SCIENCE FACT: “A Generation Ship The Size of a Small Planet” • by Bruce Bethke

[Nota bene: This was first published in 2008. I rediscovered it recently while looking for fiction to bubble back to the top for The Best of Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE, and after re-reading it now, well… It’s a long read, but I think the length is necessary to support the disturbing conclusion I reached. Enjoy?  ~brb]

Part 1: The Multi-Generational Con

In the course of a discussion of Social Security, a reader named Athor Pel asked a few of my favorite questions.

I’ve been pondering some questions lately.

Why are we willing to pay taxes?

1) that we didn’t vote into existence

2) to a government that we didn’t have any say in creating originally

It was all in place before we were born.

Why should we play the game? 

These are some of my favorite questions, and not because I’m advocating a tax revolt—although I do believe that if we did not have automatic income tax withholding, and if all gainfully employed Americans therefore had to write a check to the government every three months just as we gainfully self-employed people do, then we would have one very angry tax revolt in very hot progress in very short order—

No, these questions fascinate me because of one of the hoary old mainstays of hard science fiction: the generation ship.

The idea, if you’re not familiar with it, goes like this. Since we know that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is not just the law, it’s the absolute limit, and we know that hyperdrive, warp drive, jump drive, and all the other variously named ways of getting beyond c are merely convenient fictional gimmicks with no basis in reality, the other obvious way for humans to cross vast interstellar distances is by building ships so big they’re self-contained ecologies, and then launching them out with the assumption that the crew will breed, and it will be their many-generations-removed descendants who will actually arrive at wherever it is the ship is going.

Silver Age SF writers in general and those who wrote for Boy’s Life in particular got a lot of mileage out of this idea. I grew up on Heinlein juveniles and Dale Colombo’s “Starship Magellan” stories, and loved ‘em. The problem came later, when I, as an adult writer, started looking at the idea afresh, with the intention of using it in a novel, and began to run into the same sorts of questions that Athor Pel posed.

What exactly is a generation ship? Pared down to its nub, it’s a closed, utopian society, on a mission to some goal that was defined long before the current occupants were born. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that in all my readings of history, I have yet to find a single example of a closed, utopian society that lasted more than five generations—and that’s using a very lax definition of “utopian.” The Soviet Union, for example, was supposed to be a utopian society, and yet even the Soviet Union, with all its formidable power, did not last five generations.

Five generations seems to be the outside limit. Three generations is when things start to fall apart. The first-generation founders of the utopia usually manage okay, if they’re not complete blithering idiots. (See “The Great Hippie Commune Disaster of 1968.”) The founders can usually do a decent job of indoctrinating most of their children, and controlling the few nonconformists. But by the time the grandchildren of the founders come along, a lot more people are asking Athor’s questions, and by the time the great-grandchildren reach adulthood, the pressure to either radically change the terms of the mission or else to just tear the whole damned thing down and start over become nearly irresistible.

This does not bode well for the prospects of a successful generation ship on its way to Proximi Centauri.

Which leads to a different line of thought: if you have a ship so large it’s a self-contained ecology, why bother leaving Sol system at all? It’s not as if there’s a shortage of room here. Why not just park the thing, say, three months ahead or behind of Earth’s position in solar orbit, and con the poor buggers on-board into believing they’re on a centuries-long multi-generational voyage to Farfnargle IV? Or, if you want to get really tricky, why not just shoot it into a long orbit out to the Kuiper Belt and back, so that the “colonists” think they’re arriving on Epison Whachamacallit when all they’re really doing is finally returning to Earth?

So that’s the root idea. Now where’s the story in this?

§

Part 2: Maintaining Social Cohesion and the Problem of Mission’s End

Once we establish base camp at this premise, there are plenty of directions in which we can start prospecting for a story idea. How do we create a closed, stable, hermetically sealed society that will survive a generations-long voyage aboard a starship? In his juvenile novels Heinlein tended to favor organizing microcosmic societies along paramilitary lines, which is a great idea if you’re also planning to sell your novels as serials in Boy’s Life. (A market that, sadly, vanished about fifty years ago.) Most people of socialistic bent eventually hit on the idea of using paramilitary organizations as an effective way to indoctrinate and discipline their young. Sometimes it even works—for a while.

Alternatively, you can consider using religion as your general-purpose societal adhesive. Sadly, these sorts of stories tend to be written mostly by lazy writers with poor research skills and only a dim understanding of the workings of actual religions, who focus on the suffocating, oppressive, punitive, and claustrophobic aspects of their ginned up societies and tend to cast their heroes and/or heroines as the lone iconoclasts who discover that The Priests Are Lying And They Alone Know The Truth; e.g., “For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”. But even the Amish, who most people accept as having about as religiously closed a community as can be, do not have a truly closed society, as five minutes of cursory research will suffice to prove.

Then there’s the problem of over-adaptation. Once they’ve spent a few generations adapting to life on-board the ship, how do you get ‘em off the bluddy thing at the end of the journey? A sufficiently clever, evil, and cynical mission designer might specify that the ship essentially self-destructs at the end of the journey, thus forcing the passengers to disembark. But given enough time, any such destruction mechanism can be disarmed, or more interestingly, diverted to other purposes. So maybe there’s a story in that:

“Five centuries ago their ancestors embarked on a journey to Proximi Centauri. Now they’re coming back—with a big effing bomb—and boy, are they pissed!” 

Next, what about reaction mass? Assuming the ship was accelerated up to some worthwhile fraction of c as it left Earth, you’d need nearly as much fuel to decelerate it at the end of the trip. Phil Jennings and I played intellectual hacky sack with this one for a while but never came up with a answer we agreed on. Maybe the ship doesn’t slow and the crew never disembarks? Maybe it just keeps on going, seeding every potentially habitable planet it comes across with human-like colonists sufficiently genetically modified to survive under local conditions? James Blish used this idea more than fifty years ago in “Surface Tension,” and Ursula Le Guin nearly forty years ago in her Hainish Cycle, but it strikes me that from the viewpoint of another species, this might constitute an act of war.

“AIIEEE! There’s a terrible giant mystery ship passing through our solar system and it’s seeding our planet with hideous alien monsters!”

Maybe there’s a story in that. Or more likely a script treatment…

Hmm. Hideous monsters. At any significant fraction of c, hitting pretty much any dust mote or stray sub-atomic particle would trigger a spatter of ionizing radiation. Assuming your ship has something resembling a front end, it would need some awesome shielding there to protect the inhabitants, but even so the accumulated exposure to heavy radiation over the course of several generations would produce—well, most likely a plague of cancers that exterminates the crew, but let’s be kinder and imagine mutations instead. For a while I toyed with that idea: what if the multi-generation crew is expendable, and the real colonists are all in some sort of cryostasis in a heavily shielded cargo hold?

