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.