Happy May Day! Last year to celebrate International Workers’ Day, I shared a full story on my newsletter, solarshades.club. Titled “May Day” of course, it’s about what happens when a pair of groundhogging immortals start bringing more people into their time loop. It’s one of my favorite short stories I’ve written, falling squarely into the genre niche I’ve come to call ‘socialist surrealism.’ So I’ve decided to make posting a proletarian-themed story a May 1st tradition.

This year my May Day story is titled “Any Percent,” and it just went live on the storied online webzine Giganotosaurus. Imagine you could play a video game that let you live a whole human life in a matter of minutes. What would it mean to “win” in that game? What would it mean to speedrun?

Click through and give it a read. Here’s a short excerpt, from a ways into the story.

Mechanically, the way he did whenever he needed to escape the bleakness of IRL, Luckless daubed gel onto his temples, closed his eyes, and held START. When he opened them, her small, brown hands were stocking cans on grocery shelves. It was her birthday, of course, but she was mostly worried about when she’d find time to study for her GED, how late the buses were running after midnight, whether her mother had been sober enough to feed baby Diwa before bed. The algo in her earbuds beeped at her to pick up the pace.

Normally, Luckless would drop the can, shed the earbuds, steal a car, and head to the nearest skip he could remember. Tonight she was in Columbus, so Ohio Truck Skip wasn’t far. From there it would be routine to buy her way into the underworld, get a new identity that could make money moves, never have to do manual labor or think about where she came from ever again.

In her back, her feet, her arms, she felt that deep-bone tired. The same tired Luckless felt every day of that one, unskippable life.

She finished work and rode the bus home, nursed her baby, and slept. The next morning she got out early, went to the diner across from the grocery, where a few of her coworkers were gathering to talk about organizing a union.

Read the full piece in all its gamer glory here.

Today my friends at the Open Air Collective posted my short story “The Co2lector” as the first in their “Carbon Punk” fiction series exploring different possible futures of carbon dioxide removal and climate repair. This was a fun story to write, exploring an entrepreneurial character trying to navigate an overly complicated, but better-than-nothing world of CDR technology and policy. I consider it predictive rather than proscriptive, hopefully offering some insight into the way this nascent industry might evolve and grow amidst a shifting economic, political, social, and energy landscape. We can do much better than this market-driven mess the story draws, but hopefully we can also enjoy this tale of Raf’s precarious hustle.

If you aren’t plugged into this “climate repair” tip I’ve been on, this story is a good place to start, perhaps read in concert with my recent Jacobin debut: Zero Emissions Isn’t Enough. ​We Need Climate Repair. I’ve also mused a bit about this “civilizational project” on my newsletter, solarshades.club. And of course there was a chunk of speculation about carbon removal in my book. Most importantly to note: climate repair/carbon removal is not technofix replacements for deep decarbonization. Rather I think it is a necessary next step to restoring a stable and habitable world, one to be powered by clean, renewable energy and regenerative land use practices.

What is “carbonpunk”? For me it is sci-fi that imagines the street-level, burner phone version of a particular slab of technological futurity, that of machines, industry, and other practices meant to clean up the carbon waste with which we’ve wrecked the atmosphere (and, increasingly, the oceans). It kicks us into the complexities of living through that upheaval, and pushes us to consider just how evenly (or unevenly) distributed and in-our-lives such futurity can get.

More to come from me on this topic, no doubt.

I spent most of 2021 working on novels, editing, slushing, getting stoked about my book release next year, and miscellaneous projects. But I was also lucky enough to have four (4) short stories published (and a few reprints!). So below is my eligibility post (here’s a Twitter thread version as well). I would be honored if others in the SFF community read any of these stories and considered nominating them for the Hugos, the Nebulas, or any other annual award.

Short Stories

“A Smell of Jet Fuel” — Lightspeed Magazine #134. Author spotlight. Nebula Reading List link.

We met on the 107th floor of the South Tower. She was standing in quiet contemplation, watching fire spread through the building across the plaza, smoke and paper billowing out into that baby blue sky. I was nursing a thunderous hangover, neglecting my tour group, which had all gone to the southern side of the observation deck to watch the second plane’s approach. She wasn’t supposed to be here.

A modern homage to Ray Bradbury’s classic “A Sound of Thunder,” featuring a time travel tour to the WTC on 9/11/2001 that doesn’t go quite as planned…

“Solarshades” — Cities of Light. Nebula Reading List link.

On cloud-out days, when that listless Pacific smother hung low over Portland, and the house batteries chirped their plaintive ten-percent forebodings—the grid no help at all—Kismet clambered onto the roof to see the lit-up glitter of the Clackamas County line: a trash-strewn no-man’s land cutting through brownfields, fallow-forests, and cemeteries. A little crack in the law that neither Happy Valley nor Pleasant Valley wanted to deal with.