There are many stories that could spring from this. What if the colonists are recognizably human children, shipped as frozen embryos and being raised on the colony world by loving but hideously deformed monsters? What if two competing colonies and cultures get established: the planned colony of “perfect” humans and the unplanned colony created by the surviving mutated descendants of the ship’s crew? What if the crew stumbles onto the fact that they are considered expendable, and start to view the frozen colonists as a source of transplantable body parts to maintain their cancerous, malformed, and increasingly cybernetically augmented bodies?

Or better yet, what if they start to view the colonists as just so much frozen food?

Yeah, there are some great stories that could be spun out of those ideas.

§

 

But ultimately, the idea for the novel I got closest to starting to write was remarkably similar to the one that, quite independently, Henry Vogel came up with. What if someone invents a religion, for the sole purpose of getting control over lots of very affluent but otherwise very stupid people? What if someone is so convinced of the rightness of his apocalyptic vision that he uses the wealth of his followers to build an Ark in Space, to send the descendants of the Chosen Ones to another world? But the gimmick is, it’s all a con, as the inner circle knows the technology to send a ship across interstellar distances doesn’t really exist, and so the real plan is that the ship will just take a leisurely one- or two-century-long excursion around the solar system and then return to Earth, where it is expected that things will have settled down again and the Earthbound survivors, if any, will treat the returning ship’s passengers as gods.

Except, of course, that when they return to Earth (truly believing that they are in fact arriving at an alien but strangely parallel planet in another star system—they’re otnay ootay rightbay, after all), they discover a world on which their revered founder’s predicted apocalypse never happened. And so, earnestly believing themselves to be enlightened star voyagers, they plunge headlong into this “new” society, sanctimoniously determined to keep it from repeating the same mistakes that “destroyed” Old Earth!

[nb: all the while utterly clueless to the fact that the doomsday prophecy they’d based their entire religion, lives, and mission on was just plain flat-out wrong. I thought this was the funniest thing about the concept and a great potential springboard for satire. Apparently I was wrong; people like to take their apocalyptic beliefs very seriously. But...]

There. That is the story that I liked.

The place where I got bogged down was in the matter of the religion. I didn’t want to use a real religion: I have no desire to draw the attention of either litigious and affluent a-holes or the sort of people who slit the throats of infidels. So I figured this would have to be a nonsense religion, of the sort that could only possibly appeal to people with great gobs of money, enormous egos, and very tiny brains. I figured I’d make this religion one started as a joke by some 1940s musician of modest talent, in which followers gathered in “listening rooms,” put on headphones, listened to recordings of Big Bill Broonzy and Bessie Smith, and meditated (at affordable hourly rates) on the profound spiritual implications of the color blue. I was thinking of calling this religion, “Cyantodigy.”

And that’s when the whole thing fell apart...

§

Part 3: “Four score and seven years ago…”

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

It’s early morning, on the last day of 2008. But it is not merely morning; it’s one of those wonderfully clear, cold, and crisp winter mornings we get up here in the north country. The sun is still well below the horizon: at this time of year it doesn’t rise until nearly 8 a.m. The sky is one flawless and unbroken wash of color, cross-fading from rosy false dawn in the southeast to deep blue and starry in the northwest. The plume of steam from my neighbor’s chimney is rising nearly straight up, slowly and gently, meaning there’s little or no wind—which is good, because at -5° F it’s already cold enough out there. Down in the garden a cottontail is gnawing on a piece of bark in the firewood pile. With six inches of fresh global warming on the ground since yesterday, there’s nothing else left for it to eat except buckthorn, and even starving rabbits won’t touch buckthorn.

It is said that Nature abhors a vacuum. Looking out my backyard window, day after day, month after month, year after year, it seems clear to me that the one thing Nature really abhors is stasis.

And yet that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it, when we talk about building a generation ship: about building a giant, perfect, static, Habitat for Humanity; a veritable terrarium in space? The sort of hubris required to believe that you can build a perfect world in a bottle is, on the face of it, staggering.

But then the literature of science fiction, the world of political science, and the realms of the social engineers have never lacked for microcosmic gods.

I’ve been asked how I define a closed society. I would have to define it as one with no pressure-relief valve; no mechanism to disrupt the stasis; no opportunity to rebel without courting utter disaster. A perfectly closed society is one from which there is no escape, except by dying.

We Americans have always had a strangely romantic view of rebellion, and especially failed rebellions. Perhaps it’s because for most of the past 500 years this entire continent has been nothing but one giant pressure-relief valve. I don’t know about you, but at least one set of my ancestors came to America after ending up on the wrong side of a failed revolution in Europe.

Everywhere else on Earth and in history, rebellions, successful or otherwise, have always been followed by the traditional Mass Slaughter of the Losers. For a terribly brief period—a mere five centuries—this pattern was changed by the existence of a giant, continent-sized pressure relief valve called the New World. These Americas were settled largely by the losers of Europe, who emigrated, fled, or otherwise escaped here. (And also by the losers of Africa, who were shipped over and sold as chattel here, but that is a different story.) Two hundred and forty years ago the losers in the American Revolution—in our history books we call them “Tories” and never mention them again — fled either north to Canada, south to the Bahamas, or deeper into the continent. One hundred and sixty years ago the losers in the Civil War fled again, some to South America, but most even deeper into the West. (For an excellent explication of this latter theme, I recommend reading, And Die in the West, by Paula Mitchell Marks.)

Yes, I know, I’m playing fast and loose with dates. There is a reason for this. Stay with me.

Slightly over a century ago, in 1890, the pressure-relief valve began to close. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this was the year the frontier officially ceased to exist. There was no longer any boundary between settled and unsettled lands, or explored and unexplored territory; now all that was left was to fill in the blanks. Perhaps not coincidentally, in 1896 the frontier of the imagination can be said to have officially opened, with the founding of the first pulp fiction magazine, Argosy.

A decade after that, and the Progressive movement was in flower, exploring the frontier of the terrarium and calling it Utopia. If there can be said to be one grand unifying idea underlying all the different flavors of Progressivism, it is this: that instead of Man creating Society, it was now time for Society to begin creating a new and better form of Man.

I for one deeply distrust people who truly believe Utopia is attainable. They always start out talking about the joys of living in their perfect world-in-a-bottle, but sooner or later get around to talking about the unpleasant necessity of weeding out those who are not fit to live there. Whenever someone starts talking about the need to change Man to better suit Society, be afraid; be very afraid.

§

The creative synergism is always difficult to explain. I was thinking about the Civil War—which, the more I consider it, closely resembles its contemporaries, Bismarck’s wars of German unification and Garibaldi’s wars of Italian unification, so perhaps it should properly be termed Lincoln’s War of American Unification—

I was thinking about the war, and the giant pressure-relief valve that was the Wild West, and concurrently ruminating over my theory that no closed society survives more than from three to five generations after its founding. Okay, let’s split the difference and call it four generations. Just how long is four generations?

Well, from a purely biological standpoint it can be as short as fifty years or as long as 160, but let’s accept the conventional definition and say that one generation is twenty years, and therefore four generations is eighty years. Expressed another way, that’s four-score years.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure...”

