JUST TWELVE HOURS LEFT!

 Stupefying Stories #19 and Stupefying Stories #20 have both reached the end of contract life of go out-of-print at midnight tonight. To go out with a bang we've dropped the price to just 99-cents each. If you’re looking to add these two to your Kindle collection you’ll never find a better opportunity—but act now, because as of midnight, they're gone forever.  Stupefying...

Read More

Review: Reverse Engineering and Behind Her Eyes • by Pete Wood

Arr, ye scurvy dogs, major spoilers ahead. Ye be warned, ye landlubbers!Here’s my beef. The entire Netflix series and Sarah Pinborough’s source novel are geared towards reaching that head-scratching double twist. Nothing the characters do matters. The genre doesn’t matter. The only goal is to reach that twist. Plausibility and tone be damned. The story is reverse engineered....

Read More

Ask Dr. Cyberpunk • with your host, Bruce Bethke

In the early spring of 1980, I wrote a little short story about a gang of teenage hackers. From the very first draft the story had a one-word title—a new word, one that I’d made up, in a deliberate attempt to grok the interface between the emerging high technology scene and teenage punk attitudes, and this word was—Oh, I bet you can guess. Half a lifetime later I’m still...

Read More

Lights, Camera, Action!

by Pete WoodTwo years ago, I found myself scouting locations for a film adaption of my short story, Quantum Doughnut. Ray Petrolino, the director, and I stood outside Krispy Kreme Doughnuts in downtown Raleigh. We had to revise the story. With customers lined up outside for the best doughnuts in the world, I doubted Krispy Kreme would shut down for a film shoot. We couldn’t...

Read More

Taking “Quantum Doughnut” from Story to Production

 by Alex Granados[continued from Part 1] ... But a few months later, Wood got back in touch and told them production was a go.“Of course everybody was up for it because it meant that we got to hang out all night in the donut shop,” Seth said.Finally, Wood asked Seth if he could cast the loudmouth. Seth didn’t hesitate.“Sure,” he told Wood. “I know the perfect person.”Seth...

Read More

Taking “Quantum Doughnut” from Story to Production

by Alex GranadosWhat do you get when an alien, a physicist, and a loudmouth walk into a doughnut shop? A Quantum Doughnut. Okay, so that’s neither a very good joke nor a particularly appealing introduction to an article about a deceptively profound piece of fiction, so maybe if I could just stop time for a moment and start over… What do you get when an alien, a physicist,...

Read More

LAST CHANCE!

 My, how time flies. Stupefying Stories #19 and Stupefying Stories #20 have both reached the end of contract life of go out-of-print at the end of this month. For the next week, we have dropped the price to just 99-cents for each issue. If you’re looking to add these two books to your Kindle collection, you’ll never find a better opportunity—but act now, because as of...

Read More

It's Quantum Doughnut Week!

What exactly are quantum doughnuts? Well, first you need to understand quantum dots, which are one of these areas where real science and engineering have so far outstripped science fiction that it’s an embarrassment to we in the Professional Imaginationeering business. To put it very simply, quantum dots are atom-sized synthetic semiconductor particles that, because of their...

Read More

MICHAEL SHAARA: Wishing for THE KILLER ALIENS • by Guy Stewart

[Editor’s note: A while back I sent Guy Stewart a book and a challenge, regarding a certain one-time science fiction writer who left the genre and went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-wining author in the mainstream world. Herewith, the result. ~brb]¤    ¤    ¤ He never won any awards with us—no Hugo, no Nebula (oh, that’s right, he’d stopped writing SF by...

Read More

A few words about the book business

 As we work to get Stupefying Stories rebooted and up and running once again, a few observations about the evolving book business seem in order. I have been in the publishing trade in one capacity or another for about forty years, and while I’d thought the changes that occurred between 1980 and 2010 were dramatic, the changes in the past ten years have been breathtaking....

Read More

Not Precisely The Friday Challenge

On further thought, that would be fun, wouldn’t it? To do a steampunk-style remake of A Clockwork Orange? I don’t want to try to revive The Friday Challenge again—that would be way too much work—but I would love to see a short pastiche or vignette spring-boarding from that idea. Make the story earn that “clockwork” in the title.If we get enough good ones, maybe we could even publish a collection under the Stupefying Stories Presents aegis. Call it...

Read More

Ask Dr. Cyberpunk: with your host, Bruce Bethke

 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...

Read More

Coming in SS#23: “They Call Me Charon,” by Gary Pattinson

 Artwork ©2021 Jonathan SemonesGary Pattinson writes: “This short story grew out of my noodling over an SF novel idea. The novel’s heroine was to be exiled from Arc City in a highly public event at the city’s gates. I riffed off of the Charon of Greek mythology and envisioned this old roughened cop who’d become a kind of celebrity, escorting the exiled from the...

Read More