I’m pleased to announce that Interzone has purchased my story “Dance of the Kawkawroons.”  This is my fifth sale to the acclaimed British SF publication.  I’m particularlypleased that this SF story — my first one with a Twilight Zone-type ending — will be getting lots of eyeballs looking at it.

A few days ago I received my distributor’s copies of Unplugged: The Web’s Best SF and Fantasy: 2008 Download, edited by Rich Horton (Wyrm Publications), which contains my Abyss & Apex story “Snatch Me Another. ”  The layout and look of the book is terrific.  Hmm, is it tacky to give copies to relatives for Christmas?

I came across this post on Facebook referring to my short story, “Dear Annabehls” which appears in Electric Velocipede #17/18.   The person who wrote the post is apparently a player of Eclipse Phase, a game with which I’m unfamiliar.  I haven’t yet come across any other reviews of this issue.  He writes:

“Here’s a short fiction reco for those who want to have some fun with the concept of personality forks: the darkly comical “Dear Annabehls” by Mercurio D. Rivera, published in issue #17/18 of _Electric Velocipede_ magazine. Although the variant people in this story apparently result from some type of alternate worlds quantum reality breach, most of the situations described (in advice column format!) could easily happen to Eclipse Phase characters who have multiple forks of themselves on the loose.–jack”

Thanks, Jack!

Revised 11/23:  And from avid reader StevenLP on the Asimov’s message boards:

“Issue [17/18] of Electric Velocipede has 20 stories of varying length, most shortish. They’re mainly fantasy or slipstream, but there’s a couple of SF ones too. The best is “The Death of Sugar Daddy” by Toiya Kristen Finley, which is slipstream, but with a very Philip K Dick resolution. Also good are “Sun’s East, Moon’s West” by Merrie Haskell (fantasy) and “Dear Annabehls” by Mercurio D. Riveria (SF); there are several fairly good stories too.”

Thanks, Steven!

I was mentally preparing for too many hours of football viewing on a rainy Sunday by fiddling around online. In the process, I came across this post regarding my satirical pornography-with-aliens story, “Sleeping with the Anemone” which appears in the online Otherworlds Anthology:

“There once was a golden age when I was barely old enough to slip in under the tent flap and into the show. We now call it the golden age of the pulps. The pages were raggedy-edged and they were expensive. Well, twenty-five cents mostly, but they were thick. Tales of wonderment and awe, a life of adventure and romance down at the corner drug store. Good stuff. My humble submission is: e-format publishing is the closest thing the 21st Century has to the pulps of my childhood. These e-thingys are the new pulps. And inside? The pulp pieces we would have written long ago if we had been around then to write them…

“How’s about sex with alien vegetable life-forms? Uh… in the heyday of the pulps we would have to have called it “inter-species hanky-panky.” Mercurio D. Rivera calls his tale “Sleeping with the Anemone.” … The offerings of Otherworlds—including Ian Faulkner’s “Cadmus Graves and the Missing Clone,” Lawrence Dagstine’s “Human Transfer,” Mercurio Rivera’s “Sleeping with the Anemone,” and “Heramphrodites are from Mercury” by Trent Roman are… well, pulpy. These guys have tapped the magic well of pulpitude: Slurp, slurp, slurp… ”

Very cool.

Any interest in learning the secrets of the universe? What are the origins of life? Does God exist? All these mysteries are solved in my story “Answers from the Event Horizon” which appears in last week’s issue of Nature Magazine (Vol. 461, Number 7262) pictured here.

I’d been meaning for a while to thank Jason Sanford for mentioning “The Scent of Their Arrival” as an example of a new trend in science fiction he terms “SciFi Strange.” As Jason explains:

“[A]t the heart of these stories is the basic strangeness, the basic uniqueness, the wide-eyed “gee-whiz” wonder and/or sense of horror which the golden age of SF displayed when it knocked upon the doors of reality back in the ’40s and ’50s. Except now this sense of awe is being told with the full range of writing styles and cultural understandings embraced by the New Wave movement of the ’70s. And where golden age SF writers dealt with a worldview which was white-bread and analog, SciFi Strange deals with an ever-changing scientific understanding of life and the universe–an understanding which is unnervingly close to being philosophical in nature.”

When I wrote “The Scent of Their Arrival” I was certainly trying to capture the pulpy feel of horrific 50’s science fiction and to delve into the mindset of aliens whose worldviews are divided along strict religious/secular lines. So I guess the story does meet Jason’s definition. Needless to say, I appreciated the shout-out given the great writers in whose company he placed me as explorers of SciFi Strange.

Speaking of Jason Sanford, I had the pleasure today of reading his terrific novella “Sublimation Angels,” which appears in the latest issue of Interzone. The world-building in this story is just topnotch. Set on a planet in an elliptical orbit with an atmosphere that freezes and thaws, its main characters are catacomb-dwelling humans overseen by AI’s in human form (“moms”) who are trying to make contact with the Aurals, intelligent alien balls of light with a mysterious agenda of their own. (And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.) You should definitely check it out!

I came across some positive feedback of “The Fifth Zhi” podcast over at Bartbooks. The reviewer called it “an impressive short story” and wrote that “three concepts (short life, wetware-telepathy, and being unable to get the attention of an alien) are explored wonderfully in…“The Fifth Zhi,” by Mercurio Rivera.” You can read the full, comprehensive analysis of the story here.

Meanwhile, over at the Escape Pod forum, one listener made the following observation:

“I did like this story, except for a imagination glitch that was my own fault. For some reason, I imagined the protagonist as a monkey. I have no idea why. I tried to change him into a human, but he stayed a monkey, ever since I read the title. Have I been listening to too much Jonathan Coulton? Anyway, great story, although it makes my head hurt to imagine something not mass-based.”

Hmm, monkeys, you say? Monkeys?!? This somewhat unique take on the story certainly made me laugh out loud. A slew of both raves and a few not-so-positive reactions can be found over at the comments section and forum discussion at the Escape Pod site. It’s always great to get so much feedback on a story.

In Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Scence Fiction, Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, he listed three of my stories as “honorable mentions”: “The Scent of Their Arrival” [Interzone 214], “The Fifth Zhi” [Interzone #219] and “Snatch Me Another” [Abyss and Apex #25].

Quite a thrill to be mentioned in this, the Ultimate SF Tome. My goal now is to write something worthy of inclusion in the anthology itself.

I’m happy to report that I’ve sold my SF story, “Answers From Across the Event Horizon” to Nature magazine. It’s a great mainstream market that I’m thrilled to have cracked.

My Interzone story, “The Fifth Zhi” is presently up at the best podcast on the net: Escape Pod. Give a listen to Steve Eley’s great reading HERE and feel free to leave a comment.

The double-sized anniversary issue of Aoife’s Kiss (#29) is out this month featuring my short story “Doubled.” It’s a story about a dystopian futureworld populated by mentally conjoined twins. I love this stunning cover.