Attend the first annual Endeavour Writers Conference!

Join local Pacific Northwest writers and fans at the first ever Endeavour Writers Conference!

For many years, the Endeavour Awards have (mostly) been held at OryCon. But since OryCon is no more (for now), a new home for the award had to be found, and the answer is a dedicated conference celebrating the best of Pacific Northwest speculative fiction.

As you may remember from when I was updating this blog more regularly (readers of my FB/Twitter know why it's lapsed, heh), my collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters won the 2021 Endeavour Award back in 2023 (#justcovidthings). So I definitely have a lot of love for this award and I'm very excited to see how this new one day conference works out. Here are the details if you want to join us, and you should:

Time/Date: Saturday, October 10, 2026 @ 8:00 AM

Location: Milwaukie-Waluga Masonic Lodge, 10636 SE Main Street, Milwaukie, OR 97222

For more information on the conference as it develops, follow the Endeavour Writers Conference Facebook page or sign up for the newsletter at their website. This year's finalists are:

The Antidote by Karen Russell

Blind Date with a Werewolf by Patricia Briggs

Hole in the Sky by Daniel H. Wilson

Making Amends by Nisi Shawl

When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory

Congratulations to the finalists, and see you at the conference!

New Story: "Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Slug Monsters" at Apex Magazine!

I have a new story out! Well, it's been out for a week, but I'm just getting around to talking about it on my long-neglected, little-visited website now. (Do people still read these things?) It's called "Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Slug Monsters," and the premise is... basically exactly what it sounds like. Here's a teaser:

"And I can pick out anything I want?" As Ruth pages through the look book with her extensors, a squeal rises from whatever remains of her flesh mouth. With a start, Jerome Parker realizes he hasn't seen one organic part of his daughter in years.

"Happy birthday, sweetie." Privately, he's steered the salesman toward budget options. Business at the mine isn't what it used to be. They'll have to stay within the government stipend for a first-time Skyn. Hell, Jerome still wears his first one, though he pays to age it up every few years.

On the salesman's tablet, Ruth skims through the collection of models. With growing irritation, Jerome watches her reject Skyn after Skyn. She lingers for a half-second on a picture of a pretty ebony-colored girl with bright red hair, then flips all the way to the back of the catalog. The expensive part.

A story of teens, fitting in, and the rationale behind looking human (or not) on an alien world, "Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Slug Monsters" is my first long story in almost two years, and I hope it's worth the wait! The story won't be on the Apex Magaine site for another month, but you can read it now by purchasing the issue here. The issue also contains thousands of words of fiction by J.S. Breukelaar, E. Catherine Tobler, Damien Angelica Walters, and many others. I've read about half of it so far and can confirm it's dynamite. You can also subscribe to a full year of Apex here.

Speaking of longer stories, while it won't be out officially until January 1, you can get an eARC of Weird World War: China now from the Baen Books site, which includes my story "Tunnel Vision"! This is a story co-written with my editor/husband Rob McMonigal, the second of (possibly?) more. I'll write more about the story once the anthology is officially released, but let's just say that if stories about evil interdimensional shifters are up your alley, you'll probably want to get a copy of this.

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).

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.

Apocalypse... Now!

It's release day!!! How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, my first collection, is now available in nearly every online store you can name, which are all helpfully collected on this page. Copies ordered through Fairwood Press are already on their way to readers. You can also ask your local bookstore or library to order it, and I hope you do because libraries are great!

Having a short fiction collection has been a dream of mine for a long time. While I've had two longer things published (Stay Crazy and Busted Synapses, please buy/read/review those as well kthx), short stories are where I started and honestly where I feel most at home, inasmuch as I feel at home with anything related to writing lately. I really think these stories are the best thing I've ever done, and I hope some other people like it too.

But wait, there's more: I'll be at OryCon 42 this coming weekend (November 12-14, 2021), along with Patrick Swenson of Fairwood Press (who, yes, will have copies of my collection and many other great books!). Here's where I'll be if you want to come say hi:

 
Writing Short Fiction
Friday, November 12, 2021, 4:00 PM, Jantzen Room
A detailed look into the unique craft of creating original worlds in fantasy, sci-fi, and the paranormal. Whenever a writer begins a story, their goal is to take the reader to places they’ve never been before. What are some essential questions one needs to ask themselves about their world? Learn the various techniques to make worlds as original as possible. We will also discuss how to research, plot, and develop a setting.

