Stupefying Stories Magazine

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

The Never-ending FAQ • 9 July 2025

By ~brb July 09, 2025 1 comment

Questions have been piling up while I’ve been busy with Otogu, so this is going to be a combination FAQ and status update. Quick, Robin, to the Bat-Agenda!

First item: The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge

This is just a reminder that we’re soliciting reader input for a proposed short story collection, to be drawn from the hundreds of Pete Wood Challenge stories we’re published over the past four years. You’ll find the details and links to all the stories here: https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2025/07/its-time-to-nominate-your-favorite.html

Remember, if you want to vote for a story, put your comments in the above post or send them to our submissions email address. We’ve had to lock-down commenting on older posts because of the spam. If you try to comment on an older story, your comment won’t be lost, but it will go into the moderation queue, and we’ll see it… eventually.

Second item: The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds

Another reminder, that Allan Dyen-Shapiro’s novelette, The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, is now out on just about every ebook platform there is, and in trade paperback, too. Allan will be at Readercon 34 next week, with print copies hot off the presses and ready to sign. If you’re going to Readercon, be sure to stop by and say hi.

While the Amazon-specific print edition is available now, the Ingram print edition seems to be taking a longer than usual time to wend its way through the distribution pipeline. The Amazon edition is available now and slightly cheaper. The Ingram edition is better-quality and will in time be available in wide distribution, but at this time is available only directly from Ingram. (Or from Allan, at Readercon.)

The truly dedicated fan will want both, of course.

Third item: the growing A.I. menace

As you should be able to see from the photo at the top of this page but can’t, the black raspberries are ripe, and the red raspberries are just coming into being ripe. I’ve been unable to get a good photo of the black raspberries, though, because the “we’re going to make you use A.I. whether you want it or not” image filter in my cell phone’s camera software apparently recognizes them as being raspberries, and thus insists they must be red and keeps tinkering with the image to turn the berries red. I mean, everyone knows ripe raspberries are red, right?

This to me is the greatest menace of ubiquitous A.I.: millions of tiny A.I. algorithms out there all suffering from galloping Dunning-Kruger Effect, quietly and constantly editing all that we see, hear, and read to reflect what “everybody knows,” and thus in reality reflecting the original programmer’s unconscious biases and unthinking assumptions. The collective effect on human cognition and critical discernment will be suffocating.

This is no mere jeremiad. It’s already happening in music, where creators are complaining that “AI-Generated Music Is Starting to Crowd Out the Real Stuff on Streaming Platforms.” (Heh. “…a wasteland of unchecked beatspam.” Great description. Wish I’d written that.)

Don’t shrug it off as, “So what? It’s hip-hop.” This is coming soon to your favorite ebook platform. Yes, I know, people are putting lots of low-grade A.I.-generated crap out there already, but such books are not getting much traction… yet. Right now, most readers are smart enough and discerning enough to recognize dim-witted A.I.-generated slop when they see it.

The coming change will not be that A.I.-generated books will get better. It’s that the people who buy books will get stupider.

This is where you come into the story. This is your challenge. Educate your readers. Make them smarter. Don’t succumb to the temptation to write down to the lowest common denominator. Write the best books you can write, and train your readers to expect better.

I know. This sounds like work. But your future depends on there being intelligent, discerning, and literate readers who want to read your work, and won’t settle for A.I.-generated wordspam.

</jeremiad>

Fourth item: the end of the world as we know it

While the robins in the nest under the deck have hatched, the raspberries are doing well, scattering used coffee grounds in the garden seems to be discouraging the deer from conducting any more midnight raids on my beans and tomatoes, and the plum trees are showing promise of producing ripe fruit in the fall, the mulberry trees have completely failed. They were loaded with flowers in the spring, a few weeks after the plums trees bloomed, but they’re barren now.

