I sold a short story!

I have some very good news: I've just sold a short story to Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination Future Tense Fiction series, tentatively titled "Deficiency Agent"!

I've written about the program and Future Tense before: they've been using art and literature to explore the connections between science and science fiction, working to imagine new futures to look forward to. For several years now, the program has been publishing short fiction under the Future Tense series, originally with Slate, and now with Issues in Science and Technology, a journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and ASU. The program also published the occasional anthology, and in 2019, rounded up some of the best stories in the series for an anthology, Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow, which is excellent reading.

I really like the stories in this series: I've found them to be thoughtful and interesting explorations of the near future, by an incredible group of authors, including Charlie Jane Anders, Madeline Ashby, Premee Mohammad, Linda Nagata, Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, and a number of others. The stories are accompanied by a companion essay by an expert about whatever topic the story is exploring, which adds a bit of depth to the story.

I previously worked with them for a group project to imagine a future without nuclear weapons, which ultimately resulted in a digital anthology, Far Futures, which includes a short story that I wrote, "Embers". I also contributed an essay for Justina Ireland's short story "Collateral Damage" back in 2021.

This is all to say that I'm very, very pleased about this, because this particular story is one that I've been rolling around in my head for probably the better part of a decade. A couple of years ago, I started jotting it down by hand in a notebook, and was pleased with the direction it was going, and ended up pitching it to the fine folks at ACU, who liked it and decided to include it in their series. The goal is to have the story out for their December issue.

It's loosely inspired by a long ride home from Pennsylvania, where my wife and I had to contend with a particularly annoying route that Google Maps was trying to direct us to. That kernel of an idea, mixed up with the spooky nature of artificial intelligence and the problem of fog of war on a battlefield has stuck with me ever since.

I'm looking forward to getting this one out into the world: I've been feeling like I need to spend more time writing creatively, and this was a good push to get it finished.