

I’m happy to say that one of my climate fiction shorts, “Pollen and Salt,” has been reprinted! You can find it in the inaugural volume of The Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth, edited by Allan Kaster. I have to admit that even though I basically grew up on Star Trek as the epitome of science fiction, my own scifi is predominantly set here on Earth. It’s not that I don’t still love space travel and alien worlds; it’s just that what’s happening on this world is what I’m most invested in. The changes taking place here, and the changes coming. I’m really pleased to see an anthology that focuses on that, and it’s wonderful to be in it.

I will say, of all the reactions to this particular story, I’m most interested in how people perceive the protagonist. The story’s told by a first person narrator, and they talk about how much they miss their dead spouse, and how affected they are by the changing environment of the salt marsh, but as far as I recall there was no real indication as to the gender of either of the people involved. Every so often a reader reaction or review indicates that they think the protagonist is a man or a woman (I suppose nonbinary would also be a valid interpretation, although I haven’t seen that one yet.) Same with the spouse. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. No matter your gender, you’ll grieve when someone you love dies.

I can’t honestly say that ambiguity was a deliberate choice on my part. I noticed it later, and thought might as well keep it in, but I’m enjoying seeing how people choose to interpret it. I have my own opinion, of course, but there’s no right answer. People can read into it what they want.

SFF, Short stories

You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories

OJ

My new collection is out! You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories, published by Stelliform Press, is available now.

It’s a collection of speculative eco-fiction, ranging from eco-horror to solarpunk. Many of the stories have been published before, and you can read them in places like Clarkesworld (“You’re Not the Only One”) or Strange Horizons (“We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice”). Have a read of either of these to see if you’ll like what’s in the rest of the book!

There’s also a few stories original to the collection, including the title novelette, “You Are My Sunshine.” This is one of my favourites, because it’s just so weird. It’s set in the same world as my Stelliform novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, where in the near-future ecological grief at a degrading environment causes a wave of insanity and suicide. Plus, the novella had jellyfish. Lots of jellyfish. There’s no jellyfish in “You Are My Sunshine” – this time it’s starfish. Zombie starfish, which are a real thing. Sea star wasting disease is spread in warming waters, and it causes the poor starfish to disintegrate… but the bits that fall off keep moving. For a while, anyway. If you’re a marine biologist, as main character Cyrus is, that’s pretty disturbing. Also disturbing are the severed human arms that keep appearing on his property, complete with apology notes. It’s bizarre, but I think it’s also a bit funny.

Stelliform has a fantastic range of books, focused on environmental and climate fiction, so if short stories aren’t your thing, take a look at their catalogue and you’re sure to find something appealing!

Horror, Short stories

Those Shining Things Are Out of Reach

OJ

I have a new story out! “Those Shining Things Are Out of Reach” can be found in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia from Shortwave Publishing.

Now, I enjoy reading dark academia but I’ve never really written any before this, so when editors Ai Jiang and Christi Nogle kindly asked if I’d be interested in contributing a story, I about fell over myself to give it a go. Especially as I was allowed to take a slightly more speculative approach… Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t gone full-on sci-fi here (tempting though the prospect was), as I wanted to still maintain a very contemporary setting. “Those Shining Things” is, however, ambiguously placed when it comes to time period. It’s near-future, mostly, though informed by historic events.

I was interested to see how far I could push ambiguity in this story; how many things I couldn’t come straight out and say. I’m not, it must be said, an especially subtle writer. When I have something to say I tend to want to hammer it, so maybe this is nowhere near as subtle, or as elliptical, as I hoped it would be, but I still enjoy the lingering sense of threat. A lot of my fiction work is influenced by the dark side of science: unethical experiments and horrific hypotheses, and I’m interested in seeing just how people can get corrupted into behaving that way. This story was a way to explore that. It’s pretty grim, but then this is dark academia.

Sometimes it’s fun to be horrific.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Lise Meitner Speaks to the Living

OJ

I have a new story out! “Lise Meitner Speaks to the Living” is out in volume 8 of Horror Library, edited by Eric J. Guignard. It’s one of my science history stories, this time about Lise Meitner, who was one of the physicists who discovered nuclear fission. She was invited to work on the atomic bomb in World War Two, but refused on moral grounds. I don’t know how much comfort that would be in the wake of something like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though… it was still her work being used as the basis for slaughter. That must have been very hard to live with.

In many ways this is a bookend story; the second of a pair. The first of them, “Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead,” about a chemist who worked on chemical weapons in World War One, was originally published in The Dark.

Meitner and Hahn were friends. Complicated friends, but friends for all that. When push came to shove, one of them went along and one didn’t. That, too, must have been hard to live with. A relationship built on ground seeded with landmines, I think. I wonder how much each of them resented the other, deep down. If they did. (How could they not?)

It was meant to be a two-story thing. Two and done.

I’m not sure that I am done, to be honest.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Cover reveal for You Are My Sunshine

OJ

My second short story collection, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories, is out in September from Stelliform Press! I’m really happy to say that the cover is done by the wonderful Rachel Lobbenberg, who did my last Stelliform cover, for The Impossible Resurrection of Grief. I love Rachel’s work – it’s always so detailed and creepy, and the tentacular sunflower here is the perfect example of this.

You can pre-order the book here. If you like eco-horror and solarpunk and the journey from one to the other, this collection might be for you. Behold the blurb:

Sometimes change can hurt. This collection of short stories traces the growing pains of a new world, beginning with the death throes of our current way of life and ending with a world transformed by science and technology, and by grief, hope, love, and humanity’s will to transform. This is a collection that will both tear you apart and tend to your wounds. Cade’s stories are informed by science, tracing the biological and emotional threads that bind us, human and non-human alike. You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories is a promise of what worlds are possible if we allow ourselves to change.