Worldbuilding 101
Friday, November 12, 2021, 5:00 PM, White Stag Room

A detailed look into the unique craft of creating original worlds in fantasy, sci-fi, and the paranormal. Whenever a writer begins a story, their goal is to take the reader to places they’ve never been before. What are some essential questions one needs to ask themselves about their world? Learn the various techniques to make worlds as original as possible. We will also discuss how to research, plot, and develop a setting.

Be a Writer? Yes, You Can!
Friday, November 12, 2021, 7:00 PM, White Stag Room
If you've been dreaming of writing fiction, but you've struggled to finish your first project--or worse, gotten crushed by rejections!--this is the panel for you. Learn from experienced writers how to get going, keep going, and believe in yourself.

Autograph Session
Saturday, November 13, 2021, 1:00 PM, Art Show Foyer

All Planets Are Not Monocultural
Saturday, November 13, 2021, 6:00 PM, Pendleton Room
We get it, lazy writers and movie makers give you an entire ice planet that is somehow inhabitable. Or a jungle that goes on forever. Earth is not a mono-culture, why should your SF worlds be? We'll talk geography and how the terrain will impact your politics and biology for your aliens.

Reading
Sunday, November 14, 2021, 11:00 AM, Overton Room

Hope to see you there!

HOW TO GET TO APOCALYPSE AND OTHER DISASTERS Blurbs, Giveaway, and More!

My debut collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters comes out in a month! And to celebrate, I'm giving away at least one and possibly two paper ARCs. Just fill out this survey with your contact information and your favorite fictional apocalypse. Due to international shipping costs and the fact that the last few things I sent overseas I can't ship a print ARC out of the United States, but I can send an eARC if you win (or hell, just if you ask nicely).

In the meantime, you can still pre-order H2G2A&OD directly from Fairwood Press, as well as at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books2Read (digital), and my local bookstore Powell's! If you use Goodreads, you can add it to your to-read list, or post a review if you have an eARC. And if you're a reviewer who's interested in getting an eARC, email me at satifka at gmail dot com!

Here's some more stuff that people have been saying about my collection with the very long title:

"The stories in Satifka's debut collection are inventive and gritty, bleak and satirical, hilarious and horrifying. Her work is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick at his best in revealing the struggles and resilience of everyday people caught up in the machinery of the future."

— Tim Pratt, author of Prison of Sleep and the Axiom series 

"Satifka is one of the most exciting writers around and still sadly under the radar. Her mordant stories grapple with technology and society in a way that brings to mind the cyberpunk greats. The tales in her first collection range from a grim story of dead children turned into flesh puppets for a TV show to an incredibly effective response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

— Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of Mexican Gothic

"Satifka (Busted Synapses) presents 23 strange and captivating stories about the end of the world. None of these endings call for rains of fire and brimstone. Instead, these apocalypses are most often brought about by extraterrestrials, and the tales explore a wide variety of human-alien relationships . . . displaying wide-ranging creativity. Fans of speculative fiction are sure to be pleased."

— Publishers Weekly

 

And while I'm not sure of my schedule yet, I'm definitely going to be at OryCon 42 the weekend after my book release, and there'll be copies there! So lots of ways to get a copy of H2G2A&OD in the very near future.

Coming Soon-ish: HOW TO GET TO APOCALYPSE AND OTHER DISASTERS (My First Collection!)

Today is my book conception day! How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, my first collection, will be released in November 2021 by Fairwood Press! Here's the description from the website:

The apocalypse can take many forms. Possibly our end will come by way of an addictive cell phone game that manipulates its users into a crowd-sourced mass murder. Or perhaps our downfall involves aliens drugging us into bliss and then taking it away. Maybe it'll be technological redundancy that leaves loved ones without a purpose, or corporations replacing the natural world with creatures more amenable to market pressure.

All these apocalypses and many more can be found in Erica L. Satifka's debut collection, which gathers together twenty-three short stories from the past decade, including from Clarkesworld,,Lightspeed, Interzone, and The Dark.

While I've published one and a half novels, my first writing love and main focus has always been short stories and it's been my forever dream to have a collection. And Fairwood Press was at the top of my dream publisher list, having put out many of my favorite collections over the past decade. So needless to say, I'm thrilled in ways mere pixels can't express.

So what's inside? HTGTAAOD contains twenty-one of my previously published stories from such venues as Interzone, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Shimmer, as well as two or three original stories, one of which will be set in the Busted Synapses universe.