I blame the suburban obsession with having a smooth, manicured, weed-free lawn. In the early spring, my yard and garden were full of bees. I counted six different species. Then the lawn service trucks came through my neighborhood, and the bees vanished. Any vegetable plant or fruit tree that blossomed after Extermination Day is barren now.

The entire human food chain depends on insect pollinators, my friends. Be kind to them. Don’t spread toxic shit* on your lawns. Tolerate the clover and dig up the dandelions if you must, but don’t poison the bees!

I suppose this explains why “Bootleg Bees,” by Laura Jane Swanson, remains one of my favorite stories, of all the stories I’ve published on this web site.

* One of the more perversely amusing lawn service signs I saw on one of my neighbor’s lawns boasted that they used “only organic chemicals.” Well, rattlesnake venom is an organic chemical, too, but I sure wouldn’t want to walk barefoot across a lawn that’s been freshly sprayed with it.

Fifth item: the future of Stupefying Stories in general and this web site in particular

Quite a few questions have come in lately asking when we’re going to be reopening for submissions, how long stories on this site are going to remain available to readers, when the next issue is coming out, when is Writing 101 going to resume, etc., etc., etc.

The answer to all of these questions is, “We’re working on it. We’ll have better answers next week.” But right at the moment I’ve run out of time for today, so must stop writing now and hit the Publish button.

See you next week, then.

Ask Dr. Cyberpunk • with your host, Bruce Bethke

By ~brb July 05, 2025 2 comments

This being the Independence Day holiday weekend, we’re running The Best of Ask Dr. Cyberpunk today. This column was originally posted on February 19, 2021.

One of the weirder things about being known the world over as “the guy who wrote ‘Cyberpunk’” is that people seem to think I am some sort of judge, arbiter, or elder spokesman for the genre.

On the face of it, the idea of there being any sort of elder anything for cyberpunk is a contradiction in terms. What part of punk don’t you get?

Nonetheless, the questions keep coming in, so I may as well get some value from this smelly dead albatross I’m wearing and turn it into a regular feature. Friday seems as good a day as any for it, so beginning today, the lines are open. Have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me about that story? Post it here, email it to me at brucebethke.cybrpnk @ gmail.com, send it to me in an IM—or what the hell, think it at me, really hard. But be advised that I am absolutely immune to telepathy, so I probably won’t answer.

Today’s question comes from Adrian, who asks: What comes between atompunk and cyberpunk, timeline-wise?

The answer, obviously, is “beepunk:” stories of tech-savvy rebel gardeners hacking the genomes of common backyard pollinators in order to fight the agribusiness megacorporations and stick it to the man. Like this one:

SHOWCASE: “Bootleg Bees,” by Laura Jane Swanson

Somewhat more seriously: cyberpunk began as a self-conscious attempt to apply 1970s punk rock anomie to the emerging 1980s high tech scene, and then to extrapolate what might happen next and take it forward from there. I have always been more interested in what comes next than in what’s already been done, and figured that—

Well, it doesn’t matter what I figured, because that book was never written.

In the meantime, while almost every other young sci-fi writer around was writing Bill Gibson fanfic and every agent and publisher in the business was scrambling to find another book “just like Neuromancer only different,” Paul Di Filippo took a really good crack at “what’s next?” in Ribofunk, and essentially invented biopunk.

Unfortunately, Gibson & Sterling had a much bigger hit with The Difference Engine, and thus invented steampunk.

I thought the basic idea of The Difference Engine was fairly clever—that Charles Babbage’s analog computers had actually worked, and therefore the computer revolution hit western civilization a century earlier than it actually did—but what most everyone else seemed to seize on was the Victorian Era costumes, trappings, and set dressings. Instead of going forward and thinking about what might be next, it was as if science fiction as a whole suddenly took a great leap backward, and started over again, with Jules Verne.

Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. Steampunk begat clockpunk—and gods below, I grew to hate clockpunk. Seemed like every week one of the major publishers was launching a new series with the word “clockwork” in the title: The Clockwork King, The Clockwork Crowbar, The Clockwork Assassin, The Clockwork Toaster, The Clockwork Schlockwork…

Nota bene: A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, is not a steampunk novel.

