Tesseracts 8, Tesseract Press

This story appears in my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and is licensed for downloading under a Creative Commons license. Download it here

Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

This story is a sequel, of sorts, to Shadow of the Mothaship, which Kim Mohan published in Amazing Stories.

I got the idea for this while snorkeling in the Bay of Pigs, on the south coast of Cuba. I’d just gotten out of the water and picked up E.L. Doctorow’s brilliant Book of Daniel, when the entire story smacked me between the eyes. Once I returned, I sweated blood for a month, cranking out the 10,000 words — I had this tremendous vision of the effect I was trying to capture, but implementing it was trickier than it appeared. I finished it on a Sunday afternoon, read it through twice, and decided it was the best thing I’d ever written. I’ve just re-read it, prepatory to emailing the manuscript to Tesseract Books, and I still think it’s brilliant.
more

On Spec

Like Craphound, Visit the Sins and Shadow of the Mothaship, I wrote this story at Gipsycon, the post-Clarion summer workshop I attend every year. There’s another Clarion connection: the title for this story was conceived of while at the Clarion 30th anniversary reunion, as I sat in the Owen Hall courtyard with a gang of other Clarion grads and talked about the memories the place brought back, discussing the possibility that we were being bombarded with “recollectons,” the fundamental units of memory.
more