Erica L. Satifka's Blog

I have a new story out! Well, it's been out for a week, but I'm just getting around to talking about it on my long-neglected, little-visited website now. (Do people still read these things?) It's called "Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Slug Monsters," and the premise is... basically exactly what it sounds like. Here's a teaser:

"And I can pick out anything I want?" As Ruth pages through the look book with her extensors, a squeal rises from whatever remains of her flesh mouth. With a start, Jerome Parker realizes he hasn't seen one organic part of his daughter in years.

"Happy birthday, sweetie." Privately, he's steered the salesman toward budget options. Business at the mine isn't what it used to be. They'll have to stay within the government stipend for a first-time Skyn. Hell, Jerome still wears his first one, though he pays to age it up every few years.

On the salesman's tablet, Ruth skims through the collection of models. With growing irritation, Jerome watches her reject Skyn after Skyn. She lingers for a half-second on a picture of a pretty ebony-colored girl with bright red hair, then flips all the way to the back of the catalog. The expensive part.

A story of teens, fitting in, and the rationale behind looking human (or not) on an alien world, "Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Slug Monsters" is my first long story in almost two years, and I hope it's worth the wait! The story won't be on the Apex Magaine site for another month, but you can read it now by purchasing the issue here. The issue also contains thousands of words of fiction by J.S. Breukelaar, E. Catherine Tobler, Damien Angelica Walters, and many others. I've read about half of it so far and can confirm it's dynamite. You can also subscribe to a full year of Apex here.

Speaking of longer stories, while it won't be out officially until January 1, you can get an eARC of Weird World War: China now from the Baen Books site, which includes my story "Tunnel Vision"! This is a story co-written with my editor/husband Rob McMonigal, the second of (possibly?) more. I'll write more about the story once the anthology is officially released, but let's just say that if stories about evil interdimensional shifters are up your alley, you'll probably want to get a copy of this.

I have a new story out in Nature: Futures this month-ish! Check out "Deus Est Machina," the story of a sentient spaceship with a world in her belly who has to contend with the curiosity of the troublesome organisms who may have twigged to the fact that their reality isn't what it seems. Here's an excerpt:

Ancient spacefaring humans had built the world-ships as temporary shelters after ruining every planet they’d attempted to colonize. But when it became clear that their new homes were not destined to be temporary, they’d descended into chaos, tearing apart their artificial universes rivet by rivet. Despite the fact that they were well cared for by the world-ships, and even loved in a way, humans chafed under their self-imposed ‘imprisonment’. So now the world-ships shield their organisms from the truth, keeping them dumb for the sake of all sentients involved.

This story appears almost a year after my last story in Nature, "Symphony of the Damned." As much as I love writing and publishing flash, I'm happy to say that I also have some full-length stories coming out this year. As always, Twitter is the best place to get the latest scoop on my writing, but I'll post it here as well for non-Twits.

In case you missed my Endeavour Awards livestream a few months ago, you're in luck! There's a podcast version available here, featuring a Q&A followed by a live reading of "After We Walked Away" (my take on an Omelas story, every writer gets one). Like the fiction, I have a few other podcasty things in the works, which I can hopefully post about soonish.

Lastly, just a reminder that if you've read my Endeavour Award-winning short fiction collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, I'd really appreciate it if you left a review (starring is fine) on Amazon and/or Goodreads. They help sales and give a little burst of dopamine, and isn't the latter what we're all looking for?

As you probably heard if you read my Twitter, my Facebook, or even this very blog, my collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters won the 2021 Endeavour Award a few weeks ago! In commemoration, check out the livestream happening this Friday (April 28) over at the Endeavour Awards Facebook page. I'll answer questions about the collection and read a story. You should also be able to watch the livestream after it's over.
The details:Date: Friday, April 28, 2023Time: 4:00 pm Pacific / 7:00 pm EasternPlace: Endeavour Awards FB page
See you there!

I am very pleased to announce that my debut collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is the winner of the 2021 Endeavour Award for speculative Pacific Northwest fiction! It was announced at Norwescon last weekend. which was a real blast. I was and am so honored to receive this distinction, and I'm thankful the award coordinators, judges, my publisher Patrick Swenson for publishing the book in the first place, and my husband/editor Rob McMonigal for shining up every one of these stories. There'll be an interview posted soon on the Endeavour Award Facebook page, so watch for that!
The judges' comments were quite complimentary (I teared up a little listening to them), so I'm putting them here for posterity:

"We are delighted to help shine an eerie phantasmagorical glow of regard onto a book of such spiky originality as this. Satifka's How To Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a fractal triumph that works on every level, from individual sentences and stories to the splendidly counterintuitive jigsaw of the whole. Rather than forming a seamless sameness, they constitute a fully interlocking kaleidoscope of moods and modes. These 23 stories take a gorgeously broad view of the genre, jacking especially into the cyberpunk mainframe, while exploring 21st-century concerns in language that raises a shower of sparks on every page. One juror compared this book to classic collections by Avram Davidson and R.A. Lafferty, which is the same as saying it's basically incomparable; another juror summed up by saying, simply: ‘I'm very impressed.’ We also must honor the chutzpah of a book that identifies all the stories t
herein as disastrous."​ — Catherine Asaro, Andy Duncan, & Fran Wilde

If you haven't yet picked up a copy of Apocalypse, you can get it at Amazon, Books2Read, or the Fairwood Press site itself. Or ask your local library to order it! And if you have a moment to drop a review (Amazon and Goodreads especially, but anything's cool) then it would really be appreciated.

And now... I definitely need to write more stories!

I'll be at the 45th annual Norwescon in SeaTac, WA from April 6-9! It'll be my first time at Norwescon since the global unpleasantness, and my first time paneling. In case you didn't remember, my collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is up for a delayed Endeavour Award this year, which is of course ridiculously exciting. (I'll be reading part of one of the collection's two original stories on Saturday.)

Here are the panels I'll be on:

Thursday

Into the Metaverse

2:00pm - 3:00pm @ Cascade 11

Dr. Sean Robinson (M), Kimberly Unger, Wm Salt Hale, Erica L. Satifka

Reluctant Heroes

4:00pm - 5:00pm @ Cascade 10

Erica L. Satifka (M), Shiv Ramdas, Brenda Carre, Brianna Tibbetts

Friday

Systems of Governance in SFF

11:00am - 12:00pm @ Cascade 7 & 8

Brenda Cooper (M), Erica L. Satifka, Crystal Lloyd, Tracy Furutani

Rising Oceans, Blurring Genres

4:00pm - 5:00pm @ Cascade 11

Brenda Cooper (M), Erica L. Satifka, Scott James Magner

Language in Science Fiction

6:00pm - 7:00pm @ Cascade 12

David D. Levine (M), Erica L. Satifka, Shweta Adhyam, Joseph Malik, Nisi Shawl

Saturday

Reading: Erica L. Satifka

11:00am - 11:30am @ Cascade 3

Erica L. Satifka (M)

Endeavour Awards

4:00pm - 5:00pm @ Cascade 12

Jim Kling (M), Marilyn Holt, Erica L. Satifka

Sunday

Reboot Your Myth

10:00am - 11:00am @ Evergreen 3 & 4

J Tullos Hennig (M), Ellis Bray, Benjamin Gorman, Erica L. Satifka

Vacations in Space

11:00am - 12:00pm @ Cascade 10

David D. Levine (M), Dan Dubrick, Greg Dubos, Erica L. Satifka

I am thrilled to announce that my collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a finalist for the Endeavour Award! Founded in 1999 to honor science fiction writers of the Pacific Northwest, previous winners include Ursula LeGuin, Robin Hobb, and Greg Bear. I couldn't be happier about this, and I'm looking forward to attending this year's Norwescon, Congrats to the other nominees (full list on Facebook) and I hope to reconnect with some people at the con! Simultaneous gentle and hostile reminder that if you enjoyed How to Get to Apocalypse, or even if you didn't, it could use a few more reviews and ratings on Amazon and/or Goodreads if you have a moment.

In other writing news, I've sold my SF short story "Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Slug Monsters" to Apex Magazine! Like many people, I didn't have such a productive pandemic, and despite an influx of free time I mostly stopped writing from March 2020 to mid-2022. "Papas" is one of the few stories to come out of this dark era, and despite the darkness of said era and the general darkness of my writing in general, this is probably one of my more optimistic stories. Although considering that it starts with a teenager shopping for a new body after her first one was destroyed by the harsh environment of her Titan mining colony the day she was born, my idea of "optimistic" may not be universal. Look for it in 2022, along with...

Another sale to the Weird World War III series from Baen! "Tunnel Vision," a collaboration with my husband and in-house editor Rob McMonigal, will appear in the forthcoming anthology Weird World War III: China. When a strange emissary from a parallel dimension shows up at a US military base, looking for allies and humanitarian aid after China depleted his world of resources, the officers in charge of the operation have a difference of opinion about how victimized these parallel-worlders actually are. But wait, there's more...