You can/should pre-order How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters on the Fairwood Press site. If you're a reviewer and want to get an advance review copy, please also get in touch! I am really excited about this collection, and I hope that you will be too!

Story Notes: "Where You Lead, I Will Follow: An Oral History of the Denver Incident"

Hello there! It's time for another installment of my "story notes" series, which comes around whenever one of my short stories gets published. Today's discussion/commercial is for the story "Where You Lead, I Will Follow: An Oral History of the Denver Incident," published October 2020 in the Baen Books anthology 

Weird World War III, edited by Sean Patrick Hazlett.

In early 2019 I decided to join everyone else in 2016 and start getting into Pokemon Go. And as I do with all video games, I'm talking obsessive interest for like five months until it became something to check on my phone once a day. But during those months my mind turned, as it so often does, to figuring out how the thing I'm obsessed with could potentially be used to destroy the world.

If you don't know what Pokemon Go is, it's an augmented reality games played on your cell phone where you're shown a mini-map of your surroundings with superimposed Pokemon, stops, and gyms. The similar game in my own story, Follow the Leader, is the same idea with a paranoid twist: The game sometimes asks you to interact with your real-world surroundings in order to complete its "Instructions," while your phone's camera records your actions for posterity. What kinds of things were included in these "Instructions"? Oh, they're innocuous things like moving a post-it note or stealing someone's pencil or going into the basement of your apartment building. A lot of actions that don't seem like anything at all, until it's too late.

As the title implies, this is an oral history, told by ten characters each with their own special connection to Follow the Leader and the ensuing catastrophe. This is among the more experimental stories I've written, but it came from necessity: No matter how many "zero drafts" I did I couldn't find a way to get across the scope and reach of the fictional game without at a minimum three characters, and at that point I figured I might as well round up to ten.

It's not a spoiler to say that the eventual result of all these small-scale changes is that Washington, DC was vaporized in a nuclear explosion, as this is revealed on the very first page. And since this is an anthology of alternative Cold War stories, the putative enemy is also not in doubt. But could the Russians really be behind such a complex scheme? Get your own copy of Weird World War III to find out! (And check out the Tangent review if you have a moment, for short reviews of the stories in the rest of the anthology.)

My Obligatory 2020 Awards Eligibility Post

It's one of the most awkward times of the year for writers: the month-long flurry where we all pick our favorite thing we had published this year and why we'd be ever so pleased if you'd consider it for things of an award-ish nature. My one big publication this year, to nobody's great surprise, is my novella Busted Synapses, published by Broken Eye Books in November 2020.

Some reviews/blurbs:

"Johnny Mnemonic goes Millennial. Cyberpunk is not dead, and Erica Satifka is its queen.” -- Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of Mexican Gothic

"Satifka effortlessly packs a full adventure into a limited page count. Readers will be hooked." -- Publishers Weekly

"Busted Synapses grabs that familiar, thoroughly depressing reality outside the window by the sack and gives it a goodly twist, just like proper science-fiction should." -- Lawrence Burton, Pamphlets of Destiny

I won't lie: Being nominate for any one of the many extent SF/F awards would make me extremely happy on a personal level for all the reasons you'd expect. But I also want to get more eyes on Busted Synapses because it's a look at the kind of dystopia the 2020s might turn out to be: extreme income inequality, hyper-gentrification, and a descent into technological neo-feudalism. Busted Synapses isn't the only book out there tackling these themes, but it's the one I wrote and I'm pretty damn proud of it.

Anyway, if you'd like to get a review copy of my novella for possible nomination purposes, you can email me at satifka at gmail dot com or DM me on Twitter (my DMs are always open, baby).

In addition to Busted Synapses, I published two original short stories this year, "Where You Lead, I Will Follow: An Oral History of the Denver Incident" in Weird World War III (Baen Books), and "Sasquatch Summer" in Kaleidotrope. The latter is available online for free, and I can send you a copy of the former if you want too.

BUSTED SYNAPSES: Still Out

Hello again, after a surprisingly short (for me) period of time! I'm not sure if anyone reads this blog, or blogs in general, but if you've gotten this far you might as well read the rest of the post.

