2021 YEAR IN REVIEW
It was a very big year for me: In total I had nine appearances in professional speculative fiction magazines in 2021 -- one novella, two novelettes, four short stories, and two translations of Russian speculative fiction stories by Anastasia Bookreyeva. Here's the full list:
- in January my first SF novella, "A Rocket for Dimitrios" was the cover story for Asimov's.
- Also in January, Dark Matter published my short story "Evrim's Children" in its inaugural issue. It was great to be a part of the genre's expansion.
- In February, Clarkesworld published my first Russian to English translation, of Anastasia Bookreyeva's "Terra Rasa".
- In March, Analog published my short story "The Shadow of His Wings".
- In May, Asimov's published my novelette "Año Nuevo".
- Also in May, Clarkesworld published my novelette "Sarcophagus"
- In September, Clarkesworld published my short story "Yesterday's Wolf"
- In October, Samovar published my translation of Anastasia Bookreyeva's short story "Scissors"
- And in November, Asimov's published my short story "Muallim"
Below are short summaries of my original stories. Please do let me know if you are considering them for any reason, and need a digital copy of one of the stories not available online. I feel that stories appearing in print magazines have lately been overlooks, and since at least half of my output in word count is in print this year, I'm happy to do anything I can to correct that.
- "A Rocket for Dimitrios": In an alternate postwar Istanbul, American global dominance, born out of the technology discovered in a crashed flying saucer, is at stake. Sylvia Aldstatt, the only person able to use alien technology to read the memories of the dead, is called in to probe the memories of Dimitrios, a criminal and spy, to discover the location of a second flying saucer which may have crashed in the Black Sea, and keep the enemies of American hegemony from getting hold of it. But is defending a unilateral world the right thing to do?
- "Evrim's Children": On an interstellar seed ship horribly damaged by a collision with debris in space, an android -- the sole survivor of the crew -- fights for centuries to save the ship's mission and bring humanity back.
- "The Shadow of His Wings": A young boy serving a group of rich Qatari falcon hunters in the Kara Kum desert finds himself in the midst of a kidnapping -- not of a human being, but of the consciousness of a man downloaded into a falcon. And his own brother may be the ringleader.
- "Año Nuevo": A teenager and his mother visit a national park on the California coast where strange, immobile alien creatures like gigantic chunks of beach glass have taken up residence. Shortly after their visit, the creatures disappear -- or have they just changed their state, becoming something even more strange, and altering what it means to be human forever?
- "Sarcophagus": An explorer sent to an inhospitable planet battles the failing life support of their suit -- and races to escape the creature that is hunting them across the frozen wasteland. But the creature is not what it seems.
- "Yesterday's Wolf": A young girl talented in computer programming uses deadly, abandoned military technology to save herself and her family from the real wolves of the Kyrgyz mountains -- men seeking to exploit her and her family.
- "Muallim": An isolated village high in the mountains of Azerbaijan fights to keep their robot teacher after an evaluator arrives and finds that the robot is not performing the tasks it was originally designed to.