Kismet didn’t envy the refugees, undocs, and homeless who pitched their tents and parked their RVs in the interstices. But seeing their pyramids of warm glow, hearing their music, whiffing their smelly foreign food—all while his games were forced off and his showers ran cold and his cousins ate dry cereal and squabbled over flashlights—on those days he couldn’t help but feel a little drip of resentment runneling into his soul.

It’s a story of a Green New Deal and its discontents. Can an encounter with state-seeing AR glasses change Kismet’s perspective and help him organize for energy amnesty in his community before he’s drawn into his brother’s world of hate and small violence?

“Stowaways” — Lightspeed Magazine #138

Special Exhibit
Making Aliens of Us: The Collected Works of FLOAT
Title: Stowaways, 2081
Inkjet print, forming memetic code, arranged behind curtain
Artist: FLOAT, Netherlands, 2040 – 2133
On lend from the Foundation for the Preservation of Troubling Artwork
**Please read this card in its entirety before proceeding**

Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Would you like to?

A flash piece about art, memes, and infohazards.

“The Painter and the Flatiron” — Cities in a Wild Garden: Stories of the Nature of Cities, Volume 2

The elephant who visited most often was a painter who lived on the Upper East Side. She’d walk down Park Avenue, swerving into museums for inspiration, canvases slung across her back. Then she’d post up in Central Park, where she’d sketch scenes everyone knew but which seemed, through her distinguished eye, freshly poignant.

She painted big and little cats sleeping in sunbeams; joggers racing Savannatown zebras; children climbing trellises to treehouses; permaculture wonks plotting in the gardens; lovers sharing picnic blankets; revolutionary working groups debating policy in the squares; critters perched on park benches, watching skateboarders try tricks by the statues; orangutans working public orchards, swinging from fruit trees, laughing on their lunch breaks.

Another flash piece, this one about tolerance and connection in a multispecies vision of New York City.

Thanks for reading this year! You can follow my work via Substack at solarshades.club.

I have a flash fiction piece about art and memes out in Lightspeed Magazine today: “Stowaways.” It’s in the form of a pretentious gallery description card. You know, the thing you have to lean close to the wall and squint at to read, that gives you a semi-enlightening, semi-inscrutable short history of the attached painting or other artwork. This one, however, has a creepy twist.

I wrote the first version of this several years ago when I was solicited by someone putting together a compendium of ‘impossible works of art.’ I came up with three, this being the weirdest. One of the other ideas birthed my Pushcart Prize-nominated story “Black Ice City,” published in Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters.

The idea of “nucleated” and “unnucleated” brains hosting “memetic intelligences” however goes back to a novel idea I had as a wee college student way back in 2007, when I was studying abroad in Kalimpong, India. The story was about Memento-memoried people living in cloud cities on Venus, waiting for in limbo while a centuries-long terraforming process unfolded. I’m still amazed at how many ideas I had that fall, when I had no easy access to TV or internet and spent most of my time drinking chai, journaling, and staring out at the rolling, foggy Himalayan foothills. The title of that never-written novel (which, who knows, maybe I’ll one day write) was Float, which in this story lends its name to the future artist who created Stowaways.

I’m quite fond of this weird little story, and I’m very glad that (after racking up many, many rejections) it has finally found a home.

My story “A Smell of Jet Fuel” is out in Lightspeed Magazine #134!

Future time travel tourists visit the World Trade Center to observe the Sept. 11 attacks, but for Brad the tour guide not everything goes as planned. This story is an homage to Ray Bradbury’s classic “A Sound of Thunder,” about time travelers who hunt dinosaurs in the Jurassic. I talk more about this inspiration (and 9/11) in this interview. If you happen to nominate for the Hugo or Nebula awards, I’d be obliged if you considered this story come awards season and/or gave it an upvote on the Nebula Reading List.

I was lucky enough to have six (6) short stories published in 2020—a big chunk of my output from the last few years. I also joined the SFWA about a year ago, voted in the Nebulas for the first time, and attended a solid handful of (Zoom-bound) SFF conventions. So it seems about time that I also made an eligibility post. I would be honored if others in the SFF community read any of these stories and considered nominating them for the Hugos, the Nebulas, or any other annual award.

Short Stories

“Voice of Their Generation” — in Lightspeed Magazine #119. Audio version. Author spotlight.

Franchise mashups, DeepMake instant-movies, the creative process under cultural fracking. Can Thicket complete a script that pleases the algo before Starbucks kicks them out?