In news that is not related to Busted Synapses, two anthologies came out with stories of mine in them! One original, one reprint. The original is "Where You Lead, I Will Follow: An Oral History of the Denver Incident" in the Baen Books anthology Weird World War III, edited by Sean Patrick Hazlett. I'll be writing a full post about it later (hopefully after another surprisingly short period of time), but basically it's the tale of how Pokemon Go destroyed the world. The anthology also includes many other stories of a US-Soviet war that never was from writers like John Langan, Martin L. Shoemaker, Nick Mamatas, Alex Shvartsman, Eric James Stone, and many others. Read more about the anthology and get your own copy at the Baen site.

Also out this month (along with Busted Synapses, which I'm getting to) is Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction (Dover Publications), edited by Nick Mamatas. This one includes my Lovecraft/Cordwainer Smith mash-up "You Will Never Be the Same," first published way back in 2013. Also includes stories by Laird Barron, Molly Tanzer, Victor LaValle, and others. Get a copy at Books, Inc., or wherever else fine books are sold.

Now for the part where I talk about Busted Synapses! It's been out for three weeks now, and while I haven't collected many reviews yet (gee, it's like it came out on Election Day or something), the ones I've gotten have been fantastic, both in terms of being positive about the book and also making me feel personally good as hell. Over at Pamphlets of Destiny, Lawrence Burton says "Busted Synapses grabs that familiar, thoroughly depressing reality outside the window by the sack and gives it a goodly twist, just like proper science-fiction should. The call centers, screen addiction, and human populace reduced to economic resource will be known to most of us. The rest is extrapolated from where we are right now, but not by a whole lot, and not enough to leave us cosily reflecting on how at least things aren't yet this bad because they sort of are but for the small print."

And at Parsecs & Parchment, JonBob writes "Busted Synapses is the shot in the arm the genre needs. It has that gritty techno-pessimism that’s at the heart of cyberpunk, and it doesn’t offer a rosy picture of the future or indeed offer any solutions, but it has done what modern cyberpunk needs to do in order to have a future, and that’s start critiquing the corporatism of our own society which, in many ways, is manifesting the very dystopia the progenitors of the genre warned us about decades ago." (You can also read my interview with JonBob at P&P!)

Finally, on the off chance you're not completely content-ed out, you can read my Big Idea essay at John Scalzi's blog on rural cyberpunk: what it is, where it's going, why I made it up. And last but certainly not least, check out my episode of Podside Picnic, where I talk a little about Busted Synapses but mostly about short stories (most of which you can read for free!)

And that's it for now! If you'd like a review copy of Busted Synapses, please email me at satifka at gmail dot com. And if you've already read it, please take a moment to drop a short review (even star-only reviews are fine) at Amazon or Goodreads; they really do help both with sales and also with the appeasement of my neurotic existentialism.

BUSTED SYNAPSES Has Been Released (for a week)

One week ago, while one of the many storylines of this strangest of years reached its climax, my novella Busted Synapses made its debut. If you're like most people in the twenty-first century, you've already seen my frequent posts about Busted Synapses on Facebook, Twitter, my mailing list, that courier pigeon outside your window, etc. And now you're reading about it here too!

Eternal thanks to Scott Gable at Broken Eye Books for bringing this book and its amazing cover to life. This is a strange little book set in a world I hope to return to again, described by one person on Twitter as Hillbilly Elegy meets cyberpunk. Hey, I'll take it. (And for some background on the setting and why I chose to write a "rural cyberpunk," check out my Big Idea essay.)

Here's a couple reviews I've received so far:

"Satifka effortlessly packs a full adventure into a limited page count. Readers will be hooked." --Publishers Weekly

"A superb example of dystopian, cyberpunk f lash fiction that echoes William Gibson’s Neuromancer, this volume may be slim but it packs a punch." --Library Journal

You can pick up Busted Synapses on Amazon (including Kindle), Powell's, or the Broken Eye Books website. You can also request it at your local library, even if you did buy it elsewhere. That would be really awesome, actually.

Now, onward, into our terrible future!

Two Weeks Until BUSTED SYNAPSES!!!

