Great Video Review of "Robinson Calculator" in Robots Through the Ages

 

New Science Fiction Short Story: "Foreseeable"

photo by Toni Hukkanen
now available on Kindle
Sven accidentally picks up someone else's similar glasses in a restaurant's men's room, and discovers they can give him glimpses of the future.
Also available for free on Vocal
earlier version published in AcademFic, vol 1, 2020

Slipping Time

Here's another one of my time travel stories available FREE on Vocal: "Slipping Time"

• Illustration from painting by Gustave Caillebotte, 1877
• Earlier version of story published in Amazing Stories, 2018
• Get the story for your Kindle 

Four Publications

I've had four publications in the past week, and since all are available FREE online, I thought I'd list them for you right here:

• Foreseeable -- brand new science fiction story in debut issue of Academfic
• The Missing Orientation -- essay about space exploration, sense of wonder, and religion in Religions
• Popper and Evolution Over the Decades -- how I met the great philosopher
• Tetrads and Chiasmus: A Reclamation of the Tetrad Wheel -- a pathbreaking, scholarly new article by Matt Lindia and me in New Explorations

More Freebies from my science fiction, media theory, and music!

Amazing Stories launch event in Toronto

For Immediate Release

Amazing Stories, the first science fiction magazine created in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback and featuring such luminaries of the genre as Jules Verne, H. G, Welles, E. E. “Doc” Smith, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clark, has returned!

To celebrate the first new print issue of the magazine since 2005, a special launch event will be held at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy (239 College St.). The event will take place on Wednesday, September 12, from 6 to 8 pm.

Editor-in-Chief Ira Nayman will be on hand to give a brief history of the magazine and talk about the challenges of reviving it in the current economic and political climate.

Authors who have confirmed their attendance include: Paul Levinson (“Slipping Time”), Shirley Meier (“Flight of an Arrow”) and Drew Hayden Taylor (“When Angels Come Knocking”). Julie Czerneda (“Foster Earth”) has expressed an interest in attending if her schedule allows. Various other contributors to the magazine will also be on hand.

The first 50 people to attend will receive free copies of the magazine.

“This is both exciting and a little scary,” admitted Toronto native Nayman. “Amazing Stories has a – ahem – storied history. This makes reviving the magazine a delicate balancing act between honouring Amazing Stories’ legacy and updating it for a modern audience. Fortunately, the authors who have contributed to the first issue have given us a great start!”

Advance copies of the first issue of Amazing Stories are now available. Toronto-based author Ira Nayman is available for interviews.

For more information, contact:

Ira Nayman, Editor-in-Chief, Amazing Stories

(416) 630-7331

aardvarkseyes@hotmail.com

The Experiment with "The Other Car"

Hey, I don't usually talk much inside baseball here about my science fiction writing  - how and why I make decisions to get my stories published in this place or that, or try to get them published - but I thought you might enjoy a little of the story behind the story of my recently published The Other Car, which I put up as an ebook on Amazon about two weeks ago.

First, as some of you may know, this is the not way I've ever published my short stories.  All of the 40 short science fiction and fantasy stories I've published since 1991 - you can see a list of most of them here, at the Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base  - were published the good old-fashioned traditional way.  I sold the story to a magazine - whether print, or more recently, online, or both - for a payment per word, usually 5 to 10 cents per word.   For example, my most recent sale of this sort was for my 5500-word story, "The Wallet," to Sci Phi Journal #4, which was just published last month.   The Sci Phi Journal paid me 5-cents per word for this story.

"The Other Car," which I just wrote a little over two weeks ago, is coincidentally almost the same length, and is in the same slipstream, new weird, science fantasy corner of the science fiction genre.  I describe it as follows:

James Oleson is beginning to see everything in perfect duplicate - two identical models of cars which are the same down to scuff marks and license plate, two old philosophy books with the same torn pages and inscription in old ink, and twin mail men. Is he losing his mind, or experiencing the birth of a new alternate reality via binary fission?

I decided, as an experiment, to publish this right away as a short story ebook on Amazon Kindle.  I got my friend, world renown illustrator Joel Iskowitz, to do a cover - see below.   The satisfaction to an author in getting a work immediately out to the public is enormous.   But would I make anything close to the money I would have made had I sold "The Other Car" to a magazine?    I priced the short story at $0.99, and as an author I by no means see all of that money, but so far "The Other Car" is off to a pretty good start.  Here's where it was about a week after its publication on Amazon, on its Top 100 science fiction short story list:



But the story still has a long way to go to reach what I would have earned had I sold the story for 5-cents a word, let alone 10-cents or more a word, to a magazine.   I'm going to give this experiment a year, and see where I stand then on the story's earnings.  I'll be sure to report the results right here.

