StarShipSofa Stories: Volume 3

StarShipSofa, the awesome audio magazine run by Tony C. Smith, has released its third fiction anthology, StarShipSofa Stories: Volume 3. It includes the first print appearance of my story, “In Pacmandu”, first published online at Futurismic. There are e-book, paperback and hardcover editions available, as well as a super-limited signed edition with some bonus material.

Fiction Writers

1. “Electric Ladyland” by Matthew Sanborn Smith (Illustrated by Daniel Tozer)
2. “That Blissful Height” by Gregory Frost (Illustrated by Simon Watkins)
3. “Feedback” by Joe Haldeman (Illustrated by Jack Calverley)
4. “In The Harsh Glow of Its Incandescent Beauty” by Mercurio D. Rivera (Illustrated by Timothy Booth)
5. “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese” by Nicola Griffith (Illustrated by Jerel Dye)
6. “Nimbus” by Peter Watts (Illustrated by Evan Forsch)
7. “Luck” by James Patrick Kelly (Illustrated by Patrick McEvoy)
8. “Where Virtue Lives” by Saladin Ahmed (Illustrated by Ben Greene)
9. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time” by Catherynne M. Valente (Illustrated by Mike Dubisch)
10. “The Occurrence at Slocombe Priory” by Paul Cornell (Illustrated by Thomas Crielly)
11. “Sunsets and Hamburgers by Gareth L. Powell (Illustrated by Bradley W. Schenck)
12. “Martyrs of The Upshot Knothole” by James Morrow (Illustrated by Brian Thomas Woods)
13. “Newts” by Kevin J. Anderson (Illustrated by Richard Case)
14. “Cold Reading” by Michael Swanwick (Illustrated by Peter Snejbjerg)
15. “Drink For The Thirst To Come” by Lawrence Santoro (Illustrated by Daniele Serra)
16. “In Pacmandu” by Lavie Tidhar (Illustrated by Graeme Neil Reid)
17. “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders” by Aliette de Bodard (Illustrated by Mark Zug)
18. “World Without End, Amen” by Allen Steele (Illustrated by Brent Holmes)
19. “The Happiest Dead Boy In The World” by Tad Williams (Illustrated by Ben Wootten)
20. “Nothing Ever Happens In Rock City” by Jack McDevitt (Illustrated by Dave Krummenacher)
21. “Halfway People” by Karen Joy Fowler (Illustrated by Patrick McEvoy)
22. “Friction” by Will McIntosh (Illustrated by Jouni Koponen)
23. “Just A Couple of Subversive Alien Warmongers Floating All Alone in the Night” by Adam Troy Castro (Illustrated by Doug Holverson)
24. “News From 2025″ by David Brin (Illustrated by Bradley W. Schench)

Fact Writers

1. Joy of The Flicks by Dennis M. Lane
2. Top Ten “Must Read” Time Travel Works by Amy H. Sturgis
3. Comics: what have they done for Us lately? by Frederic Himebaugh
4. Science Fiction Through The Looking Glass: the Ape, the Alien and the Android by Morgan Saletta (Illustrated by Timothy Booth)

The Hungarian Invasion!

New Hungarian web magazine SF Mag has just gone live, and it includes my first Hungarian translation! “Spider’s Moon” (which you can read in English over at Futurismic) - A Pók holdja – is now online, as well as an interview with me, in both Hungarian and English.

SFmag: One of your stories, “Transylvania Mission” has Hungarian references. Where did the idea come from and did you have help with the Hungarian words?

Lavie Tidhar: Well, my family is Hungarian, in fact – my grandparents come from Transylvania, and I grew up with Hungarian being spoken (though I can’t speak it myself!) and a lot of references to Transylvania. I still have some relatives in Budapest, as it happens. My grandfather’s cousin, Erdélyi Lajos, who is quite a well known photographer,  is still there. When I was eighteen I travelled through Romania and Hungary – this would have been early 90s – so I got a chance to go to Braşov and Vásárhely / Târgu Mureş, where my grandfather grew up, and to Budapest. I really should go back soon…

 

Guest blogging and Mind Melds

I’m guest-blogging at Futurismic this week, alongside Aliette de Bodard and Gareth L. Powell. Check out What’s The Beef? On Faith and Food, where I talk about the stomach god, Jewish kryptonite, thetans, Nigella Lawson, cannibals, and the mystery of chicken.

I also took part in this week’s Mind Meld on SF Signal, answering the question, What are some of the SF/F tropes that need to be retired?

New short story: “In Pacmandu”

I have 3 stories coming out in three days, which is a bit crazy. The first one was Aphrodisia at Strange Horizons. The second one is In Pacamandu, at Futurismic:

The world is strange. The world is two dimensional. The palette is all wrong.

‘It’s two-dee made to look like three-dee,’ Sergei says.

‘Freaky –‘ from Hong.

We look at each other. Our avatars look like dolls. We move jerkily. We are in an abandoned street. There are signs for products I have never heard of. Avatar corpses litter the street. The dead are everywhere, silent, motionless, frozen in the act of life. We are beyond the known worlds or – the thought strikes me hard. I know this place. I saw pictures, images in old textbooks, a lost world – impossible. We are not beyond the universe, I think, we are too deep inside it. Approaching the core. This is – can only be –

Continue reading.

Third story out tomorrow – sign up free at Daily Science Fiction to read Butterfly & The Blight & The Heart of the World!

New story sale

“In Pacmandu”, to Futurismic. Very happy about this one, and glad it was Futurismic who picked it up. Moving into the new apartment on Wednesday! Looking forward to it.

New Story up at Futurismic

My short story “Spider’s Moon” is now online over at Futurismic.

Spider’s Moon. He raised his head, looked at it again. Even from down here, the giant shadows could be seen, crawling slowly across the lunar surface… – read the rest of the story.

 

Short story sale to Futurismic

Futurismic is a very cool blog/fiction magazine, and I’ve wanted to sell them a story for a while. As it turns out, they will be publishing “Spider’s Moon”, a new SF story from me, in an upcoming issue. Like most of my SF, this one takes place in the same shared future history.