November 3, 2020 is almost upon us, which marks a momentous event of great importance to everyone: The release of my rural cyberpunk novella Busted Synapses! The pre-orders have been open for some time now and will let you get a copy early, and there's also links to it on Powell's and Amazon. Here's what some people are saying about it:

"Satifka effortlessly packs a full adventure into a limited page count. Readers will be hooked." --Publisher's Weekly "Johnny Mnemonic goes Millennial. Cyberpunk is not dead, and Erica Satifka is its queen.” --Silvia Moreno Garcia, Mexican Gothic

"Busted Synapses is the cyberpunk cry of Generation Screwed—a shrewd look at transhumanism through the lens of insurmountable debt and a thoroughly dehumanized workforce. A stunning novella from a unique voice in the literary class war." --Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

"What constitutes a human life? Erica Satifka asks that monster of a question in Busted Synapses, and the answers offered aren’t for the faint. With poignant sensitivity and science-fictional rigor, Satifka proves herself an uncanny
chronicler of the huan—and inhuman—condition.” --Jason Heller, Strange Stars

So what's Busted Synapses about? Like the Publisher's Weekly review said, there's a lot going on here. You can read a little about the things that inspired the novella in my piece on the Speculative Chic blog, but basically I wanted to write a story in a genre known for a particular kind of grungy, industrial, urban setting and instead place it in the kind of town that the great march to the future leaves behind, a town like Wheeling, West Virginia. In the world of Busted Synapses. the major cities are run by the Solfind Corporation, which has showed up in a handful of my published stories (and yes, they all interconnect). But these high-tech enclaves aren't for regular people, an injustice that call center employee Jess Novotny painfully learns when she's priced out of the newly bought "island city" of Pittsburgh. Into this despair-ridden world steps Alicia, one of the androids who's succeeded in making humans like Jess redundant, but who wants nothing more than to blend in with the denizens of Wheeling, including small-time drug dealer Dale Carter.

And that's just the first couple of chapters!

Busted Synapses also has a Goodreads page, so if you're planning to read it please pop on over to add it
to your list. While Busted Synapses tells a complete story, I have many ideas for future stories and novels set in this world, and there's a much better chance of that happening if this book does well. So pick up 2020's best rural cyberpunk novella set in West Virginia, before reality catches up to it completely.

Story Notes: "Sasquatch Summer"

First things first: Yes, after four long years I have another book coming out. I'll be making another post about it soon, but just in case that future post as delayed as this one I should mention that it's cyberpunk set in rural West Virginia, you can pre-order it now, and the cover is amazing. Oh, and the title is Busted Synapses, a reference to the side effects of the drugs used in the book, because you can't have cyberpunk without drugs. I'll be talking about it anywhere I can (which unfortunately doesn't include any bookstores or conventions), including here, but if you liked my previous book Stay Crazy I'd be real stoked if you pre-order this one too.

But the novella isn't the only thing that's going down. I'm still writing short stories from time to time, and earlier this month one of those stories was published! Not getting around to writing up story notes until now is pretty inexcusable, but call it a combination of 2020, laziness, and believing the story pretty much speaks for itself.

"Sasquatch Summer" is my first attempt at writing historical fiction. Set in turn-of-the-last-century Oregon, it centers on a small town torn apart by the fight between a small-time timber industrialist, a trainload of New York City anarchists, and the gentle socialist sasquatches that lived (and as far as I know still live) inside Mount Hood. The narrator is Helen, a plucky girl who stumbles into this messy political situation when her brother is kidnapped by sasquatches. Here's an excerpt:

That was the summer the sasquatches came down from Mount Hood and put Papa out of a job. 

It wasn’t their fault, not really. Sasquatches don’t need tools to work. When a sasquatch wants to tear down a tree, he doesn’t use an axe. He grips each side with his leathery hands and just pulls until the earth decides to let that tree go. When a tree falls on a sasquatch, the company doesn’t have to pay his family any compensation like they did to Jimmy’s family. That creature just rolls out from under the tree and keeps on walking. 

Of course, most folks didn’t see it like that.

Automation has arrived in the Oregon wilderness, courtesy of cryptids who are too intelligent to understand money. To the rescue of both the exploited sasquatches and the dispossessed townsfolk come a motley gang of proto-feminist city folk who seek to form a sasquatch union, but the cultural disconnect between the brash newcomers and the unemployed townies seems like it may do more harm than good for everyone. In the end, the sasquatches need to speak for themselves, but how can a creature that doesn't talk have a voice?

Though written as a several-years-after-the-fact reaction to Occupy Wall Street, this story is really damn 2020. Because I want you to actually read the story, I won't go into the resolution, and will only say that it emphasizes the importance of helping communities on their own terms, and that it's pretty optimistic for one of my stories. You can read it right now at Kaleidotrope, one of the best smaller online magazines out there, and there are many other great stories in this issue. So go read it!

Story Notes: "Trial and Terror" (psst... A PUNK ROCK FUTURE comes out today!)

