“We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read” is a Nebula Finalist!

Absolutely delighted that my Lightspeed story “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” is a Nebula Finalist!
Absolutely delighted that my Lightspeed story “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” is a Nebula Finalist!
Catching up on reading for the year? I had three stories out in 2024.
This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.
“We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read” is the most challenging story I’ve ever attempted, and I’m really proud of how it came out. My goal was to get the reader’s brain to do a thing that human brains do not actually do. If you read nothing else from me this year, I hope that you’ll give this one a look.
(If you prefer to listen …
I will be at Readercon! Want to find me? Here’s my schedule:
11:30am (Salon C) – Reading: Caroline M. Yoachim
2:00pm (Salon 3) – Panel: Retroactive Problem Solving in SF
A lot of the more hopeful SF is written in worlds where the most urgent problems facing our society today have already been solved, and the characters face other, different problems. But by imagining futures where our current crises are of the past, are we missing out on an opportunity to blaze a real path into such futures? What does it mean to tell stories about solving …
I have a new story out today in issue 213 of Clarkesworld Magazine! Our Chatbots Said “I Love You,” Shall We Meet? Here at 123aiLOVEu, we take all the guesswork out of dating. With personalized chatbots trained on social media and chat histories, we put you in conversation with hundreds of potential matches . . . and you never have to say a thing!
I have a new story in issue 168 of Lightspeed, and I am so excited to share it with you! This is a story that I wrote with the deliberate goal of making your brain do a thing that human brains really do not do. Give it a try* and let me teach you a whole new way to read?
We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read
“This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.”
In addition to the story, I also did an Author Spotlight interview …
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 …
I will be at Norwescon! Want to find me? Here’s my schedule:
4:00pm – 5:00pm @ Evergreen 1 & 2
Frank Morin (M), Caroline M. Yoachim, Ellis Bray, David D. Levine
If you could travel back in time, where would you go? Time travel adds a slew of cultural complication to historical fiction. Consider Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. This panel discusses what makes such stories so intriguing.
11:00am – 12:00pm @ Evergreen 3 & 4
Wm …
New fiction out today! “Collaboration?” is a novelette I wrote with Ken Liu, and it is in Uncanny Magazine’s 50th issue!
“Worlds pop into existence, composed by clicking keyboards or in spraying foam on waves of thought…”
Writing this broke my brain in all the best ways. Working with Ken pushed me in directions I would not otherwise have gone, and we got to dig deep into the question of what collaboration really is. It was an absolute joy to write, and I am so excited to share it with you!
I wasn’t going to write an end-of-year post this year, partly because I usually focus on new stories I’ve published… and this is a gap year for me with nothing new coming out. But despite that it was a good year for me, writing-wise:
If you will be at Chicon next month, come see me! Here’s my schedule:
Friday, Sept 2
10am – The Writing Workshop (Michigan 3)
Saturday, Sept 3
10am – Reading (Dusable)
1pm – Let Me Tell You About the Very Alien: They Are Different From You and Me (Grand Hall K)
4pm – Table Talk (Crystal Foyer)
Sunday, Sept 4
10am – Autographing