Steampunk begat dieselpunk, which begat raypunk, which begat atompunk, which begat solarpunk, which begat… Oh, I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few more in there. The point is, science fiction is now cluttered with dozens of *.punk microgenres, all of which suffer from such paucity of imagination that they can’t even think of a word to describe themselves that does not end in punk. Speaking ex cathedra, Doctor Cyberpunkenstein heartily wishes that all these eager young writers would find their own damn names for their new genres!

Ahem. Excuse me.

So, to answer the initial question: if atompunk is a sort of refurbished atom-age SF of the 1940s~1950s as derived by way of steampunk, and cyberpunk began in the 1970s, then what falls between them in the timeline would be…

Hippiepunk? Except hippiepunk is an oxymoron, as punk rock was first and foremost a rebellion against hippies in general and the pompous dinosaur arena bands that evolved in the 1960s in particular, so let’s call it, oh—

Acidpunk. Stories of society’s rebels and outcasts fighting the pharmaceutical megacorporations and sticking it to the man by hacking the chemistry lab and cooking up new psychedelic drugs.

While listening to The Doors and Jefferson Airplane? Suddenly this all begins to seem terribly familiar to me. I suppose, just as William Burroughs and Alfred Bester were the points of departure for so many of the early cyberpunk writers, this means your points of departure for acidpunk would be Ken Kesey, Thomas Wolfe, and Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories. Considering that out here in the Real World we seem to be stuck recapitulating 1968 through 1973 right now, this is also probably exactly the right time to be revisiting Kurt Vonnegut’s early novels, with an eye towards giving Vonnegut’s ideas a punk style facelift. If I were to do this, I think I’d start by rereading Cat’s Cradle.

Over to you.

—Bruce Bethke

In lieu of an author’s bio, Bruce Bethke would like to direct your attention to this very short story:

“On the Conservation of Historical Momentum”

After you’ve read it—and “Bootleg Bees,” don’t forget that story, too—why not take a look at Allan Dyen-Shapiro’s “The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds,” for a nice big heaping helping of hopepunk.

Going to Readercon 24? (Plus, our 4th of July Sale!)

By ~brb July 03, 2025 No comments

Allan Dyen-Shapiro will be at Readercon 34, July 17-20!

Better yet, he’ll be there with print copies of The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, fresh off the presses and ready to sign! If you’re going to Readercon, be sure to find him and say hi!

If you aren’t going to Readercon, you can still get the book, either in ebook or paperback. It’s now out on a plethora of ebook platforms, all of which you’ll find at this link:

https://books2read.com/The-Day-We-Said-Goodbye-to-the-Birds

As for getting a print copy, the Amazon-exclusive version has been out for about two weeks now and looks fine, but we now have a link to the new IngramSpark edition, which is going into wider distribution and will be available (soon, we hope) through outlets such as Barnes & Noble, etc. The books Allan will have to sign at Readercon will be the IngramSpark edition.

We also have a QR code for the IngramSpark edition, which is something entirely new to us. If someone who is familiar with QR codes would be so kind as to do whatever it is one does with QR codes to this incomprehensible glob, and let us know what it does, we’d greatly appreciate it.

Why two print editions, you ask? Because while Amazon is much faster, the IngramSpark edition is just all-around better, in a variety of subtle ways. Better paper, better alignment of the interior content to the trim size, better color printing on the cover, and a tighter and more durable binding. The most important difference, though, is that while Amazon can in theory put the book into wider distribution, Ingram actually does get our books into real honest-to-God bookstores, most notably Barnes & Noble.

The astute observer will also note that as of today, the Amazon print edition is priced at $7.99 USD, while the Ingram edition is priced at $8.99. This is a temporary difference. While the Ingram edition is slightly more expensive to produce, it’s a lot more expensive to distribute. Thus, we had to set a slightly higher MSRP.

