Tag: Strange Horizons

Horror, SFF, Short stories

How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross

OJ

I have a new story out! “How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross” is free to read at Strange Horizons.

It’s a bit of a weird story. Very experimental, but then it’s part of an experimental project of mine. I’m currently the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, which basically means I’m the writer in residence there for 2025. One of the projects that I’m working on as part of the Fellowship is a near future science fiction/climate fiction novel called Bloom, in which a toxic algal bloom invades Otago Harbour. Dunedin, you understand, sits on that harbour, so it’s a very local story!

Down near the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, Dunedin is a great place for wildlife spotting. There are sea lions here, and penguins, and a colony of albatrosses on Taiaroa Head. I’ve been out to see that colony, and the birds are amazing. In the world of Bloom, however, they’re also dead. Poor albatrosses! A lot of the wildlife is dead, in the novel, with the waters choked by algae. And somehow, without my planning it, the novel started to be this exploration of how people might respond to this strange and quietly violent disruption of their environment. “How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross” is actually the first chapter of the novel. It works as a standalone, so when I saw that Strange Horizons was open again for submissions earlier in the year, I sent it along.

I’m so pleased I did!

SFF, Short stories

Come Water, Be One of Us

OJ

I have a new story out! My last story of the year. It’s called “Come Water, Be One of Us,” and it’s free to read at Strange Horizons, just click on the link.

This is a story inspired by true events. As the wee paragraph at the beginning says, back in 2017, the New Zealand Parliament recognised the Whanganui River as a legal person. You might think that sounds strange, but I’ve long been irritated by the legal fiction that corporations are people when they clearly fucking aren’t. Making rivers legal people as well redresses the balance – and takes into account indigenous beliefs about the personhood of the river in question. And this isn’t just a Kiwi thing. Not long after the NZ Parliament did its bit, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India, and the Rio Atrato in Colombia were also made legal people by the respective governments of those countries. (And it’s not just rivers. At least one mountain here in NZ has been accorded the same status.)

I like the idea of making ecosystems legal people. It gives another layer of protection, and if you know anything about the state of rivers in NZ, you know they need all the protection they can get. But it’s also, in its way, a potential pushback against the ridiculous idea that corporations have the same legal protections as you and me. Those fucking things are not alive. I don’t care how much you love Amazon. It is not an ecosystem like the South American river, and Apple didn’t grow on any bloody tree. They are not alive.

It really annoys me. So I used the idea of rivers, fighting back against the corporations, because what is a person, really? I’m so glad that Strange Horizons bought this story. I had a feeling it was right up their alley – occasionally, when you write a story, you just know it’s a good fit for a particular market. And they got Galen Dara to illustrate it. Galen Dara!!! Author achievement unlocked right there, I tell you. Just look at it. Isn’t it beautiful?

Horror, SFF, Short stories

We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice

OJ

I’ve a new story out! “We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice” is free to read over in this week’s edition of Strange Horizons. It’s a climate horror story about bears and lies.

It’s an odd mix of fantasy and fact, this one. Clearly, ghost bears the size of houses are not prowling over the ever-less-frozen north of the Americas. But I like finding interesting new ways to write about science so folded in with all the gore and mayhem are bits of biology and climate, and sprinkled through the whole are links to science news stories from journals like Science and Scientific American. The articles inform the story, so you can read them if you want but the mere presence of the titles in the text should clue you into context if you don’t want to follow the links.

I wrote it in cold rage a few months back, after seeing that terrible video of the starving polar bear. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and it was either swallow down all my bile (which didn’t seem to work, apparently spite concentrates in small spaces) or spit it out and make other people suffer too. Fair warning, this one’s really dark. Strange Horizons lists content warnings before each story, and this hits quite a few of them. As you can see from the opening snippet:

Look at what we woke.

We feed them lies and watch them burn for it.

Koala bears rarely run during bush fires. Their instinct at danger is to climb up into canopy, where the leaves are shot through with eucalyptus oil, and flammable. They cling to the trunk with charred paws when it begins to burn, the thin bark catching easily and falling off in flaming strips. It sets their fur alight.

They die screaming. ….