Somehow, the van makes it most of the way through Iowa. Then it dies all at once, spectacularly, farting out its reserve of gas like an old man on taco night in the run-down nursing home his good-for-nothing children stuck him in after he drove the family sedan into a telephone pole. 

Most of those things don't exist anymore. No nursing homes. Only a few sedans. And don't get me started on the lack of taco nights.

Another two months, another story post! My newest one is the 6000ish-word "Trial and Terror," which is my first published sequel.

When the editor of A Punk Rock Future solicited a story from me for the anthology, he specifically mentioned my Interzone story "The Big So-So" (also in audio at Escape Pod) as a story that would fit the theme. And that was when I realized that I wasn't quite done with these characters or their world of permanent ennui due to the sudden withdrawal of alien love drugs. So what did I do? I, uh, wrote a 40,000-word novella with these characters.

I am not a fast writer, nor do I really like writing or pretty much anything about the process other than the brief shot of dopamine when I see my name in a table of contents. However, I finished this novella in about three months, with over half the work squeezed into a two-week span, and I enjoyed nearly every minute of it. The story, naturally, was far too long for a short fiction anthology, so I wrote another story (the aforementioned "Trial and Terror") that chronologically takes place after the novella, which means that this is not just a sequel but the sequel to a sequel, although all of the stories can be read separately from one another and make total sense.

So, anyway! "Trial and Terror" is, as its name implies, a courtroom tale. As in all the Magic Band stories (so named due to featuring a band that is magical, because I bleed creativity from my very pores), your unreliable narrator is Syl, who's not unreliable in the "lies about murdering people" way but instead in the "has spaced five times on picking you up at the airport, will absolutely flake again" way. Not that there are airports in this acktshually decimated world. Unfortunately for them, the band encounters one of the few towns that still clings to something like law and order, and it's up to Syl to get her friend/vocalist Frank's head out of a noose. And maybe there's some romance in the mix? (There is!)

Like I said before, this story (and everything featuring these characters) was insanely fun to write and also funny, at least to me. Maybe you'll laugh too? To find out, buy A Punk Rock Future at Powell's, Amazon, or anywhere else books are sold. There's 25 other "punkpunk" stories in this anthology, including rocking tales from Spencer Ellsworth, Sarah Pinsker, Marie Vibbert, Wendy Nikel, and many more.

(And that novella? Well, I'm still tinkering away at the edits, and whether it's published by someone else or self-published it won't be out until 2021 at the very earliest. In the meantime, I'm definitely open to writing more stuff in this milieu that I love. Big hint.)

Story Notes: "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse?" (+ Bonus Flash!)

After over a year of not having any stories published at all, suddenly I had two of them come out in the same month. That's how these things happen sometimes! The first and shorter of these is the self-explanatory "You Have Contracted a Deadly Song Virus," which you can read for free at Daily Science Fiction. It's my tenth story there, and probably my most horrific one.

If you like your stories to take longer than five minutes to read, pick up Interzone #282, which includes my short story "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse?" illustrated by Vincent Sammy. (Aside: This is my third story with a Sammy illustration, and damn if he doesn't do some insanely incredible work.) A very short excerpt:

A dozen little dead kids sit on the Styrofoam steps outside the only apartment building on Gumdrop Road. They're listening to the newspaper seller. He's talking to them about time.

As is obvious from the title of the story, Gumdrop Road isn't a real place. Like the educational program/media empire that it's based on, it's a television show watched by the last remnants of a dying world that's been annihilated by a virus that attacks the reproductive system. In a world where there's nothing new -- because what's the point? -- people escape into a reboot of childhood comfort viewing. But how do you get child actors when nobody can be born? Well, you read the excerpt.

This spun off from the same flash-writing challenge that spawned "Song Virus," although it quickly expanded beyond flash length. What I'd intended to be a cynical commentary on reboot mania became something much more, as I thought about how this form of cultural recycling might be a reaction to the apocalyptic feel of our times. If you and everyone you love is going to die anyway, why not go with what's safe? Nobody cares about innovation when the world is coming to a close, especially not in the arts. And if it takes digging up a bunch of dead children to lend your comfort viewing the proper amount of verisimilitude, that's not really so bad, is it? It's the end, after all.

Yeah, real cheery story I wrote here.

Anyway, you can get a copy of Interzone #282 from the TTA Press site, on Amazon, or in your classier local bookstores. I have at least one more story coming out by the end of the year, which means I'll be posting on this blog at least one more time. Smell you later.