It doesn’t line up with mathematical pseudo-scientific psycho-historical precision, of course. This is an organic system we’re talking about, after all, and in an organic system there is always a fair amount of slop. But the pattern seems to hold true with disquieting accuracy.

In 1695, Americans were for the most part the loyal subjects of the King of England. By 1775 rebellion was at a furious boil, and the lid was about to blow off the kettle. The nation that emerged from the smoke and fire of Yorktown a decade later would have been unrecognizable to the Americans of even two generations before. A land without a king, where even Jews and Catholics were allowed to practice their religions freely? Unthinkable!

Four generations later, the pattern repeats. By 1855 the Republic was coming apart at the seams, and the idea that America was composed of a voluntary union of separate but equal states died in Mr. Lincoln’s war. The nation that emerged from the smoke and fire of Gettysburg would have been unrecognizable to the Americans of an earlier generation—which many of them proved, by fleeing into the Wild West. A land where even Negroes were allowed to vote and own property? Unthinkable!

Four more generations? That puts us in or around 1935, and while the popular image of that decade now is of soup lines, Oakies, bank robbers and Depression glass, the nation was much closer to the brink of disintegration than people now like to admit. There were authentic Fascist plots to overthrow the government. There were Communist plots, too. In the end FDR somehow held the country together, with considerable unintentional assistance from the Japanese and Germans, but as my parents never got tired of pointing out, the nation that emerged from the Great Depression and World War II was one that would have been unrecognizable to the people of the 1920s.

There is ample evidence to support this assertion. If we accept that science fiction is collective secular prophecy packaged in commercially marketable form, then the science fiction of the 1920s proves that the world of 1950 was unthinkable to the people of only twenty years earlier.

§

What about now? Today? I’m a science fiction writer, and having observed the failures of prescience of so many other writers before me, I am reluctant to prognosticate. However, I can’t help but notice that we are approaching the 80th anniversary of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, 

[nb: This was written in 2008, remember?]

and that every eighty years or so we seem to spew up a truly transformational leader who for better or worse rewrites the terms of the social contract.

Do the times make the man or does the man define his time? I don’t know. All I know for certain is this: Nature abhors stasis. And this leads me to wonder whether this four-generations principle has nothing to do with whether a society is closed or open, but is only more readily visible in a closed society.

Or perhaps our society is not so open after all...

§

Part 4: In lieu of a conclusion... 

Conclusion? I have no conclusion. I’ve held off clicking the [Publish Post] button for hours now in hopes of coming up with a stirring and inspirational conclusion, but the best I’ve been able to come up with is an observation. Like it or not, we are all here together on this giant multi-generational spaceship we call the Earth, traveling into the future at Time Factor 1X. The only thing we can be certain of now is that things will change, and what matters most to you and your posterity is how you react and adapt to this change.

And with that thought, I wish you all a happy, safe, and successful New Year.

Nil desperandum,
~brb

31 December 2008

REPRISE: “Sunday Dinner with la Famiglia (and Nonno’s Brain)” • by Franco Amati

 

Art by Justine Backes

Sunday dinner with the family was a little different this week. 

We all sat around a dumpy-ass table in the middle of the nursing home. From where I was sitting, I could see a big bowl of pasta. My younger sister Gina was across from me, and next to her was the big jar with Grandpa’s brain in it. We called him Nonno, and he didn’t say much these days. A few of his usual phrases once in a while, but that was it.

The jar was filled with this blueish fluid, and there were all these sensors and wires coming out of Nonno’s lumpy old sponge. Attached to the cart that held the jar was a mounted rig with a large mechanical arm that Nonno could control if he wanted to.

“Whattatheycallit again? A vath?” Gina asked.

“A vat, honey,” Mom said…

» READ IT NOW

---

Franco Amati is a speculative fiction writer from New York. His educational background is in cognitive science. His fiction has appeared in The Colored Lens, Northern Speculative, Utopia Science Fiction, and other places. You can find more of his work at francoamatiwrites.com

The Never-ending FAQ • 28 March 2025, Part 2

Continuing the FAQ I ran out of time to finish yesterday:

Q: If you are going to post a picture of Mr. Ruffles, the most famous cat in speculative fiction, you gotta republish “Take Me To Your Litter Box.”

A: Whether Mr. Ruffles is indeed the most famous cat in speculative fiction is highly debatable. If you want to assert that he is, Lazarus Long and Jubal Harshaw will likely want to have words with you. (“Can your cat walk through walls? Hmm?”) In fact, we could probably fill an entire week with heated fannish arguments over exactly which cat is the most famous, notable, important, adorable, etc., etc., etc. cat in speculative fiction. 

Personally, I have to go with Flyball, the intrepid gray kitten who is the hero of Ruthven Todd’s Space Cat series, which I absolutely loved when I was about seven years old. I haven’t looked at those books since. As a rule, I’ve found that the SF/F books I loved as a child don’t hold up well on re-examination.

As for cat stories we’ve published, though: in spelunking through the archives, looking for tails tales to tout in The Best of Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE feature, I’ve found that we don’t just have enough cat stories to fill a week: we could parse it quite finely and do an “Anthropomorphic Cat Week.” Or a “Witch’s Familiar Cat Week.” Or even, as the illo at the top of this column suggests, an “Anthropomorphic Cats Playing Cards Week.”

Damn, we’ve published a lot of cat stories!

If I have to pick one story to recommend as a place to start, though, it has to be Carol Scheina’s “The Disappearing Cat Trick.” These cats can walk through walls.

Q: Speaking of The Odin Chronicles, whatever happened to Season 2? 

A: Pete and his team of writers got waylaid by Otogu, and it turned into, pardon the expression, an exercise in herding cats. The good news though is that Pete has come up with a plan to complete the season, and he and his writers are moving ahead with that. I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished product and to publishing it, and most of all, to finding a home for the podcast version of Season One, as I spent a bundle on it and it’s already produced and in the can. Stay tuned for more details.

Q: Speaking of serials in general, I clicked the The Serials button in the top bar, and all I got was a message saying “temporary placeholder file.” What’s up with that?

A: The same thing that’s up with so much else on this site. The transition to people doing most of their reading on their phones happened much faster than we anticipated. When we created this site, it was optimized for reading on a desktop or laptop computer. A lot of the clever features we embedded in the site design aren’t even visible when you’re looking at it on a phone.

This problem was one of the things that made us realize we really needed to rethink and completely redo our web presence—but then Otogu struck, and the work remains unfinished.

Q: There’s that name again: “Otogu.” Where have I heard that before?

A: It is said that somewhere in the Far East, in the mist-shrouded K’themai Isles, there stands a great temple, built by the now-vanished K’bab peoples and dedicated to Otogu the Insatiable, Devourer of Days. In the heart of this temple there squats a grotesque giant idol, purportedly depicting Otogu himself, and while the idol is gilded with purest gold, the visage is that of a vast, flabby, and revoltingly toad-like creature, miserable with constipation. For though he consumes ceaselessly, despite all his straining, in the end, Otogu produces frustratingly little.

