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).

HOW TO GET TO APOCALYPSE on the Locus Recommended List, Also New Publications!

Hello again to my neglected blog! It's been about two months since the release of How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, my collection of 23 dark science fiction stories from the past decade and a half. It's been getting some great reviews and mentions! Silvia Moreno-Garcia lists it as one of her favorite SF/F books of the year in The Washington Post:

Another favorite was How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, a strong collection by Erica L. Satifka, one of the brightest science fiction writers today who should be getting more attention.

(She also picks out Caroline Hardaker's Composite Creatures as her favorite SF novel of 2021, and after reading it myself I have to strongly agree that it's one of the best SF books I've read in ages. Particularly recommended if you like reading about climate collapse, housecats, or both.)

And on Tor.com, Jared Shurin name-drops it in both his best-of-2021 list and "Our Cyberpunk Year," where he writes:

These are the apocalypses of automation and redundancy; social stratification and malignant ignorance. Satifka has an incredible—unparalleled, even—ability to pack each story filled with technological concepts and imaginative conceits. It is excellent world-building, with every element strange and wondrous, but all perfectly plausible and naturally woven. It is a wave of new ideas, but never once feels like an onslaught, because the stories themselves are character-driven; about deeply empathetic people in these recognisable, if unsettling, worlds. These are stories that are not only immediately relevant, but will stand the test of time. Science fiction—cyberpunk, even—at its finest.

And over on the Locus Magazine site, reviewer Ian Mond also praises the collection, writing:

A common feature of Satifka’s work, which we see portrayed in “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse”, is the slow death of society, typically brought about by the rapacious appetite of capitalism (and sometimes alien invaders). [...] For all the despair and dystopia in Satifka’s fiction, there’s an acerbic thread of humour that runs through most of these stories. Several of them are even out-and-out hilarious.

Speaking of Locus, my collection also made the Locus Recommended List (first time I've ever been on it), so if you really liked it, then you can vote for it (reader votes determine the shortlist/winners). And of course, more reviews on any platform are always appreciated!

In non-collection news, I had a non-fiction piece come out in the anthology Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, out from PM Press at the tail end of last year. It's about (who else?) Philip K. Dick, and I take the position that Dick was perhaps not as personally far left as he's made out to be, but that the radicalism inherent in his works still resonates on both a left-wing and just a general human level. This is a gorgeous full-color book featuring essays on New Wave SF authors and the politics that inspired them (and that they inspired).

And in impending publication news, my short story "Twilight of the God-Makers" will be appearing in the Baen anthology Weird World War IV edited by Sean Patrick Hazlett (who also edited Weird World War III, which I am also in). It's an anthology of war stories that take place after the Big One ends, including authors such as Nick Mamatas, Martin L. Shoemaker, Laird Barron, and many others! My story is about what happens to the demented superhumans a united North American state created after they were no longer of use. I hope you check this book out too! Release date March 1, 2022. If you're a person who likes author interviews, I have a three-part interview series with the editor that can be accessed from his channel Through a Glass Darkly.

Oh, and last but certainly not least, we got a new kitten named Jack, who's modeling my contributor copy of Weird World War IV to the left here. But for more about him, you'll have to check Twitter.