Status Update • 16 February 2026

 

With two weeks left to go until the Nebula ballot cutoff, we’re pleased to report that THE DAY WE SAID GOODBYE TO THE BIRDS has made it onto the SFWA Nebula Awards Recommended Reading list. If you’re a voting member of SFWA, you can download the full PDF text of the book for FREE at this link:

https://www.sfwa.org/reading-list-entry/the-day-we-said-goodbye-to-the-birds-by-dyen-shapiro-allan/

If you’re a mere mortal, you can buy the book pretty much anywhere ebooks or print books are sold, by following this link:

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

We have it on good authority that SFWA didn’t lock down the membership validation function on their download site as well as they might have and that it’s possible to bypass the check and download the PDF for free no matter who you are, but we have decided to leave figuring out how to do that as a challenge to your cyberpunk skillz. We don’t mind if you do so, but we’re not going to make it easy for you.

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On the subject of cyberpunk: no, I wouldn’t call this one a “cyberpunk” book. I’d say it’s more on the order of an “ecological hopepunk” book. In looking at what other people have had to say about it I’ve found it classified as “cli-fi,” which is a category I didn’t know existed before, but I guess it does now.

I’ve also been a bit disappointed to see a few people dismiss it without reading it on the grounds that the title suggests this is a sci-fi riff on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Seriously, do you think I would publish something that thuddingly obvious? Yes, the backbone of this story is grounded in ecological bioscience, which is a subject near and dear to my heart, and yes, there are some birds in it, but if you’re thinking this is yet another story that’s going to club you over the head with an Important Ecological Message until you submit, you are way off base.

Trust me. I don’t publish sermons and screeds. I publish good stories.

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On a tangentially related subject: one of the stranger questions to come in lately is whether this is a “gay” story, apparently because we got this very kind review on the QueerSciFi.com web site. Seriously? Because a gay book reviewer liked the book, that makes it suspect? 

The story is set in near-future San Francisco. There are people in it; lots of people, some of them with speaking parts. This being San Francisco, some of those speaking characters are gay. So? You know, it is possible to set a story in contemporary or near-future San Francisco without having it end up in the middle of a pride parade in the Castro District, and without it turning into a sermon or screed on LGBTQ+ issues. I’m just saying. 

Geez…

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Finally, for those who have been wondering what’s happened since the 1 February status update: things have been developing at a remarkable rate. I’m having an outpatient procedure tomorrow, which should reveal the answers to a lot of questions, after which we’ll have a much clearer path forward. I won’t be online or answering email tomorrow, but more likely will be sedated and having sweet dreams of tiny submarines the size of microbes and a young Raquel Welch in a skin-tight wet suit.  

See you next Wednesday,

~brb

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Status Update • 1 February 2026

 

The universe is taunting me.

Or if not the universe, at least Netflix.

Friday night I turned on the TV, intending to find a movie to doze off to, but got sidetracked and didn’t get straight to giving it my undivided attention. When I finally got back into the living room, I found that Netflix had wandered off into some kind of slide show mode I’d never seen before, and was sequencing through a succession of title cards for movies it thought I might like to watch. After a few minutes I realized it was more complicated than just a simple slide show; within each slide, it flew in a series of keywords, to tell me more about why I might want to watch the movie.

Oh.

You don’t say?

Okay, I’ll concede that Johnny Mnemonic earned that keyword. But the others? It seemed like every third movie Netflix showed me had that keyword, and a lot were movies I never would have associated with anything even remotely related to cyberpunk.

Hmm.

In Niven and Pournelle’s novel, Inferno, there is a special place in Hell reserved for advertising and marketing people who craft catchphrases, slogans, and earworms that are too successful. There they spend the rest of eternity suffering in misery, forever tormented by their own stupid words being flung back at them.

Is this to be my fate?

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A lot of people have written lately to ask how I’m doing and what’s going on with Stupefying Stories. The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Last fall, we had a really solid plan for what we were going to publish and how we were going to finish out 2025. Then, in October, I had a really stupid accident of the self-inflicted kind involving a 24-foot aluminum extension ladder.

And then, in November, I compounded the stupidity and really ripped with living shit out of everything in my right shoulder.

Since then we’ve been on a journey of discovery, figuring out how to patch me back together and turn me into a functional human being again. For a span of some weeks I was lucky to get two hours of sleep each night, which did nothing good for my ability to think clearly. We’ve been exploring the GRAS list—the list of medications “generally recognized as safe”—trying to determine which are actually safe, at least in the dosages I need to take in order for them to be effective. I have experienced some of the most amazing allergic reactions and rashes, but at least haven’t had another Somogyi reaction in the past month. Those are truly fascinating, in retrospect. Remind me to tell you about them sometime.

People have made the observation that I appear to be active on Facebook again. If you look more closely, you’ll note that I’m not really active there. Mostly I’ve been sharing photos that amuse me, and sometimes appending a few lines of snark. There are days a few lines of snark are all I have left in me.    

Progress and recovery has been slow, slow, painfully slow. There are days I’m almost able to work for a few hours. There are other days I lack the strength and coordination in my right hand to do so much as lift a cup of coffee—and if you know anything at all about my longstanding relationship with coffee, you know this is serious. Fortunately I’m left-hand dominant, so I can do most of what I need to do one-handed, but this is a right-handed world, so I’m having to relearn how to do a lot of things I’d surrendered to the pressures of the world and learned to do right-handed.

There are days when all it takes is one slightly wrong stretch or twist to leave me curled up in a ball, whimpering and waiting for the searing pain to recede.

Whimpering? Yes. I exhausted my store of profanity sometime in December.

For reference, typing on a keyboard is not a transferable skill. You can probably imagine how frustrating I find this. It’s taken me hours longer to write this post than it normally would. 

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In a perverse way, though, I’m lucky this happened now. As I said before, this has become a journey of discovery, involving a lot of time spent in various diagnostic imaging clinics. Along the way, quite by accident, literally on the edge of an image intended to let my doctors take a closer look at something else, they discovered—

Oh. That is not right. Which led to further follow-up appointments, more blood tests, more imaging work, and I feel quite thoroughly imaged now. During the last session I was able to look at the screen over the technician’s shoulder and could swear she was tracking the movements of a microscopic submarine as it traversed my left ventricle.

The current assessment, then, as of today, is that there is something previously undiscovered and seriously wrong with my heart. As soon as the doctor began to describe it in detail he didn’t need to, as it’s the same thing that killed my Dad thirty years ago this month. The irony of the date is not lost on me.

The advantage I have is that we’ve discovered it now, while I’m still deceptively and to all appearances healthy, and not as they found it in my Dad, when he was face-down on the floor and the paramedics were charging up the paddles. So given the advance warning we now have, we should be able to get this under control before things proceed too much further along the road to Hell in a hand-basket.

What form will this control take? 

I don’t know. Ask me again in two weeks, after the next round of tests and diagnostic imaging is done.

—Bruce Bethke

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