The K’bab legends as they have filtered down through the ages say Otogu is forever hungry because he feeds on nothing more substantial than time itself, and so is never sated. Further, the legends hold that in the very end Otogu will consume every last moment of every day, and in final desperation turn on himself, beginning with his own left foot and consuming even his own body until utterly nothing remains. And thus will the world end, although right up until the final seconds, Mankind will be too busy working to notice what’s happening.

The K’bab peoples are long gone, now; their myth of Otogu, barely remembered. Jungle has reclaimed the once mighty but now nameless city, save for the weed-strewn courtyard and the vine-covered temple mound. The first white man to see the temple, the daringly brave but severely navigationally challenged pioneering aviator Wrong-Way Wojciechowski, thought it a magnificent ruin as he flew over but was never able to find it again. Twenty years later the eminent archaeologist Professor Herr Doctor Arvid Morgenstern, working from Wojciechowski’s journal, was able to rediscover the temple and reach it on the ground, but he sent out just one brief, cryptic, and sadly direction-free message before disappearing forever into the hungry maw of the mysterious green jungle. In his message, Professor Morgenstern claimed to have found proof that the temple was not in fact a ruin, but merely incomplete. According to Morgenstern, the K’bab had just plain never found the time to finish the blessed thing, but they’d always meant to get back to work on it, one of these days…

All of which is a overly long and unnecessarily roundabout way of saying that Otogu is an acronym for “Other Things Of Greater Urgency.” At one time I was working on a book, Tales of the Otogu Mythos, but never found the time to finish it. 

And I’m almost out of time for today. Time for just one more question:

Q: What can I, personally, do to help promote writers and writing?

A: Turn off your TV. Read something.

I can elaborate on that at greater length, and likely will next week, but seriously, that’s the single most important thing you can do. READ SOMETHING!

And I don’t mean on your phone. Turn off your TV, mute your phone—better yet, put it in another room, so it can’t elicit that Pavlovian response you’re conditioned to provide whenever it beeps, squawks, hums, chirps, or lights up—and spend 15 minutes or half an hour actually reading something. It doesn’t matter what: fiction or nonfiction; an article, a short story, or a chapter of a novel; but give something that was written by someone other than yourself your complete and undivided attention for more than a few minutes.

Try to do that every day. Do it for a week, and you’ll be amazed by the difference it makes in how you feel.

Out of time: more to follow next week. And in the meantime, don’t forget to watch for The Best of Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE, resuming next week!

 

 

The Never-ending FAQ • 28 March 2025

Oh, good grief: it’s the last Friday in March already? Where did this week month quarter go?

Mostly into the “minimally invasive, three days tops” repair and remodeling project that began in January and finally wrapped up just this past Tuesday. At last, I can finish moving back into the half of the house I had to vacate while the work was in progress and start opening up and dealing with all those bins full of Why the Hell Was I Keeping This? down in the basement. My primary goal is to find the clothes I put into “temporary” storage back in January. I’ve grown tired of wearing and washing the same seven shirts every week.

My secondary goal is to completely fill the trash and recycling bins every week. So far progress on this goal has been slow, but very therapeutic.

It’s also been very disruptive. In the past two months I’ve gotten out of the good habit of blocking out quiet time for writing first thing every morning and into a set of bad habits consistent with leading an interrupt-driven* life. 

* Interrupt-driven: an archaic computer technology used for multi-tasking, when CPUs were rare and expensive and CPU-time was at a premium. Now largely replaced in computers by parallel processing architectures, but since the H. sapiens meatware has not been significantly upgraded since Paleolithic times, attempts at implementing this technology in the human mind usually result in what is perhaps most charitably described as “scatter-brained” or “ditzy” behavior.

Lately I’ve typically begun my day by rolling out of bed and going straight into dealing with whatever is the crisis d’jour; usually but not always with a quick stop in the kitchen to make a pot of strong coffee. This latter has become absolutely essential for rebooting my cognitive processes and maintaining my energy level, but is probably not doing much good for my ability to focus or ignore distractions. For example, this morning I began to write this post nearly four hours ago, but then… [interruption]… and then [interruption]… followed by [interruption]…

Crap. It’s now past noon. On the last Friday in March. At the tail end of Q1 2025.

Okay, no time for finesse. I’m muting the phone, closing my email clients, and diving in. Here goes.

Q: Does Rampant Loon Press have a bookstore site where all your titles are listed?

A: Yes. No. Kind of. Sorta. We have a Linktree shop, https://linktr.ee/stupefyingsf/shop, that was created as part of our misguided attempt to establish a presence on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/stupefyingsf/) but that never worked as expected and was a headache to maintain. I rather liked the Friends of Stupefying Stories section, but there is no way to point a link directly to it. The most aggravating part of the Linktree shop was that for reasons unknown they slapped a “Sensitive Content” warning on Stupefying Stories #23 through #26, hid the books from site visitors, and we were never able to get them to remove that warning. (Apparently we’d violated some unwritten and unpublished “community standards” rule, but they would not deign to explain what standard we’d violated or how to correct the violation. The assholes.) 

A quick search on Amazon turns up most of our titles, but in no order I can comprehend. Also, some of our titles are missing from the list. These appear to be the books we distribute through Ingram Spark. You can buy these books through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or pretty much anywhere, but it seems you need to know what you’re looking for before you can find it. 

Q: What’s going on with The Pete Wood Challenge? 

A: I’m glad you asked! After some prolonged negotiations, Pete and I have agreed on the terms for what I wanted to call The Last Dangerous Pete Wood Challenge but we wisely decided to call “Happy Trails” instead. Here they are.

Challenge #38, “Happy Trails,” is now open for entries!

The Challenge: Write a story of up to 150 words in length using the prompt, “happy trails.” The prompt does not need to appear in the story. Any genre is fine.

Prizes: 1st place $20.00 USD, 2nd place $15.00, 3rd place, $10.00, Honorable Mentions, (1-2) $5.00. The winning entries will be published online by Stupefying Stories in June of 2025.

Who can enter: The contest is open to both Codexians and the general public. One entry per writer, please.

How to enter: Send your entry in the body of an email to:

southernfriedsfwriter@gmail.com

Include the words “Happy Trails” in the subject line. It wouldn’t hurt to include “Pete Wood Challenge 38” or “PWC 38” in your email, too. 

Deadline: 7AM EST, May 15, 2025

Now get writing!

Out of time now. Will answer more questions tomorrow.

~brb

NEW STORY: “Rebirth” • by Toshiya Kamei

The flame of Magdalena’s torch sent shadows dancing across the walls of the crypt. 

She prowled toward my open sarcophagus on her nightly patrol, dressed like the other priestesses who supposedly communed with the dead: face obscured by the hood of a heavy wool cloak, feet snug in worn boots, a dagger sheathed at her waist.

