New Story in Nature: Futures

I have a new story out in Nature: Futures this month-ish! Check out "Deus Est Machina," the story of a sentient spaceship with a world in her belly who has to contend with the curiosity of the troublesome organisms who may have twigged to the fact that their reality isn't what it seems. Here's an excerpt:

Ancient spacefaring humans had built the world-ships as temporary shelters after ruining every planet they’d attempted to colonize. But when it became clear that their new homes were not destined to be temporary, they’d descended into chaos, tearing apart their artificial universes rivet by rivet. Despite the fact that they were well cared for by the world-ships, and even loved in a way, humans chafed under their self-imposed ‘imprisonment’. So now the world-ships shield their organisms from the truth, keeping them dumb for the sake of all sentients involved.

This story appears almost a year after my last story in Nature, "Symphony of the Damned." As much as I love writing and publishing flash, I'm happy to say that I also have some full-length stories coming out this year. As always, Twitter is the best place to get the latest scoop on my writing, but I'll post it here as well for non-Twits.

In case you missed my Endeavour Awards livestream a few months ago, you're in luck! There's a podcast version available here, featuring a Q&A followed by a live reading of "After We Walked Away" (my take on an Omelas story, every writer gets one). Like the fiction, I have a few other podcasty things in the works, which I can hopefully post about soonish.

Lastly, just a reminder that if you've read my Endeavour Award-winning short fiction collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, I'd really appreciate it if you left a review (starring is fine) on Amazon and/or Goodreads. They help sales and give a little burst of dopamine, and isn't the latter what we're all looking for?

Endeavour Awards Livestream!

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As you probably heard if you read my Twitter, my Facebook, or even this very blog, my collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters won the 2021 Endeavour Award a few weeks ago! In commemoration, check out the livestream happening this Friday (April 28) over at the Endeavour Awards Facebook page. I'll answer questions about the collection and read a story. You should also be able to watch the livestream after it's over.

The details:

Date: Friday, April 28, 2023

Time: 4:00 pm Pacific / 7:00 pm Eastern

Place: Endeavour Awards FB page

See you there!

How to Get to Apocalypse is an Endeavour Award Winner!

I am very pleased to announce that my debut collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is the winner of the 2021 Endeavour Award for speculative Pacific Northwest fiction! It was announced at Norwescon last weekend. which was a real blast. I was and am so honored to receive this distinction, and I'm thankful the award coordinators, judges, my publisher Patrick Swenson for publishing the book in the first place, and my husband/editor Rob McMonigal for shining up every one of these stories. There'll be an interview posted soon on the Endeavour Award Facebook page, so watch for that!

The judges' comments were quite complimentary (I teared up a little listening to them), so I'm putting them here for posterity:

"We are delighted to help shine an eerie phantasmagorical glow of regard onto a book of such spiky originality as this. Satifka's How To Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a fractal triumph that works on every level, from individual sentences and stories to the splendidly counterintuitive jigsaw of the whole. Rather than forming a seamless sameness, they constitute a fully interlocking kaleidoscope of moods and modes. These 23 stories take a gorgeously broad view of the genre, jacking especially into the cyberpunk mainframe, while exploring 21st-century concerns in language that raises a shower of sparks on every page. One juror compared this book to classic collections by Avram Davidson and R.A. Lafferty, which is the same as saying it's basically incomparable; another juror summed up by saying, simply: ‘I'm very impressed.’ We also must honor the chutzpah of a book that identifies all the stories t
herein as disastrous."​ — Catherine Asaro, Andy Duncan, & Fran Wilde

If you haven't yet picked up a copy of Apocalypse, you can get it at Amazon, Books2Read, or the Fairwood Press site itself. Or ask your local library to order it! And if you have a moment to drop a review (Amazon and Goodreads especially, but anything's cool) then it would really be appreciated.

And now... I definitely need to write more stories!

Norwescon 2023!