Consider this an inadvertent and unplanned Fourth of July Sale. Through the coming weekend, you can buy the Amazon print version for just $7.99.

By Monday, we should have the two versions fully synced, and then the Amazon price will go up to $8.99 USD, to match the IngramSpark price.

It’s Time To Nominate Your Favorite Stories!

By ~brb July 01, 2025 33 comments

All good things must end someday, and this includes The Pete Wood Challenge. After a four-year run and more than 230 published stories, it’s time to close the circus, strike the big top, pay off the roustabouts, and send the elephants off to their well-deserved retirements in The Elephant Sanctuary.

However…

Before we go, there is just one more thing we need you to do.

Four years. More than 230 published stories. That’s a lot. Looking back on it all, it seems like the only fitting way to wrap up The Pete Wood Challenge would be by putting together a book:

The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge

What I’d like to do is a reprint collection, putting together in some kind of meaningful order the stories that represent the very best of all the work that has come through the PWC in the past four years. The problem is: how do we define the best?

I can’t ask Pete to do it. He’d want to reprint everything. I can’t afford to do that.

(Yes, the selected authors will be paid for reprint rights.)

I can’t go by site metrics. These are wildly skewed and more than a little suspect. If we went strictly by readership numbers, the single most-read story would be “King of Chrome,” by Travis Burnham, which has drawn more than 3,400 reads!

Or has it? Considering that it’s also drawn thousands of spam comments, I have to think there is something in that story that really appeals to the algorithms of spambots, much as there are things in “Canned Kraken” by Tobias Backman or “Pink Marble” by Zoe Kaplan that continue to draw spam comments galore.

(I will confess, even with all possible spam filters engaged, having to moderate the comments section has taken a lot of the fun out of running this web site.)

Ruling out the obvious spam magnets, it appears the all-time most read stories in the Pete Wood Challenge have been “For Sale: Used Time Machine. No Refunds!” by Roxana Arama and “Songbird, Jailbird,” by Pauline Barmby. But a host of other factors have also affected the readership numbers over time and from challenge to challenge, and so it seemed unfair to me to pick the stories for the collection based solely on metrics. The list would skew towards older stories, as they’ve had more time to rack up reads. Deserving gems might be overlooked, because they were published at a bad time. Less-deserving stories might be included, solely because their authors had really great social media presences. Selecting the very best stories was beginning to seem like an insoluble problem, until I had a thought…

Why not ask you?

And thus, we come to:

The Final Pete Wood Challenge

Here is the complete (we hope) list of every story we have published in the past four years as part of the Pete Wood Challenge. What we want you to do is skim through this list, read anything that catches your interest, and then—this is the tricky part—nominate your choices for stories to be included in the ‘Best of’ collection!

Don’t comment on the stories themselves. I’ve had to lock-down commenting on older posts because of the ever-growing spambot menace. Put your comments in this post, if you don’t mind their being public, or in an email to our submissions mailbox, if you’d rather they were private.

The nominations period closes July 31st. If there are a lot of nominations we may do a run-off to pick the finalists, but I’ll be surprised if that’s necessary. We’re doing this by Chicago Rules: vote early and vote often! Campaigning and log-rolling allowed! Bribes appreciated but not necessary!

Tell your friends! Tell your fans! Tell the people you know who aren’t such good friends but can be cajoled into voting for you anyway! But most of all: READ THE STORIES!

And share the link. Remember, likes and hearts are nice, but shares and retweets get the message out.

Thanks,

Bruce Bethke
Stupefying Stories

Challenge #38: “Happy Trails”

All good things must end eventually, and this includes the Pete Wood Challenge. After a four-year run and more than 230 published stories, the final Pete Wood Challenge was to write a flash fiction story of up to 150 words in length, inspired by the prompt, “Happy Trails.”