She didn’t remember what I remembered, but her memory would return when I broke the cycle tonight.

When she came close enough, I sat up and grabbed her wrist. Her shrill scream ricocheted off the walls. As I pulled her to me, the lavender scent of her skin filled my nostrils. Once again.

“Don’t you remember me, mi querida Magda?” I loosened my grip and breathed in her familiar perfume, savoring every bit of it, before she managed to pull away.

I reached for her, tugged her close again, and bit her wrist gently to jog her memory. Taken aback, she peered into my pale face. Startled recognition flared in her dark eyes, and she gasped. “Ana!”

Even though our physical characteristics and temperaments diverged every time we reincarnated, we had an uncanny knack for finding each other. After each cycle ended, we didn’t remember anything that had happened to us before. At least, we weren’t supposed to.

Both of us had been apprentice witches a few lifetimes ago. We’d loved each other without bothering anyone. And then, after a ritual we cast together, Magdalena had become pregnant without male seed. The church elders condemned us for having engaged with what they considered dark and unnatural magic. Catch them and kill them! Their cries thundered through the vaults of the church.

They hanged Magdalena in the patio before my eyes and then burned me at the stake. I still remembered vividly how her body gave a last twitch before it sagged, how she expelled the dead fetus. I could still taste the sour smell of my singed flesh.

“What are you doing here?” Magdalena asked, blinking, confused.

“I sneaked down here a few days ago to wait for you,” I said. “I’m here to turn you undead, to break the cycle.” My rib bones crackled with joy, and I ran my cold fingers over the warm skin of her wrist. She shivered, but didn’t jerk away.

“What cycle?”

“Once I turn you, you won’t have to be reborn ever again. You’ll remember everything, and more importantly, we’ll stay together forever.” I smiled the best I could with my ruined face. “Don’t you trust me?”

She didn’t answer, and I watched as she paced the narrow confines of the aisle. The air around us increasingly became chilly and stale. Magdalena was always more cautious than I. She never would have risked the ire of the church, but I insisted on starting a family. She always thought through her actions, and after so many cycles, so did I.

“When did you turn?” she asked.

“A few months ago, when I got lost in the woods while gathering mushrooms; I was bitten by a wolf. My wound became horribly infected afterward, and I ran a high fever for days on end.” I glanced away as Magdalena’s eyes bloomed with pity. “My fever never broke. I died.”

I didn’t like talking about those days, but she needed to know. “Before my family could bury me, though, I opened my eyes. I had turned undead! And I remembered everything.”

“Are you saying the undead are all-knowing?”

“Sort of. We have infallible memories.”

Magdalena paused, doubtful, and my smile almost slipped, but I believed in my love. And I knew, somewhere deep inside, that she still believed in me.

Magdalena returned to where I waited, and she held my hands.

“Here’s to forever,” she said, lifting an invisible glass in a toast. “I’m ready whenever you are.” She leaned forward, perhaps, to demonstrate her eagerness. Maybe she didn’t want to make things more arduous for both of us than they had already been.

“You won’t mind joining me in my cursed existence?”

“No, Ana.” Magdalena shook her head as if to shoo away my doubt. “I’m more than happy to leave this sect behind.”

I reached for her and planted kisses on her cheeks.

As I sank my fangs into Magdalena’s neck, she writhed in pleasure. Savoring her sweet blood, I shivered in anticipation of what was to come. We would love one another for eternity.

 

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Toshiya Kamei (she/they) is an Asian writer who takes inspiration from fairy tales, folklore, and mythology. Her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, and elsewhere. Her piece “Hungry Moon” won Apex Magazine’s October 2022 Microfiction Contest.

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REPRISE: “Reunion” • by Toshiya Kamei

The carriage door creaked open, and a chilly draft blew against Maya’s cheeks…

SYNOPSIS: It was the greatest honor one could ever hope to have; to be chosen by the gods themselves to give up one’s life to serve their glory… wasn’t it? Toshiya Kamei begs to differ, in “Reunion.” » READ IT NOW

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Toshiya Kamei (she/they) is an Asian writer who takes inspiration from fairy tales, folklore, and mythology. Her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, and elsewhere. Her piece “Hungry Moon” won Apex Magazine’s October 2022 Microfiction Contest.

NEW STORY COMING TOMORROW:
“Rebirth,” by Toshiya Kamei!

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The Never-ending FAQ • 19 March 2025

I’ve heard from a lot of people since last Saturday’s announcement that we’re going to be striking the tent and closing the circus. The first thing to remember is…

Oh, I bet you can guess.

To reiterate: if you have a story under contract with us, we will publish it, unless you choose to withdraw it.

The exact nature of that publication may vary. Some of the stories we originally bought for the SHOWCASE web site will be sliding over into books. We plan to stay in the book business.

Our original novels sell. 

 

Well, most do. I still can’t figure out why we’re having such a hard time generating interest in EMERALD OF EARTH.

Henry Vogel’s latest novel, THE PRINCESS SCOUT, is a finalist for the Imadjinn Award.

Matthew Castleman’s PRIVATEERS OF MARS continues to sell in batches. (It’s odd. We’ll sell a bunch of copies in two days, and then nothing for weeks.)

Eric Dontigney’s novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, hasn’t sold many copies lately, but it’s turning big KENP numbers on Kindle Unlimited.

But as for Stupefying Stories, the magazine… 

Have a Kindle? Find out what you’ve been missing!
Buy the four latest issues with just one click!

(Or buy just one, if that’s what you’d really prefer.)

Even with it being FREE on Kindle Unlimited, we can’t seem to give the thing away. So it’s time for me to do something else. 

I’m more than a bit saddened by this. We’ve poured a lot of time, money, and energy into it over the past fifteen years. For personal reasons I was really hoping Stupefying Stories would make it to issue #30. 

But in the past 15 years it’s gone from being a chaotic effort produced by a collective of eager volunteers (hence my onetime job title, “Executive Cat-herder in Chief”), to being a mom-and-pop operation run by me and my wife with a rotating cast of helpers and first readers, to being a grandma-and-grandpa boutique operation…

I really appreciate all the kind comments I’ve received in the past few days from people who have found a sense of community here, but I can’t continue to run this thing as a one-man band.

§

We—meaning me and my financial backers—considered a lot of options. We talked about putting the fiction content behind a paywall, or moving the site over to substack or something like that. Until a few weeks ago the plan was to cut over to a new web site at the end of this month, and to rebrand as StupefyingSF.

But for some reason the spambots took that name to mean we were about to open a new restaurant in San Francisco—seriously—and all the email addresses associated with that domain were spam-bombed into rubble by people trying to sell us restaurant fixtures and kitchen supplies. Then the schedule for moving over to the new site was thrown into complete chaos by The Remodeling Project That Would Not End, And Still Hasn’t…

So the good news is, we’ve abandoned the plan to move to a new web site anytime soon. This web site, https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/, will continue to exist well into summer. This will let us finish publishing most of the stories we have accepted for SHOWCASE.