I'll be at the 45th annual Norwescon in SeaTac, WA from April 6-9! It'll be my first time at Norwescon since the global unpleasantness, and my first time paneling. In case you didn't remember, my collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is up for a delayed Endeavour Award this year, which is of course ridiculously exciting. (I'll be reading part of one of the collection's two original stories on Saturday.)

Here are the panels I'll be on:

Thursday

Into the Metaverse

2:00pm - 3:00pm @ Cascade 11

Dr. Sean Robinson (M), Kimberly Unger, Wm Salt Hale, Erica L. Satifka

Reluctant Heroes

4:00pm - 5:00pm @ Cascade 10

Erica L. Satifka (M), Shiv Ramdas, Brenda Carre, Brianna Tibbetts

Friday

Systems of Governance in SFF

11:00am - 12:00pm @ Cascade 7 & 8

Brenda Cooper (M), Erica L. Satifka, Crystal Lloyd, Tracy Furutani

Rising Oceans, Blurring Genres

4:00pm - 5:00pm @ Cascade 11

Brenda Cooper (M), Erica L. Satifka, Scott James Magner

Language in Science Fiction

6:00pm - 7:00pm @ Cascade 12

David D. Levine (M), Erica L. Satifka, Shweta Adhyam, Joseph Malik, Nisi Shawl

Saturday

Reading: Erica L. Satifka

11:00am - 11:30am @ Cascade 3

Erica L. Satifka (M)

Endeavour Awards

4:00pm - 5:00pm @ Cascade 12

Jim Kling (M), Marilyn Holt, Erica L. Satifka

Sunday

Reboot Your Myth

10:00am - 11:00am @ Evergreen 3 & 4

J Tullos Hennig (M), Ellis Bray, Benjamin Gorman, Erica L. Satifka

Vacations in Space

11:00am - 12:00pm @ Cascade 10

David D. Levine (M), Dan Dubrick, Greg Dubos, Erica L. Satifka

HOW TO GET TO APOCALYPSE Is an Endeavour Award Finalist!!! (+ other news)

I am thrilled to announce that my collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a finalist for the Endeavour Award! Founded in 1999 to honor science fiction writers of the Pacific Northwest, previous winners include Ursula LeGuin, Robin Hobb, and Greg Bear. I couldn't be happier about this, and I'm looking forward to attending this year's Norwescon, Congrats to the other nominees (full list on Facebook) and I hope to reconnect with some people at the con! Simultaneous gentle and hostile reminder that if you enjoyed How to Get to Apocalypse, or even if you didn't, it could use a few more reviews and ratings on Amazon and/or Goodreads if you have a moment.

In other writing news, I've sold my SF short story "Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Slug Monsters" to Apex Magazine! Like many people, I didn't have such a productive pandemic, and despite an influx of free time I mostly stopped writing from March 2020 to mid-2022. "Papas" is one of the few stories to come out of this dark era, and despite the darkness of said era and the general darkness of my writing in general, this is probably one of my more optimistic stories. Although considering that it starts with a teenager shopping for a new body after her first one was destroyed by the harsh environment of her Titan mining colony the day she was born, my idea of "optimistic" may not be universal. Look for it in 2022, along with...

Another sale to the Weird World War III series from Baen! "Tunnel Vision," a collaboration with my husband and in-house editor Rob McMonigal, will appear in the forthcoming anthology Weird World War III: China. When a strange emissary from a parallel dimension shows up at a US military base, looking for allies and humanitarian aid after China depleted his world of resources, the officers in charge of the operation have a difference of opinion about how victimized these parallel-worlders actually are. But wait, there's more...

My story "Woke Up New," a quiet tale of a medical anomaly who gets a surprise visit from an astronaut-in-training, will appear in Kaleidotrope! This will be my second appearance in Kaleidotrope (after 2020's "Sasquatch Summer." These two are probably my most "Pacific Northwesty" stories, and I'm grateful to Kaleidotrope for giving them a home.

And that's it, I think! I'll try to update this blog when these stories come out, but as always you can find the most up-to-date Satifka writing news/shitposts on Twitter, the only social media site I can stand (and I can't even stand it all that much these days, heh).