I only had one piece out this year, which makes for a year-end post that is short and sweet.
Worlds pop into existence, composed by clicking keyboards or in spraying foam on waves of thought; tucked away in spells, algorithms, entangled particles, recipes; evoked by waving wands; sketched by twirling ley-line brushes; assembled by spinning quantum mundistructors. They’ve been doing it for eons.
But recently, there has been a pause.
“I’ve lost it,” he says to her, despondent. “I haven’t been able to make a new world in sixteen terakernels.”
“Same. I haven’t conjured one in ages.” The barest wisp of an idea skitters around the edges of her brain. She’s always admired his worlds, so elegantly structured. “Want to collaborate? Maybe we could spark each other.”
“Collaboration?” is a 7550-word novelette, co-written with Ken Liu. It appeared in the January/February 2023 issue of Uncanny Magazine.
This novelette was a blast to write, with interwoven worlds, poetry and mirrors, muses and anti-muses, wine and kittens. There are robots, bored gods, and works of art that cannot quite be appreciated by human minds. I even got to try my hand at some digital calligraphy to create an ensō.
And really, how better to explore the question of what it means to collaborate than by writing a collaboration?
(The original version of the story has a fair bit of formatting trickery, so we have created an accessible version for screen readers, which you can find here.)