“Black Ice City” — Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters (paperback, Kindle, ebook, iTunes, Nook). Blog post. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

The blue harvest is good this year, kelp growing in straight ropes as thick as my head, dulse bushes meat-red in the angel light of the balmy Barents Sea. We keep waiting for storm waves to rip our crops away, to carry the ripest fronds down to carbon trenches—but they never come. So day after day Zhi Ruo and I pull up seaweed and full racks of mussels and scallops, plumped on the fat plankton of the New North Gyre. It’s a fine season, watching Zhi Ruo’s long legs slide in and out of the water, her shoulders taut and strong from lifting what we’ve grown. Shells clatter on the deck, a bounty, and I feel a greedy excitement at the luxe adventures they’ll earn me at autumn’s end.

Zhi Ruo pouts when I tell her I’m drifting north for the party this year. “Come where the sun is, Gillam, you masochist,” she says. But I’m set. Four years since I last made Black Ice City, and in that lifetime I’ve become, I fancy, the type of strapping, worldly man I’d once seen turn heads skating across the floe. I take Zhi Ruo to bed every night for a week, and then slip out one lightless morning, untie my boat from hers, raise sail and set course for the white-specked horizon, against the tide of migrating birds.

Nautical adventure, Arctic ice palaces, hothouse climate politics, lots of sex!

“In the Storm, a Fire” (with Jay Springett) — And Lately, The Sun (Kindle), 2020. Longlisted for the BSFA Short Fiction Award.

“Chani! I was worried I wasn’t going to see you today,” Kayla said. She was a middle-aged millennial, but, with dyed black hair and meticulous makeup, she passed for 30. This wasn’t vanity, Chani knew, but self-preservation. Asperity was unkind to the elderly.

“Hectic morning, you know how it is,” Chani said. She opened her pack of jars, pulled out a stack of pickled plums hiding drugs that kept Alzheimer’s at bay. Kayla’s face lit up with gratitude.

“Folks are really going to appreciate these,” Kayla said. “My mother especially. I know she’s been running low.”

“Kayla, listen. I have extra today, of some, uh, different varieties,” Chani said carefully. Around them the market bustled. “Would you want to take them off my hands? Free of charge, of course.”

Kayla’s eyes flickered.

Bootleg healthcare, religious schisms, technomilitarized policing, fascism with American characteristics, solarpunk communities of resistance.

“Your Mind is the Superfund Site” (with C. Y. Ballard) — Lightspeed Magazine #127. Audio version. Author spotlight.

“Ever consider killing yourself?” the gecko said. “It’ll save you one hundred percent on your car insurance.”

I was alone, but not. I tried to step on the creature, but my foot wasn’t there. I clenched my teeth, which felt like water. Alleyah’s Southie accent crackled a reminder of radio.

“Tracey, are you paralucid yet? Need another poke of DMT?”

I was back in high school—or somebody’s high school. The classrooms were vintage Sears catalogs and a spruce tree that grew sideways—not in a directional sense but just with a profound association with the concept of sideways. I climbed the tree and then fell. I fell for a long time, the gecko taunting me, before Alleyah got me moving with another call on the radio.”

A festive brawl through the advertising-infested dreamscape of future socialist Boston. Will Tracey and Alleyah be able to find and defeat the King of Brands before the solstice ends?

“Zooming” — MIT Technology Review. Audio version via Curio.

I’m sitting in my parents’ basement, in a cracked pleather gaming chair, smelling my own funk, or maybe the damp of black mold, and 400 miles below me the whole world is laid out like some vast Tibetan tapestry, full of little demons and beasts and believers.

I tap, zoom, look, unzoom, slide, tap, zoom, look. Sometimes at familiar spots, but mostly just at random, searching for something happening somewhere that’s interesting enough to stream or gif or sell or just linger over. I watch Berliners mob a music festival. I watch mining equipment drag rocks out of an Australian quarry. I watch Pakistani dogs fighting over a chicken and hurricane clouds slamming into Cuba and an exhibitionist couple fucking on a bright red blanket on a Californian rooftop. I lose myself for a few minutes in the ripples of swaying Amazon jungle leaves, wondering how the wind feels to all those trees. And then I get bored, and I’m just zooming through my rounds again, not thinking much, and I see it.

Some kid is dragging a tasteful brown coffin out of the back of a pickup truck parked at the edge of a pile of trash in the junkyard just outside of town, my town. Silent thunk when the box hits the trashdirt, and the kid loses his grip, rolls it, and out comes a body. Denny’s body.

A twisted crime story—from a satellite-eye-view.

“The Lizard and the Rat” — StarShipSofa podcast.

Delhi was silent but for the dripping of her suit. Kala felt at home in the empty place. She wove through maze-like slum-husks, shuffled across melting highways. She was a ghost, spectral in the silvery shedsuit. Even though the dehumidifier on her back left a trail of water, for once she didn’t fear being followed. She was protected—by superstition, the bright sun, and the “60C” glowing in the corner of her faceplate.

A professional burglar and an orphan street kid find themselves on the run from trillionaires, cults, and geoengineering spooks.