This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007

Baen’s Universe, August 2006
The Rake, December 2006

Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth“>Full cast radio drama, QN Podcast

French fan-translation, courtesy of Zen le Renard (Text, HTML)

Spanish tranlsation (Axxon)

Italian Translation (Fantascienze, Dec 2007)

I started writing When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth on July 6th, 2005, while teaching Clarion. The next day, the London Underground and busses were bombed, including the bus I rode to work every morning (I was in Michigan, teaching Clarion, thankfully). These kinds of coincidences can be spooky when you’re a writer. I ended up putting the story away for some months.

When I returned to it, I was fired anew with the story of Felix and Van and their vainglorious struggle to keep the servers online as the world went offline. Once created, apocalyptic anxiety can’t be destroyed — the 1980s fear of nuclear annihilation I grew up with surfaces anew with each theoretical disaster: Y2K, climate change, und so weiter. There’s something primal about a story of the Earth’s impending doom.

I was a sysadmin at an earlier stage in my career and I have infinite respect for the field: sysadmins are the secret masters of the universe, and they keep your life running.

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This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007

Flurb Magazine, August 2006

Podcast: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

This story came to me while I was 20 meters down the reef-wall in the Coral Sea, off the coast of northern Australia. I think a turtle was involved.

The good ship “Spirit of Freedom” is the model for the “Free Spirit,” the ship in this tale. As far as I know, neither it nor its ship’s boats are sentient.

If I return to this theme, it will be with a story about uplifted cheese sandwiches, called “I, Rarebit.”

“I, Row-Boat” is a riff on my Hugo-nominated story I, Robot, and it concerns the theological wars between an Asimov-cultist AI boat and an uplifted coral-reef.

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Winner, 2008 Locus Award for Best Novella

This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007

Elsi (Russian translation), Summer 2006
The Infinite Matrix, January 2007
Comic book in Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now, June 2008

Podcast, Subterranean Press, read by Mary Robinette Kowal, June 2008
Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Listeners to my podcast heard me read this story, After the Siege, as it was written, shortly after returning home from a family trip to St Petersburg. My grandmother was born there, back when it was Leningrad, and she lived through the Siege of Leningrad as a little girl. She’d never talked to us about those years, but then, walking through Petersburg, she opened up and the stories came pouring out, stories that scared and appalled me. After the Siege is a science fictional re-telling of those stories, with much artistic license.

I gave first publication rights to this story to Esli, the Russian sf magazine that had published some of my stories in translation before. In return, Elsi has given me the Russian text to release under a Creative Commons license. The first English publication will come shortly in the online magazine The Infinite Matrix, which published my story I, Robot and other pieces.
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