I have a new story out! “How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross” is free to read at Strange Horizons.

It’s a bit of a weird story. Very experimental, but then it’s part of an experimental project of mine. I’m currently the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, which basically means I’m the writer in residence there for 2025. One of the projects that I’m working on as part of the Fellowship is a near future science fiction/climate fiction novel called Bloom, in which a toxic algal bloom invades Otago Harbour. Dunedin, you understand, sits on that harbour, so it’s a very local story!

Down near the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, Dunedin is a great place for wildlife spotting. There are sea lions here, and penguins, and a colony of albatrosses on Taiaroa Head. I’ve been out to see that colony, and the birds are amazing. In the world of Bloom, however, they’re also dead. Poor albatrosses! A lot of the wildlife is dead, in the novel, with the waters choked by algae. And somehow, without my planning it, the novel started to be this exploration of how people might respond to this strange and quietly violent disruption of their environment. “How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross” is actually the first chapter of the novel. It works as a standalone, so when I saw that Strange Horizons was open again for submissions earlier in the year, I sent it along.

I’m so pleased I did!