In the meantime, I'll list reviews and any other good news about "The Other Car" that may come along, right here as well:

• 28 March 2015: 1st review of "The Other Car" on Ignite Books - "the end was stunning"
• 28 March 2015: 2nd review of "The Other Car" on Amazon - "my draw dropped"
• 28 March 2015: "The Other Car" on SFSignal's "140+ Excellent Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror eBook Deals – All Priced Under $4 Each"
• 31 March 2015: "The Other Car" on Speculative Fiction Showcase's "Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for March 2015"
• 3 April 2015: 3rd review of "The Other Car" on timetowritenow  "an inspiring break from working on my taxes"
• 4 April 2015: 4th review of "The Other Car" on Amazon - "brain tease extraordinaire"
• 2 May 2015: I raised the price of "The Other Car" to $2.99 - I'll keep it there for a few months, and see if I make more money (70% of $2.99) than at the original price (30% of $0.99) at what will likely be fewer sales at the higher price.

Science Fiction and Music: A Personal Account

Science fiction and music have been two of my passions every since I was kid in the 1950s, when stories about space and time travel, and rock 'n' roll, were in their first, separate golden ages.   But, for me, they were intertwined.  I'd hear Roy Orbison's "Only the the Lonely" playing on someone's transistor radio as I walked to the Allerton Avenue branch of the New York Public Library to nab a copy of Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity.   I loved them - still love them - both.   The music and the stories somehow both speak to unlimited, soaring possibilities.

In the years that followed, I've written a lot of science fiction, and a lot of songs.  But rarely have the two been interconnected.  Last year, though, I wrote a the lyrics to "If I Traveled to the Past," a time travel love song, for which John Anealio wrote the music and recorded this demo.



And, also last year, I wrote a story that I had come with just the title of nearly 20 years ago:  "Sam's Requests".   It's like nothing else I've ever written - a story about a battle in deep space in the distant future, connected to music here on Earth in the early 1960s.    The 15-year old in me and my present self were  delighted when Buzzy Mag accepted it for publication, where you can read it, here, any time, for free.  You've heard of space opera?  I think of "Sam's Requests" as space rock 'n' roll.

Enjoy ... and I think I'm going to listen to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" now.

The State of my Short Fiction at the Start of 2015

Hey, I don't talk enough about my short fiction, which I enjoy writing every bit as much as my novels.   But it's been percolating along with publications the past few years, so I thought I'd provide a little summary of what's been going on and what will be happening in 2015:

• "Ian, George, and George" is the most recent story I've had published in Analog (December 2013).   It's the 3rd story in the "Ian's Ions and Eons" time travel series, and the 14th published in Analog over all.  I expect to be getting all of these up as Kindle ebooks this year.  I've already started with my 1997 novella,  Loose Ends, nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards.
• "The Chronology Protection Case," first published in Analog in September 1995, was reprinted for the fifth time in The Mammoth Book of Time Travel (July 2013), a best seller on Amazon. The novelette was the basis of The Chronology Protection Case short film made by Jay Kensinger in 2002, recut with a new extended ending in 2013.  You can also read it free on Wattpad.    It's being used again in 2015 as reading in an enlightened class at the College of Dupage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.
• "Extra Credit" was published in BuzzMag - where it's available free of charge - in July 2012.  It was reprinted in December 2014 in the Altered States cyberpunk anthology, for which I also had the pleasure of writing the Introduction.  And it will be reprinted again, in Chinese translation by He Daokuan, in The Essential Levinson, 2nd edition, to be published in China in 2015 by Remnin Press.
• "Synchronicity" was published in Buzzy Mag, where it's available free of charge, in May 2014.
• "Sam's Requests" - the strangest story I've ever written - will be published in Buzzy Mag in a just a few days - January 9, 2015.  You've heard of space opera?  I consider this space rock 'n' roll, literally.   Mark your calendars.
• "The Wallet" - science fiction based on something that actually happened to me - will be published in the Sci Phi Journal early this year (likely February, in issue #4).  Here's what an earlier issue of this magazine at the intersection of science fiction and philosophy looked like.
• "The Kyss" will appear around Valentine's Day in Speculative St. Valentine's Day Drabbles, edited by Jorge Salgado-Reyes and Roy C. Booth, the same guys who put together Altered States.  At 100 words, "The Kyss" will be the shortest story I've ever had published - not that I believe in short kisses, but a "drabble" is supposed to be just 100 words.
• "The Last Train to Margaretville" is the first "shared world" story I've written.  It will likely be the last, because even though I loved writing it, I still like writing more in worlds of my total creation.   It was published in the Walk the Fire 2 antho edited and conceived by John Mierau in December 2013.  You can hear me do a reading of it here.
• And to end on a charitable note: I contributed two new stories, "Transfer of Power" and "The Chimps Shall Lead," to Something to Read, published in December 2014, a special charity anthology edited by Stella Wilkinson,  for which all proceeds go to a children's hospital in England.   Why England?  I do the like country and that's where the invitation came from.   Happy to do the same for an American charity, or for that matter, any charity on this or any other planet.

So that's the long of it about my short fiction, for now.  I'll try to keep this page updated, or maybe make these summaries a yearly thing.  Hey, I still love the long form, too - and below are six of my novels you can get in a heartbeat on Amazon.




thanks to Joel Iskowitz for illustrating the six above covers