My story "Woke Up New," a quiet tale of a medical anomaly who gets a surprise visit from an astronaut-in-training, will appear in Kaleidotrope! This will be my second appearance in Kaleidotrope (after 2020's "Sasquatch Summer." These two are probably my most "Pacific Northwesty" stories, and I'm grateful to Kaleidotrope for giving them a home.

And that's it, I think! I'll try to update this blog when these stories come out, but as always you can find the most up-to-date Satifka writing news/shitposts on Twitter, the only social media site I can stand (and I can't even stand it all that much these days, heh).

Hello again to my neglected blog! It's been about two months since the release of  How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters , my collection of 23 dark science fiction stories from the past decade and a half. It's been getting some great reviews and mentions! Silvia Moreno-Garcia lists it as one of her favorite SF/F books of the year in The Washington Post:

Another favorite was How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, a strong collection by Erica L. Satifka, one of the brightest science fiction writers today who should be getting more attention.

(She also picks out Caroline Hardaker's Composite Creatures as her favorite SF novel of 2021, and after reading it myself I have to strongly agree that it's one of the best SF books I've read in ages. Particularly recommended if you like reading about climate collapse, housecats, or both.)

And on Tor.com, Jared Shurin name-drops it in both his best-of-2021 list and "Our Cyberpunk Year," where he writes:

These are the apocalypses of automation and redundancy; social stratification and malignant ignorance. Satifka has an incredible—unparalleled, even—ability to pack each story filled with technological concepts and imaginative conceits. It is excellent world-building, with every element strange and wondrous, but all perfectly plausible and naturally woven. It is a wave of new ideas, but never once feels like an onslaught, because the stories themselves are character-driven; about deeply empathetic people in these recognisable, if unsettling, worlds. These are stories that are not only immediately relevant, but will stand the test of time. Science fiction—cyberpunk, even—at its finest.

And over on the Locus Magazine site, reviewer Ian Mond also praises the collection, writing:

A common feature of Satifka’s work, which we see portrayed in “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse”, is the slow death of society, typically brought about by the rapacious appetite of capitalism (and sometimes alien invaders). [...] For all the despair and dystopia in Satifka’s fiction, there’s an acerbic thread of humour that runs through most of these stories. Several of them are even out-and-out hilarious.

Speaking of Locus, my collection also made the Locus Recommended List (first time I've ever been on it), so if you really liked it, then you can vote for it (reader votes determine the shortlist/winners). And of course, more reviews on any platform are always appreciated!

In non-collection news, I had a non-fiction piece come out in the anthology Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, out from PM Press at the tail end of last year. It's about (who else?) Philip K. Dick, and I take the position that Dick was perhaps not as personally far left as he's made out to be, but that the radicalism inherent in his works still resonates on both a left-wing and just a general human level. This is a gorgeous full-color book featuring essays on New Wave SF authors and the politics that inspired them (and that they inspired).

And in impending publication news, my short story "Twilight of the God-Makers" will be appearing in the Baen anthology Weird World War IV edited by Sean Patrick Hazlett (who also edited Weird World War III , which I am also in). It's an anthology of war stories that take place after the Big One ends, including authors such as Nick Mamatas, Martin L. Shoemaker, Laird Barron, and many others! My story is about what happens to the demented superhumans a united North American state created after they were no longer of use. I hope you check this book out too! Release date March 1, 2022. If you're a person who likes author interviews, I have a three-part interview series with the editor that can be accessed from his channel Through a Glass Darkly.

Oh, and last but certainly not least, we got a new kitten named Jack, who's modeling my contributor copy of Weird World War IV to the left here. But for more about him, you'll have to check Twitter.

It's release day!!! How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, my first collection, is now available in nearly every online store you can name, which are all helpfully collected on this page. Copies ordered through Fairwood Press are already on their way to readers. You can also ask your local bookstore or library to order it, and I hope you do because libraries are great!

Having a short fiction collection has been a dream of mine for a long time. While I've had two longer things published (Stay Crazy and Busted Synapses, please buy/read/review those as well kthx), short stories are where I started and honestly where I feel most at home, inasmuch as I feel at home with anything related to writing lately. I really think these stories are the best thing I've ever done, and I hope some other people like it too.

But wait, there's more: I'll be at OryCon 42 this coming weekend (November 12-14, 2021), along with Patrick Swenson of Fairwood Press (who, yes, will have copies of my collection and many other great books!). Here's where I'll be if you want to come say hi:

 
Writing Short Fiction
Friday, November 12, 2021, 4:00 PM, Jantzen Room
A detailed look into the unique craft of creating original worlds in fantasy, sci-fi, and the paranormal. Whenever a writer begins a story, their goal is to take the reader to places they’ve never been before. What are some essential questions one needs to ask themselves about their world? Learn the various techniques to make worlds as original as possible. We will also discuss how to research, plot, and develop a setting.