(“Most of?” someone asked. The rest will go into new books. I’ll explain in a minute.)

I hope you noticed yesterday’s post, REPRISE: “The Prediction of a Horrific Crime” • by Humphrey Price  

Over the past few years we have published hundreds of stories in SHOWCASE. Since we’re going to be keeping this web site going for a few more months, we’ve decided to go spelunking through the archives and resurface what we’re calling The Best of Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE. 

Some will be stories you probably have read before, as they drew thousands of readers. Others will be stories that were unfairly overlooked. All will be stories united by one common characteristic: they’re the stories that I think represent the best of what we’ve published online. 

I hope that in the months ahead, you’ll join me on this journey of exploration.

§

Finally—no, not really finally, I’ve lots more questions in the mailbag but have run out of time to answer them today—the burning question on many people’s minds: What about The Pete Wood Challenge?

The quick answer is that Pete and I are in discussions on the subject, and there will be a THE LAST PETE WOOD CHALLENGE, but the specifics are not yet settled. Stay tuned. 

More to follow, bye for now, and remember: BUY SOME OF OUR DAMN BOOKS, OKAY?

REPRISE: “The Prediction of a Horrific Crime” • by Humphrey Price

“I figured I had about an hour before being arrested by the Pre-Crime Police…”

SYNOPSIS: In a rigidly ordered and nearly crime-free society, where everyone everywhere is under the constant surveillance of the government’s Precog AI network, how can one person hope to commit an utterly horrific but absolutely necessary act of defiance against the system? Space systems engineer Humphrey Price shows us how, in “The Prediction of a Horrific Crime.” » READ IT NOW  

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Humphrey Price is a space systems engineer who has contributed to robotic exploration missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. His goal is to introduce interesting plausible ideas for space travel, aliens, and the future of the human race through highly realistic hard science fiction stories. Information on his writings can be found at humphreyprice.com.

 

 

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A lone space explorer, shipwrecked on a forgotten world.

A lost human colony, fighting to survive.

Heroes. Villains. Sword fights. Airships.

If you liked Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, you’ll love—

SCOUT’S HONOR

Book 1 in Henry Vogel’s best-selling Terran Scout Corps series. Available now on Kindle or in paperback. 

 

Feeding the Muse • Living Well on a Writer’s Budget

Editor’s Note: This column was first published on 3/21/2018. With today being St. Patrick’s Day—or as we call it around here, The Day Before Corned Beef Briskets Go On Clearance Sale—this seemed a good time to resurface this one. Karen always wanted to reboot her “Feeding the Muse” series but that never got the chance. Here’s hoping you enjoy this one. Bon appetit!

—Bruce Bethke 

Recipe • Traditional Corned Beef and Cabbage • by Karen Bethke

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Now is the time to buy corned beef. Just as the Monday after Easter is the best time to buy a ham, the Monday after Thanksgiving is the best time to buy a frozen turkey, and the Monday after Christmas is the best time to buy a beef roast or prime rib, all the grocery stores that stocked up for St. Patrick’s Day are now eager to move all their unsold corned beef brisket, so if you shop around you can find some great prices.

Corned beef briskets come in two basic styles: the flat cut, which is usually more expensive because it looks more attractive, and the tri-tip or point cut, which is exactly the same piece of meat but triangular in shape, because it’s the part of the bottom sirloin that’s trimmed off to make the flat cut look so nice and rectangular. Of the two, tri-tip is usually considerably cheaper, but the difference is entirely cosmetic. You can also sometimes find whole briskets, which are the flat cut and tri-tip still attached to each other, but that’s a huge hunk of meat. In some markets you may also find what’s called “New England” corned beef, which is again the same cut of meat, but has a disturbing grayish color because it hasn’t had nitrates or nitrites added to the brine to keep it pink. 

In all cases, corned beef is just a big slab of bottom sirloin that’s been packed in heavily salted brine for a good long time, to preserve it for long ocean voyages, and coincidentally to make it nice and tender. If you’ve ever run across the term “bully beef” in your reading, that’s corned beef.

For that matter, pastrami is basically just corned beef that’s been spiced and smoked. Every now and then Bruce gets a notion to try putting a brisket in the smoker to make his own pastrami, but so far hunger and impatience have always won out.

The great thing about buying corned beef right now is that it’s a.) really cheap, b.) freezes well, c.) can keep for a long time if properly refrigerated—remember, this stuff was made to stay edible while kept in barrels on long ocean voyages in the age of sailing ships, though I wouldn’t recommend doing that now— d.) tastes great if prepared right, and above all, e.) is one of the all-time great fix-and-forget meals for a working mom to prepare in a slow cooker.

So here’s how I prepare it.

AWARDS NEWS! Congratulations, Henry Vogel and Barbara V. Evers!

We’ve just learned that Henry Vogel’s latest Rampant Loon Press novel, THE PRINCESS SCOUT, is a finalist for the 2025 Imadjinn Award for Best YA Novel, which will be presented at Imaginarium 2025 this coming July.

We’re pretty pumped about this. Two years ago Henry’s previous novel, THE HOSTAGE IN HIDING, made a strong run for the Imadjinn Award, only to be beaten in the final round by a big-budget novel co-written by a pair of NY Times and USA Today best-selling authors and published by a major publishing house with a HUGE advertising budget. This year he’s facing no such competition, so we don’t want to jinx the thing, but we are, as they say, “cautiously optimistic.”

BUT WAIT! IT GETS BETTER!

It doesn’t stop with THE PRINCESS SCOUT. This year Henry is also a finalist in the category of Best Graphic Novel, for ARISOCRATIC XTRATERRESTRIAL TIME-TRAVELING THIEVES COMPLETE COLLECTION! (Try saying that three times fast!) We’ve been slow to plug this one, as a.) we didn’t publish it; Critical Blast did, and b.) the book is a bit pricey and weighs three pounds in hardcover, and made an audible thump! when it landed on the porch. But now that the book is available in a somewhat more affordable and considerably lighter paperback edition, you should check it out!

MEANWHILE, LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

Stupefying Stories contributor and former slush-pile reader Barbara V. Evers is also a finalist for the Imadjinn Award this year, in the category of Best Short Story, for “Kaleidoscope,” which I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more about as I don’t know where it was published. I can tell you though that Barbara is already a two-time winner of the Imadjinn Award in the category of Best Fantasy Novel, for her Watchers of Moniah trilogy, so you owe it to yourself to check out her website. She’s been busy since she moved on from writing columns for us!

UPDATE: Barbara’s story, “Kaleidoscope,” is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Magnificent-Display-Marvelous-Wonders-JordanCon/dp/B0CWZW98QM 

Wow. Not one but three award finalists. It’s been a busy day and I haven’t even had my second cup of coffee yet. I wonder what the afternoon will bring?

