Category: stories

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Hacker Chess & Other Stories by Robert Runté

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SF Canada member Robert Runté has been busy in recent months with several stories (new and reprinted) out in the world now.

Most recently, “Ransom and the Christmas Tree,” appeared on Abyss and Apex magazine’s website in December, just in time for the holidays.

“Ransom hesitated, because surely this wasteland wasn’t where one came to cut Christmas trees. Whole sections were just naked sticks, and even the few scattered pines that were struggling to hang on were more grey than green. The blight was so blatant, one didn’t need fae senses to see that the whole hillside was a scarred ruin.” 

“The Missing Elephant,” originally published in the anthology, They Have to Let You In, was republished by Coastal Shelf magazine in their inaugural November 2020 issue.

“Hacker Chess,” came out in Centropic Oracle on November 20, 2020 as an audio production read by Larissa Thompson. This story originally appeared in the anthology The Playground of Lost Toys, edited by fellow SF Canada member Ursula Pflug and Colleen Anderson in 2015. “Hacker Chess,” was also reprinted in Exile Literary Quarterly 39(3) in 2016.

And “Detour on the Eightfold Path” appeared in NeoOpsis #31, also in November 2020. This story is the fourth to feature Robert’s characters Fami and Julia.

Dr. Robert Runté is Senior Editor with EssentialEdits.ca, a retired professor (University of Lethbridge), and former Senior Editor for Five Rivers Publishing. As an academic, editor, reviewer, and organizer, Robert has been actively promoting Canadian SF for over forty years. He was a founding Director of NonCon, Context89, and SF Canada; and has served on the Boards of the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society, On Spec Magazine, Tesseract Books, and The Writers Guild of Alberta. In addition to dozens of conference papers, journal articles, book chapters, and a half dozen entries in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada , Robert has edited over 150 issues of various SF newsletters.

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One Bad Apple & Other Stories by Holly Schofield

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SF Canada member Holly Schofield has been busy with some new short story publications recently.

The No Police = Know Future anthology examines worlds where funding for police is redirected to other social services. The publisher, Amazing Selects (a division of Experimenter Publishing which publishes the 94-year-old Amazing Stories magazine), says it’s a “unique showcase for our authors’ creativity and problem-solving capabilities, offering much food for thought.  It will get you to think, to engage, to understand that this genre is a tool for exploring, examining and, hopefully, helping us to discover the kind of futures we desire.”

In the near-crimeless and heavily surveilled world of Holly’s story, “One Bad Apple”, a protective father has to make some tough choices when he and his young daughter are confronted by a mugger.

Get No Police = Know Future from Amazing Stories today in print or ebook.

Another of Holly’s stories, “Stubborn as Dirt”, is about rewilding a marsh — a school science project gone wrong! — and appears in And Lately, the Sun.

This 20-tale solarpunk anthology, probes at “how we could build a working world using the resources available to us – the natural, the social, the political, and the technological”. It’s published by Calyx Create Group, an international team of writers, science fiction enthusiasts, media types, and people who don’t want to see humanity crash and burn. The group is registered in Australia as a non-profit association for the purpose of supporting, generating, and disseminating creative works on themes of science, technology and the future.

Details on ordering And Lately, the Sun, and audio excerpts (including one from Holly’s “Stubborn as Dirt”), are here: https://latelythesun.com/ .

When Holly saw the submissions call for the Magic Pens anthology, she knew she had to write a story for it. The result was “Writ Large”, a surprisingly timely tale of the creation of a “new normal” and a possible way to vastly improve the world.

This eclectic, multi-genre collection of original stories is about the power of communication, the magic of writing instruments, and the strength of community, curated to inspire wonder, hope, and joy.

Treat yourself to the ebook or the print version of Magic Pens today!

A more literary look at what we are doing to the environment is Holly’s story “Passengers All”. An otter investigates an abandoned ferry and uncovers some universal truths. Find it in the October 2020 issue of Honeyguide Literary Magazine.

Environmental concerns are not the only topic Holly writes about. In “Reaching Up, Reaching Back”, familial relationships are examined through the lens of time travel. This story was recently reprinted in The Trouble with Time Travel from Smoking Pen Press.

Holly Schofield is the author of over eighty short stories. Her works are used in university curricula, have been translated into multiple languages, and have appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, the Aurora-winning Second Contacts, and many other publications throughout the world. She hopes to save the world through science fiction and homegrown heritage tomatoes.

Find Holly at hollyschofield.wordpress.com.

And be sure to watch for Holly’s upcoming stories in the Fix the World anthology, the Very Much Alive anthology, and Analog Science Fiction & Fact magazine!

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When the Call Comes In by Ira Nayman

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SF Canada member Ira Nayman was recently published in No Police = Know Future, a collection from Amazing Stories.

“When the Call Comes In” tells the story of a police incident in three variations. The first features two Caucasian police officers responding to an African American man sleeping in a car in a lane of a drive-through restaurant. The second and third have the same set-up but replaces the responders with an officer and psychiatrist team, and then a psychiatrist with a social worker robot.