First Place: “The Marks in the Walls” • by Sophie Sparrow

Second Place: “Farther Galaxy’s Choose Your Own Adventure” • by C. L. Sidell

Third Place: “The Unicorn Farm” • by Carol Scheina

Honorable Mentions:

“May Your Path Be Blessed Forever” • by Jeff Currier

“Flashes” • by Gideon P. Smith

Challenge #37: “Out of Gas”

The challenge was to write a flash fiction story of up to 150 words in length, inspired by the prompt, “out of gas.”

First Place: “Scavenger Hunt” • by Jeff Currier

Second Place: “Visions in the Jar” • by Sophie Sparrow

Third Place: “A Visit to the Recycling Center” • by Christopher Degni

Honorable Mentions:

“Panne d'Essence” • by Andrew Jensen

“Once With a Blue Moose” • by Lori Jensen

“Parting Ways” • by C. L. Sidell

“What Fuels Us” • by Richard Zwicker

“Do Not Go Gentle” • by Karin Terebessy

Challenge #36: “Pick Two”

The challenge was to write a story of up to 150 words in length, keying off two of the following words: turkey, parade, football, fir tree, stocking, or cranberry. However, the story could not be about a holiday, a meal, or a gathering of relatives.

First Place: “When the Wind Changes,” by Tobias Backman

Second Place: “Anders in Exile,” by Andrew Jensen

Third Place: “Outside,” by C. L. Sidell

Honorable Mentions:

“The Most Dangerous Game,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“Bitter Return,” by Pauline Barmby

“Talking Turkey with Tom,” by Richard Zwicker

“Hunters,” by Jason P. Burnham

Challenge #35: “The Offseason”

“Not a Fan” • by Pete Wood

“The Offs” • by Ted Macaluso (1st Place Winner)

“Reflections on Carnival-by-the-Sea” • by Christopher Degni (2nd Place)

“Dangerouser and Dangerouser” • by Sophie Sparrow (3rd Place)

Honorable Mentions:

“Tonight, We Embrace the Dark” • by Gideon P. Smith

“Efficiency Optimization” • by Jeff Currier

“Planting” • by C. L. Sidell

“Footprints” • by Robin Blasberg

Challenge #34: “Homeless”

“Proper Witch’s Home” • by Carol Scheina

“The Sky Will Fall” • by Tobias Backman

“The Ghost of Moscow” • by Sophie Sparrow

“Wandering the Cosmos” • by D.A. Xiaolin Spires

“Towerless” • by Lorraine Schein

Challenge #33: Space: 1999!

INTRODUCTION:
The Space: 1999 story contest wasn’t officially a Pete Wood Challenge competition, but there was enough overlap that we decided to include those stories in this index.

Space $19.99! (The initial announcement of the competition)

Follow-up Questions about the Contest

The winning stories, in publication order:

“Today in London History” • by Judith Field

“Pulling Up the Moon” • by Karl Dandenell

“Waxing Crescent” • by Andrew Jensen

“Fathom” • by Made in DNA

“Chasing the Moon” • by Karin Terebessy

“A Curse and a Blessing” • by Jeff Currier

“Must Have Been Moonglow” • by Jeanne Van Slyke

“Happy Anniversary?” • by Andrew Jensen

Challenge #32: “Punchline”

“Wielder of Wit” • by Ian Li

“A Behemoth Problem” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“Cruel, Unusual, and Optional” • by Gustavo Bondoni

“Green Shoots” • by Christopher Degni

“Punch Flavored Punch” • by Yelena Crane

Challenge #31: “The story must be set on the island of Tristan Da Cunha”

“The Potato Singer” • by Ian Li

“The Sirens’ Salvation” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“A Quiet Where Magic Can Grow” • by Kai Holmwood

“A Snail’s Pace” • by Pete Wood

“Floating Light Over the Waves” • by Brandon Case

“Canned Kraken” • by Tobias Backman

Challenge #30: “Hike”

“When the Woman in the Forest Says, ‘Please, You Must Help’” • by Elis Montgomery