~brb

Status Update • 15 March 2025

I’ve been thinking a lot about inertia and entropy lately.

This two-month hiatus wasn’t planned. While it’s tempting to blame it on the Never-ending Repair & Remodeling Project, that was only the inciting incident.

Previously on Stupefying Stories: Last summer’s destructive hailstorm made major repairs to the house necessary, which subsequently mushroomed into The Remodeling Project That Would Not End. A “minimally invasive, three days tops” sub-project that began in January eventually required my moving everything out of the front half of the house, and nearly two months later, that sub-project is still only “mostly” finished. From time to time a worker will show up unannounced to put in a solid half-day of chaos generation, and then vanish again, leaving only debris behind.

On the positive side, the primary contractor has yet to bill me for any of this. Perhaps they’ve forgotten I exist.  

§

The insidious thing about inertia is that it’s so tightly coupled to entropy. The longer a body at rest stays at rest, the harder it is to get it moving again, as rust and rot set in. All my best analogies on this topic come from my many experiences with old British sports cars, and with the delusional owners of barn finds who imagine their rusty piles of junk are restorable classics when they’re more likely to break in half if someone tries to hook them up to a tow truck and pull them out of the mud into which they’ve sunk up to their door frames…

But I’m speaking to an audience of writers now, so let’s couch it in terms of writer’s block—which in my experience is an imaginary condition that results from a writer beginning to write a story with no clear idea of where it’s going to go or how it’s going to end.

When we began the Stupefying Stories story fifteen years ago, we began with an overabundance of enthusiasm and ambition and no clear idea of what we were trying to do or how we’d ever know if we’d done it. The idea that it might someday end never even occurred to us. After a few very promising early years, though, Karen’s cancer took control of the narrative, and we spent the next decade scrambling to find ways to keep Stupefying Stories moving forward while learning far more about oncology and the cruelty of hope than we’d ever wanted to. 

As regards publishing fiction, we tried a lot of things. We went off in a lot of different directions, often simultaneously. We learned a lot of lessons, some fun, some eye-opening, and some painful and expensive. 

What have we learned?

I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, an observation. Two years, three months, and twelve days after she died—after a lifetime of being one half of “we”—I’m still finding it really difficult to think in first-person singular again.

§

A lifetime ago I was working for a company that was doing contract software development work for a Really Famous Musical Instrument Company. The new product we were helping them to develop was very impressive, and later went on to be incredibly successful in the market, but at the time we were working with the prototypes, the deeper we dove into them, the more we noticed some…peculiarities. Seemingly designed-in limitations. Things that made us wonder why they did it that way, instead of in some other way that, while admittedly a bit esoteric, would make the instrument far more useful for professional musicians. So we pulled together our list of questions, concerns, and suggestions, and presented them to RFMIC. 

Their response was both disturbing and enlightening. They didn’t intend to sell this thing to professional musicians. They shared their data with us, which showed that the entire world-wide “pro” market was far too small to be worth pursuing. They could afford to give their instruments away free to well-known working professional musicians, because there were so few of them; in fact, doing that was part of their marketing strategy. The real money was to be made in selling to the student market, because parents will pay stupid amounts of money to encourage their kid’s budding talent, and to the semi-pro “aspiring amateur” market, who always believe they’re just one more expensive purchase away from cracking the secret of how to make it big and become rich and famous. RFMIC wasn’t really in the business of making and selling musical instruments. They were in the business of selling the dream of success to sufficiently affluent and somewhat talented amateurs. 

So thanks for your input, but stick to the spec, okay? The changes you’re suggesting will only make it more confusing for, and thus harder to sell to, the amateur market.

A lifetime later, I must admit: they were right. Dammit. At the time I was taken aback by their naked cynicism. Ultimately, they sold four times as many of those instruments as there were working professional musicians then working in all genres in the entire world. 

§

A decade or so later I was on the board of directors of SFWA, and in the process of learning a related lesson, although I hadn’t quite put the pieces together just yet. In particular I was paying a lot of attention to the Nebula awards; how works got on the ballot, how the voting process worked, how many ballots were sent out, who returned their ballots, etc., etc., etc., etc. (The actual ballots were secret, of course, but the organization did a great job of tracking who bothered to return their ballots. Surprisingly few members did.)

Slowly, it dawned on me. The then-currently active successful working professional writers—the Big Names, who were always a very small minority of the membership—just plain didn’t have the time to pay serious attention to the Nebulas. They didn’t have the time to read enough of anyone else’s work to make more than a few token recommendations; they didn’t bother to vote in significant numbers on the preliminary ballot; they didn’t even have the time to read only the works that made it to the final ballot, much less to vote on it. Thus, by the time the results of the final ballot came out, what it really reflected was the collective opinion of all the deadwood, has-been, wannabe, never-were, and enthusiastic newbie members who made up the vast majority of the voting membership—and especially the opinions of those newbies who engaged in aggressive campaigning and Nebula-vote log-rolling.

Decades later, I can’t say things have improved. Just a few days ago a writer I know put out a desperate plea on social media for people willing to accept a review copy of his latest novel, no strings attached, in hopes that they might consider giving it a review or rating. What he received in return were lots of comments from all his writer-friends, who began with really encouraging words, but then segued into, “Unfortunately, right now I’m too busy finishing my own latest [novel, story, whatever] to look at it.”

§

Fifteen Years Later: What We’ve Learned, So Far

1. Writers are not readers.

A. They typically begin as readers. Students and aspiring writers will read other writers’ works, but only until they start getting published themselves. After that their interest in reading or promoting other writers’ work tapers off rapidly. It’s the very rare writer who will help to promote any work but their own. Some writers won’t even help their publisher promote their own work. They’re too busy writing their next thing and trying to find their next publisher.

B. There is something really wrong with the way we teach literature. Children love to read stories, but by the time they’re teenagers most have had that love beaten out of them—except for the few who have embraced the dream of becoming a writer.

C. We’ve done an intermittently good job here of building a publication that draws the interest of writers. Unfortunately, see Point 1, above.

2. New original novels sell.

A. Reprints of old out-of-print rights-reverted novels don’t.

B. Readership-over-time drops off very rapidly. There’s too much new content streaming out constantly and competing for the reader’s attention. The window to get readers interested in a new publication closes faster than the drop of a guillotine blade.

C. Series novels sell much better than standalone novels. Readers like to follow the characters in a series, not the author—and definitely not the publisher!

3. “General Interest” short story collections don’t sell.

A. General interest collections appeal to general interest readers, which are mythical creatures, or at least now extinct in the wild. See point 1B, above.

B. Strongly themed collections can sell, but only with aggressive and carefully targeted pre-release advertising.

C. Standalone novellas can sell, but only with aggressive and targeted pre-release advertising. Effectively, these are original novels for people with short attention spans.

D. Reprint collections are a very tough sell, unless they have both a strong theme and at least one famous or award-winning story. Mostly they’re vanity projects.