The collection No Police = Know Future explores a future without police in response to the 2020 protests that issued the cry to “defund the police.” Amazing Stories challenged science fiction authors the world over to create their vision of a world without police and fair systems of justice. In this collection you’ll find eleven stories showing alternate forms of law enforcement and criminal justice spread across near future, alternate realities and different worlds.

Ira Nayman is a comedy writer. In the 1980s, he was a writer/performer with the Earth Two and Dead Air radio sketch comedy troupes. Since then, he has written 14 feature length screenplays and approximately 85 scripts for television, most of which are neatly divided into 12 original series.

When he isn’t being satirical all over the place, Ira teaches new media at Ryerson University. He has a Masters degree from the New School for Social Research and he has a PhD from McGill. Ira has written film criticism for Reel Independence and Creative Screenwriting, as well as media and film criticism for *Spark Online.

Learn more about Ira and his work at www.lespagesauxfolles.ca.

Order your copy of No Police = Know Future on Amazon.

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With My Kind by Cait Gordon

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SF Canada member Cait Gordon was recently published in Stargazers, Microtales from the Cosmos, a collection from AE The Canadian Science Fiction Review.

Her short story “With My Kind” stars a disabled protagonist in a micro escape story. Originally launched through Kickstarter, the Stargazers collection was compiled from AE’s 2020 competition for ultra-short sci-fi stories.

Stargazers: Microtales from the Cosmos is a beautifully illustrated collection of the 20 best flash fiction pieces. Stargazers showcases new and under-represented voices in science fiction. Alongside our astral explorers you will get a chance to count down the clock in an intergalactic tourist agency, fight celestial starcopies with ninjutsu, witness the flashpoint of a revolution, get the downlow on astronomer-brand adultery, and even get a chance to reconnect with literary icon Lady MacBeth.

Cait Gordon is a humorist, baker, and Irish-Canadian princess living in the Narnia region of Ottawa’s suburbia. She enjoys reading and writing speculative fiction that celebrates the reality of diversity. In her advocacy work, Cait’s goal is to continue to share and elevate the voices of disabled, Deaf, and/or neurodiverse creatives.

Learn more about Cait and her work at caitgordon.com .

Order your copy of Stargazers, Microtales from the Cosmos directly from the AE website at aescifi.ca.

 

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The New Season by Graham J Darling

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SF Canada member Graham J Darling has a short story, “The New Season” in Brain Games: Stories to Astonish. This anthology was published October 26, 2020 by Third Flatiron Publishing and also includes “The Disconnect” from SF Canada member Lisa Timpf.

Brain Games: Stories to Astonish is a fabulous collection of 27 short science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories involving killer apps, Rube Goldberg inventions, clever escapes, Greek mythology, mysterious space heists, and high-tech sorcery. The humor section gives us the inner workings of a MegaMind.

Graham J. “GrayJay” Darling has long been a voracious consumer of speculative literature. The first novel he ever read was Alice in Wonderland: after learning that by heart, he went on to sip from entire fields of such flowers of the imagination. Eventually he was moved to share the wonder with like-minded fans in clubs, conventions, productions and games. He now writes as fiction what the world isn’t ready for as fact, in parallel to his activities as a scientist and as a medieval reenactor.

Full TOC and more about Third Flatiron at thirdflatiron.com.

Order the e-book or paperback version of Brain Games: Stories to Astonish on Amazon.

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Weathering and Age of Miracles by Robert Runté

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SF Canada member Robert Runté recently published two short stories. “Weathering” in the online journal Lamplit Underground [Vol. 4] and “Age of Miracles” in Canadian Shorts II.

“Weathering” is the story of a schoolgirl going about her day in a post-apocalyptic society at war. Lamplit Underground is an online journal, “devoted to all that is slightly odd, a touch off-putting.”

Read “Weathering” at lamplitunderground.com.

“Age of Miracles” is now in Canadian Shorts II (Mischievous Press, Oct 2020) which is a best-of collection of Canadian short fiction. “Age of Miracles” originally appeared in Strangers Among Us (Laska Media, 2016) and was shortlisted for an Aurora Award.

Canadian Shorts II – A Collection of Short Stories is a specially selected collection of short stories by established and emerging Canadian authors. Showcasing Canada’s diverse writing talent, there is a story for every reader.

From Literary Fiction to SciFi to Prairie Gothic, Canadian Shorts II unites some of our country’s diverse writing talent to defy 2020’s year of upheaval. From the depths of social isolation and societal upheaval, sixteen authors offer compelling stories of hope, failure, love, and sheer wonder at the workings of the world – with Bigfoot and a little alien abduction for fun.

Learn more about Canadian Shorts II at mischieviousbooks.com.

Order your copy via Amazon, Google, Smashwords, Apple, or Kobo.

Dr. Robert Runté is Senior Editor with EssentialEdits.ca, a retired professor (University of Lethbridge), and former Senior Editor for Five Rivers Publishing. As an academic, editor, reviewer, and organizer, Robert has been actively promoting Canadian SF for over forty years. He was a founding Director of NonCon, Context89, and SF Canada; and has served on the Boards of the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society, On Spec Magazine, Tesseract Books, and The Writers Guild of Alberta. In addition to dozens of conference papers, journal articles, book chapters, and a half dozen entries in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada , Robert has edited over 150 issues of various SF newsletters.