Worldbuilding 101
Friday, November 12, 2021, 5:00 PM, White Stag RoomA detailed look into the unique craft of creating original worlds in fantasy, sci-fi, and the paranormal. Whenever a writer begins a story, their goal is to take the reader to places they’ve never been before. What are some essential questions one needs to ask themselves about their world? Learn the various techniques to make worlds as original as possible. We will also discuss how to research, plot, and develop a setting.

Be a Writer? Yes, You Can!
Friday, November 12, 2021, 7:00 PM, White Stag Room
If you've been dreaming of writing fiction, but you've struggled to finish your first project--or worse, gotten crushed by rejections!--this is the panel for you. Learn from experienced writers how to get going, keep going, and believe in yourself.

Autograph Session
Saturday, November 13, 2021, 1:00 PM, Art Show Foyer

All Planets Are Not Monocultural
Saturday, November 13, 2021, 6:00 PM, Pendleton Room
We get it, lazy writers and movie makers give you an entire ice planet that is somehow inhabitable. Or a jungle that goes on forever. Earth is not a mono-culture, why should your SF worlds be? We'll talk geography and how the terrain will impact your politics and biology for your aliens.

Reading
Sunday, November 14, 2021, 11:00 AM, Overton Room

Hope to see you there!

My debut collection How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters comes out in a month! And to celebrate, I'm giving away at least one and possibly two paper ARCs. Just fill out this survey with your contact information and your favorite fictional apocalypse. Due to international shipping costs and the fact that the last few things I sent overseas I can't ship a print ARC out of the United States, but I can send an eARC if you win (or hell, just if you ask nicely).
In the meantime, you can still pre-order H2G2A&OD directly from Fairwood Press, as well as at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books2Read (digital), and my local bookstore Powell's! If you use Goodreads, you can add it to your to-read list, or post a review if you have an eARC. And if you're a reviewer who's interested in getting an eARC, email me at satifka at gmail dot com!
Here's some more stuff that people have been saying about my collection with the very long title:

"The stories in Satifka's debut collection are inventive and gritty, bleak and satirical, hilarious and horrifying. Her work is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick at his best in revealing the struggles and resilience of everyday people caught up in the machinery of the future."
— Tim Pratt, author of Prison of Sleep and the Axiom series 
"Satifka is one of the most exciting writers around and still sadly under the radar. Her mordant stories grapple with technology and society in a way that brings to mind the cyberpunk greats. The tales in her first collection range from a grim story of dead children turned into flesh puppets for a TV show to an incredibly effective response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
— Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of Mexican Gothic
"Satifka (Busted Synapses) presents 23 strange and captivating stories about the end of the world. None of these endings call for rains of fire and brimstone. Instead, these apocalypses are most often brought about by extraterrestrials, and the tales explore a wide variety of human-alien relationships . . . displaying wide-ranging creativity. Fans of speculative fiction are sure to be pleased."
— Publishers Weekly

 

And while I'm not sure of my schedule yet, I'm definitely going to be at OryCon 42 the weekend after my book release, and there'll be copies there! So lots of ways to get a copy of H2G2A&OD in the very near future.

Today is my book conception day! How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters, my first collection, will be released in November 2021 by Fairwood Press! Here's the description from the website:

The apocalypse can take many forms. Possibly our end will come by way of an addictive cell phone game that manipulates its users into a crowd-sourced mass murder. Or perhaps our downfall involves aliens drugging us into bliss and then taking it away. Maybe it'll be technological redundancy that leaves loved ones without a purpose, or corporations replacing the natural world with creatures more amenable to market pressure.

All these apocalypses and many more can be found in Erica L. Satifka's debut collection, which gathers together twenty-three short stories from the past decade, including from Clarkesworld,,Lightspeed, Interzone, and The Dark.

While I've published one and a half novels, my first writing love and main focus has always been short stories and it's been my forever dream to have a collection. And Fairwood Press was at the top of my dream publisher list, having put out many of my favorite collections over the past decade. So needless to say, I'm thrilled in ways mere pixels can't express.

So what's inside? HTGTAAOD contains twenty-one of my previously published stories from such venues as Interzone, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Shimmer, as well as two or three original stories, one of which will be set in the Busted Synapses universe.

You can/should pre-order How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters on the Fairwood Press site. If you're a reviewer and want to get an advance review copy, please also get in touch! I am really excited about this collection, and I hope that you will be too!