E. The primary market for the existing general interest short story publications appears to be students and aspiring amateur writers who hope to sell to those publications, and that market is very small. Smaller even than the market for professional musicians.

4. There is nothing older than old science fiction.

A. If it’s any good, Street & Smith already owns it and has sold the reprint and film rights at least a dozen times over.

B. Eric Frank Russell would never get published today.

C. Newly written “vintage style” stories aren’t cool or retro, they’re just faux old. They’re prose karaoke. They’re Franklin Mint collectible plates. They don’t appeal to older readers, who already have shelves full of the original stories in the form of Street & Smith-licensed reprint collections, and they don’t appeal to many younger readers either, because they’re old.

5. Speaking of old SF styles and forms, online serials don’t draw readers.

A. Amazon proved that with Kindle Vella.

B. Online multi-part stories aren’t read. If readers don’t get hooked on the first part within the first two weeks of publication, they’ll never go back to look at it later. See point 2B, above.

C. Online fiction readers have very short attention spans. A thousand words tests their patience.

6. Free content on a web site does not drive click-throughs to book sales.

A. Therefore, why are we doing SHOWCASE?

B. In fact, why are we doing a web site at all?

7. Our fundamental approach has been wrong since Day One.

A. If we want to reach writers, we should forget publishing fiction entirely and start selling the dream that you can become rich and famous while also losing weight and having a great sex life by writing best-selling fiction—but only if you buy our series of “how to write real good” self-help books and sign up for every single one of our series of “bestseller secrets” webinars.

B. But if we want to reach readers… See points 3A through 3E, above.

8. In retrospect, I should have put a lot less time into actually publishing fiction and a lot more time into establishing myself as a tastemaker/influencer and making the case for why “Stories That Impress Bruce Bethke®” is a valuable endorsement readers should seek out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, coulda woulda shoulda. Hindsight is always 20/20, except when you’re considering someone else’s failures and shortcomings, in which case it’s closer to 20/15.

9. This is a terribly fraught time to be working in publishing.

I’d thought things would settle down once the 2024 election was over. Then I’d hoped things would settle down after the inauguration. Now I’m beginning to feel like I’ve fallen through a time warp and am stuck living through 1969 again. If you’re too young to remember that year; trust me, it was not a good time, and 1970 was worse.

Lately I’ve been running into a lot of people in publishing and the publishing adjacent spaces who shouldn’t be writing for publication or active on social media at all, they should be talking to their doctor about Zyprexa®.

These people make me… nervous. And there sure seem to be a Hell of a lot of ‘em on the loose now.

§

Being forced to move everything out of the front half of my house for a few weeks was therapeutic, I guess. There were things in there I hadn’t touched in years. There were rooms I’d scarcely entered since Karen died. Cleaning out her office was bad enough, but cleaning out her sewing and craft room was worse. There were so many creative projects she’d begun with such great enthusiasm…

But then another set of metastatic lesions would pop up in some new place, all her hopes, plans, and dreams would get shoved aside while she went back on the treatment treadmill, and in the end, all that was left was the sad evidence of an unfinished life.

Through it all, we clung to the dream that we could make Stupefying Stories work. We both loved to read. We both loved the same kinds of fiction. As the cancer slowly stole her life, one piece at a time, reading and talking about stories remained one of the last things we could still do together. With each new treatment plan, we clung to the hope that this time it would work, and buy us more time, and we’d have a chance to get back to something like a normal life. 

“A chance to live longer…”

I really hate those commercials. I no longer scream obscenities at the TV when one in particular comes on, but considered in hindsight, that’s what her doctors were selling us: the hope that the next treatment might succeed where all the others had failed. Until the last one, which not only accelerated her death, but robbed her of what little remained of her dignity.

The women in that particular commercial look so happy, though. Why, they don’t even begin to look like Stage 4 cancer patients. They look like… actresses.

Is that an acting career specialty? Looking like a happy cancer patient living life to the fullest in a pharmaceutical commercial?

§

For the last few years I didn’t worry too much about the business side of Stupefying Stories, because I was considering it more akin to occupational therapy. If it was losing money, so what? It was keeping her intellectually engaged. We never talked about how we might wind down and end Stupefying Stories, because the very idea of endings was terrifying. 

But now her story has ended, and looking at all the stuff cluttering up the place around here, it’s clear that it’s time for me, first person singular, to outline my plan for how the Stupefying Stories story ends.

» I could just end it cold, with a hard cutoff, but I won’t do that. I have too much stubborn pride to do that. I’ve promised people I will publish their stories, and dammit, I’m going to publish their stories! If you have a story under contract with us, it will be published, unless you choose to withdraw it.

» But, there doesn’t seem much point in continuing Stupefying Stories as a general interest magazine, either. There’s too much competition, too few readers, and whatever goodwill we may have accrued in our early years was pissed away in our later years, as we struggled to get issues out while fighting increasingly desperate rearguard actions against cancer. As our most recent promotion with SS#26 proved, we can scarcely give the magazine away now.

» I have the financial backing lined up to put out four more full issues. Strangely enough, though, while when it was my own money I didn’t worry too much about it, now that it’s my investors’ money, I feel obligated not to spend it stupidly. I guess that’s capitalism for ya.

» In light of lessons learned 2B, 3B, and 3C, then, here’s what I’m going to do:

• We have a standalone novella in the works right now. In a just world, it would be at least a Nebula finalist. Getting it out on schedule in time to make this year’s eligibility window is a top priority.

• I’m recasting the stories we accepted for Stupefying Stories issues 27, 28, 29, and 30 as at least three theme anthologies, to be released under the Stupefying Stories Presents aegis. Cyberpunk 2.0 is an obvious theme, as is Cyberpunk 2.1. I’m still developing unifying themes for others. “Clankalog,” while apt, is too much of an inside joke. Once I firm up the themes I may put out a very selective call for submissions, if I find I’m coming up short.

• I was planning to wind down the stupefyingstories.blogspot.com site by the end of this month; however, that was before I lost about four working weeks due to not being able to get into my office. We have content in the queue for the web site and will be running it out through at least the end of April now.

• Concentrate on pre-release marketing like you wouldn’t believe! In the past we could just fling books out there and hope they were found by readers. That’s over. Going forward I’m going to market the Hell out of books before they’re released, in hopes that we’ll get decent sales in the two weeks before the guillotine drops. 

• This is the difficult one. In light of lesson learned #8—well, I am not by nature an arrogant extrovert, but I can perform the part, for a few hours, about once a month. So I’m going to give that a try. Let’s see how it works.

• And in six months we’ll reevaluate, to decide if we (now meaning me and my financial backers) want to continue into 2026.

» Of course, lesson learned #9, pardon the expression, trumps all else, so I do reserve the right to torch the social media accounts, throw away my cell phone, go dark, and hide out somewhere in the north woods until the civil war is over.

Submitted for your consideration,

Bruce Bethke