Technically, I should have posted this late in 2018. But I didn’t, because I was catching up on a lot of things in December that would have been done in November, had my husband not had three surgeries and an extended hospital stay that month. So! Here are some stories of mine that were published in 2018.
- Domestic Violence, in Slate. This is a story about smart homes, gaslighting, and revenge, set in a near-future Toronto. I patterned it after my favourite Murakami story, “Barn Burning.” (He took the title from Faulkner.)
- Tierra y Libertad, in MIT Technology Review. This is about a UN operative whose job it is to decide whether a herd of pistachio-shaking robots have achieved consciousness or not. It’s pure California noir.
- Withnail & Us, in Toronto 2033, an anthology from Spacing magazine. It’s about the future of student housing in Toronto, and also suicide, and also raccoons with distemper.
- Work Shadow/Shadow Work, in the Robots vs. Fairies anthology. It’s about a personal care assistance robot who works for an Icelandic witch with Alzheimer’s.
- “The Cure for Jetlag” in Women Invent the Future, an anthology from the people at DotEveryone, about how not to behave a tech party.
This story isn’t eligible, nor is it fiction per se, but I contributed to an article by Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in McSweeney’s first-ever non-fiction issue, The End of Trust, and you should check it out. Dave and I worked out the premise of this article while we were at the SciFi house at SXSW (where I also stayed with Ramez Naam, Brian David Johnson, and Kevin Bankston, all of whom were excellent housemates). Dave is a great guy, and we had a really fun time. It was one of those moments where you meet someone in person that you’ve spent time interacting with online, and it’s just as lovely as you imagined. Dave and I also went antiquing, and I picked up this amazing septarian fossil specimen that’s on my desk as we speak.
Speaking of awards, I served on the 2019 Philip K Dick Award jury (for works published in 2018), and the shortlist is out! My congratulations to everyone on the list, as well as their editors and publishers. If you aren’t familiar with the authors and titles on the list, I encourage you to pick them up. It was real privilege to see what so many authors in the genre have been working on. We read a lot of fun, interesting, compelling books, and narrowing the field to this handful of titles was a real process. I’m grateful to my fellow jurors for the conversations we shared about books — not just these books in particular, but about all the books, the genre, writing and so on. I’ll probably post something about it in more detail later, after Norwescon. But for now what I can say is that the opportunity to look at so many books made me think about my own work in a very different way.