It feels like a chilly minus 18 degrees outside, which makes it a good time to warm up with some cookies and tea (in this case, Earl Grey hot) and my copy of the inaugural volume of Winter of Sci-Fi & Fantasy. Edited by Dustin Bilyk and published by Worldstone Publishing with beautiful artwork by Emily’s World of Design, this new anthology features a lucky thirteen tales including my story “Random Access Memory”. Winter of Sci-Fi & Fantasy is available for pre-order now and will be released February 17th.
You can read an excerpt from “Random Access Memory” here.
All earnings from “Random Access Memory” are donated to the Veterans Transition Network, an organisation that helps Canadian veterans move into civilian life with a focus on support for mental health. VTN had a program that had helped evacuate Afghan interpreters and other local civilians that had been working with the Canadian Armed Forces or the Government of Canada who had been abandoned by the government of the day when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in 2021.
The Kickstarter campaign for Winter of Sci-Fi & Fantasy has been launched and will run until December 18th. The book is scheduled for release on February 1st (pretty much the middle of northern hemisphere winter). Please consider joining me in backing this wonderful project.
All earnings from “Random Access Memory” are donated to the Veterans Transition Network, an organisation that helps Canadian veterans transition to civilian life with a focus on support for mental health. VTN had a program that had helped evacuate Afghan interpreters and other local civilians that had been working with the Canadian Armed Forces or the Government of Canada who had been abandoned by the government of the day when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in 2021.
My Aurora Award nominated story “A New Brave World” appears in the latest issue of Jupiter’s Eye. Thank you to Tyree Campbell and Hiraeth Publishing! In the story, the civilisation portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World establishes an exile settlement on an extrasolar planet orbiting a red dwarf.
I am thrilled to announce that my new story "The Observer Affected" will be appearing in the upcoming anthology Unréal, a new collection of weird and fantastical tales set in Montréal / Moon’yaang / Tiohtià:ke produced by AEscifi.ca and published by Flame Arrow. "The Observer Affected" concerns disturbing events at a Montréal psychiatric hospital (specifically, this one) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thank you to Paul Jarvey, Duff McCourt, Su Sokol, and the entire team at AE!
Richard Graeme Cameron has written in Amazing Stories online a glowing review of the collection:
“There is a lot of excellent genre fiction being written in Canada. May this series become the definitive annual sample. If all are good as this one, I can see them becoming textbooks for high schools and universities...You owe it to yourself to purchase it for your bookshelf.”
The praise for the collection is richly deserved, but what he said about “A New Brave World” put a lump in my throat:
“Proof that the hard science genre is still capable of enjoyable originality, especially in the capable hands of excellent writers such as Eric Choi. I found the story exhilarating. It reminds me why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place.”
I am surprised and humbled that my story “A Sky and a Heaven” is sharing the 2023 Sidewise Award for Best Short Form Alternate History with “A Dream of Electric Mothers” by Wole Talabi. Thank you so much to this year’s Sidewise jury of Eileen Gunn, Matt Mitrovich, Olav Rokne, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven Silver. Here are the acceptance remarks that Nebula Award winning writer William Ledbetter delivered on my behalf at the 2023 World Fantasy Convention with one very important update in [square brackets]:
“If Bill Ledbetter is reading this at the Sidewise Awards, then I will be both astonished and honoured. I am sorry that I cannot be with you to give these remarks in person, and I thank Bill for accepting on my behalf.
“The threads of ‘A Sky and a Heaven’ have been coursing through my life for two decades. I was there in February 2003 at the Kennedy Space Centre when the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost. Thirteen years later, in July 2016, I was at the session of the International Space University in Israel and I was deeply moved by the enduring legacy of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon and the strength with which his memory is being kept alive.
“But it was the invitation by Andrea Lobel and Mark Shainblum to their anthology Other Covenants that motivated me to weave these threads into a story, and for that I am very grateful to them. Thank you Andrea and Mark for bringing Other Covenants into our timeline. Their remarkable collection produced two of this year’s Sidewise Award short form finalists, ‘A Sky and a Heaven’ and Gillian Polack’s extraordinary story ‘Why the Bridgemasters of York Don’t Pay Taxes’. I am honoured to have shared the Sidewise shortlist with Gillian and Michael Cassutt and Paul Levinson, [and I am absolutely delighted that ‘A Dream of Electric Mothers’ by Wole Talabi is sharing this year’s short form Sidewise Award.]
“Thank you to the Sidewise Award judges for this tremendous honour. This recognition is particularly meaningful because it comes on top of feedback I have received from people at NASA, people who were involved in some of the events portrayed in the story that have told me what it means to them. The story also appeared in my collection Just Like Being There and for that I thank Angela Lahee my wonderful editor at Springer Nature.”
The watch I’m wearing belonged to my late dear friend Leslie Gelberger who first introduced me to the stories of that master alternate historian Harry Turtledove. I want to believe there is an alternate timeline in which Leslie is sharing all this with me.
My new story “Beware the Glob!” about a dangerous extraterrestrial creature that is unleashed from its frozen Arctic slumber by climate change appears in the September/October 2023 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact. This is my third publication this year, my fifth appearance in Analog, and my first illustrated Analog story. Thank you to Trevor Quachri and Emily Hockaday for buying the story, Julie Czerneda and Peter Watts for their biology help, and K.A. Teryna for her artwork.
Update: Mina’s review in Tangent says “Beware the Glob!” is “fun but not fluffy” (which is exactly what I intended).