“Astronaut Countdown” • by Brandon Case

“Summit, in Memory” • by Ian Li

“Like Clockwork” • by Yelena Crane

“Argentina, Before Barcode Scanners” • by Gustavo Bondoni

Challenge #29: “Draft”

“A Jackass Walks into a Bar” • by Pete Wood

“Forgetting on Draft” • by Elis Montgomery

“The Triennial Igneous Tri-Partite Competition” • by Pauline Barmby

“Service With a Smile” • by Gustavo Bondoni

“The Draft Horse Doesn’t Leave the Stable at Night Anymore” • by Jason P. Burnham

Challenge #28: Pick two: cat, poker, storm, sandwich

“Ante Up” • by Pete Wood

“To Hell and Back” • by Kai Delmas

“Hosting a Tempest” • by Ian Li

“The Hand That Feeds” • by Tobias Backman

“How to Win at Cards When You’re Sick of Being Queen,” by Elis Montgomery

“The New Familiar” • by Lorraine Schein

Challenge #27: “You Need to Make New Friends”

“Don’t Ignore Your Television’s Captioning” • by Carol Scheina

“Honeybunny and the Embroidery Witch” • by Brandon Case

“Literally” • by Yelena Crane

“Watch Over Me” • by Addison Smith

“It’s Alive!” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

Challenge #26: “Nine Lives”

“There is Only One Black Cat” • by Pauline Barmby

“Forced Perspective” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“The Moments Between” • by Elis Montgomery

“Runt of the Litter” • by Gustavo Bondoni

Challenge #25: “Desert”

“Internal Combustion” • by Gustavo Bondoni

“Rain Dancer” • by Sylvia Heike

“No Justice for Deserters” • by Pauline Barmby

“Treasure Hunting in the Old City” • by Christopher Degni

“Egg Disputes Beneath the Desert’s Quietest Erg” • by Jason P. Burnham

Challenge #24: “Outpost”

“Ivy’s Tower,” by Gretchen Tessmer

“Sending Love,” by Kimberly Ann Smiley

“Lunar Ghosts,” by Sylvia Heike

“Anagram Ed,” by Ron Ferguson

“Trash-Talking Space Honky Trips Over the Finish Line,” by Brandon Case

“Roadside Stand,” by Pete Wood

Challenge #23: “Static”

“The Nightingale Sings,” by Sylvia Heike

“Angels,” by Sophie Sparrow

“My Name is Static,” by Christopher Degni

“Symmetry,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“Sound Affects,” by Kimberly Ann Smiley

Challenge #22: “Writer’s Block”

INTRODUCTION:
This week we hand the SHOWCASE microphone over to Pete Wood, to present the results of another Pete Wood Challenge. Normally participation in The Pete Wood Challenge is restricted to members of the CODEX online writing group, but this time Pete decided to extend the invitation to participate to the members of the Stupefying Stories Secret Inner Circle as well. His challenge was to write a 125-word flash fiction piece inspired by the words, “writer’s block,” whatever you might interpret them to mean.

Unfortunately Pete interrupted me with this idea while I was in the midst of doing a very important crossword puzzle, so instead of a flash fiction story all I was able to give him was yet another rejection letter, as I have sent him so many before.

___________________

Dear Mr. Wood,

Thank you for your inquiry. Yes, there is a medical treatment for the condition commonly known as "Writer's Block," but I would advise against pursuing it. The treatment is a rarely performed neurosurgical operation called the "Faulkner Procedure," but it has potentially deadly side effects. In a small but significant percentage of patients the procedure at first appears to be successful, but then the patient develops "Joyce Syndrome," which is, tragically, irreversible. After that the only humane option remaining is euthanasia. Unfortunately your stated limit of 125 words is far too short to capture the full horror of seeing someone who was once an intelligent and articulate human being reduced to babbling idiocy by the onset of Joyce Syndrome.

Sincerely,
Dr. Bruce Bethke
Mayo Clinic, Rochester MN

___________________