Schrodinger’s Catastrophe
I’m happy to announce the publication of Schrodinger’s Catastrophe, a brand-new, never-seen-before novelette, in the pages of the November issue of Lightspeed Magazine!
Let’s have a quick Q and A to talk about this.
Q: A…novelette?
A: Okay, I didn’t know this was a thing either. My first guess was that the Novelettes was an obscure Motown group from the mid-Sixties. I was shooting for a short story, and the story ran long enough that it no longer qualified as a short story.
Apparently, this is a big deal when it comes to magazines, and also to awards.
Q: I thought you only wrote novels?
A: I did. What happened was, I’d been brainstorming alternate titles for The Apocalypse Seven and came up with Schrodinger’s Catastrophe. I thought it was a little too whimsical, but I mentioned it to my editor anyway. He agreed, but added that it was a great title for a short story. (Said editor is John Joseph Adams. He knows his way around short stories.) I said haha too bad I don’t write short stories. The next day I put down what I was working on at the time (I was writing Two Suns at Sunset) and wrote Schrodinger’s Catastrophe.
Ironically, I proved myself right by not actually writing a short story (see: novelette), although I didn’t know this at the time.
Q: What is Lightspeed Magazine?
A: Lightspeed is an award-winning online magazine that publishes science fiction and fantasy. It’s edited by the aforementioned John Joseph Adams.
John editing the magazine was of course not the reason I was able to get published with Lightspeed—the story still had to be good, of course, and they have high standards—but knowing he ran a magazine was one of the reasons I bothered to write it at all.
Q: What can you tell us about Schrodinger’s Catastrophe?
A: I don’t want to give away too much, but I’ll say this: it may be the funniest thing I’ve written.
You might have noticed my writing tends to have a humorous element. Here’s something I learned a very, very long time ago: my voice is inherently comedic. (I learned this after writing what I thought was an extremely serious stage play, which the reviews described as “darkly comic.”) Not only do I not have worry about adding humor to lighten up a scene, I usually have to force myself to not go after the humor.
If you want to know what comes out of me when I decide not to hold back with the funny, read Schrodinger’s Catastrophe.
Q: How can I read it?
A: Schrodinger’s Catastrophe is technically being serialized by Lightspeed, which just means they’ve broken it into two parts. If you buy a copy of the issue—Issue 126, which has been on sale since November first—you’ll get both parts at once plus the rest of the magazine. (That’s two more sci-fi stories, four fantasy stories, author spotlights and book reviews.) You can either get that by subscribing to Lightspeed or by purchasing the individual issue at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, or Weightless Books.
Now, the reason I mentioned the serialization is that the story will also appear online, but not all at once. Part one will be available online as of November 5th, and part two on November 12th. This is a free option, so you will get to read it, but you won’t get a copy on your e-reader and you won’t get all of the other stories in the magazine. But whether you buy a copy for yourself or not, I recommend swinging by the website on November 5th and 12th anyway, so you can listen to the audio version.
Q: I’m sorry, did you say audio?
A: This is very cool. Lightspeed hosts a podcast in which they broadcast audio editions of some of the short stories featured in the magazine. The audio is done by Skyboat Media, which is the same group that’s doing the audio for my Tandemstar series. So even if you do buy the magazine and read the entire story, you should still do what I absolutely plan to do, which is run over to the website on the 5th and again on the 12th to stream the podcast.
That about covers everything! Run off and pick up the story, and do let me know what you think.
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