Steve’s News
March 6, 2010.
The long-awaited anthology, 2034: Writing Rochester’s Futures, is finally available.
My story is called “North Star Pipeline,” set in a future in which water wars have torn the country apart. Rochester has resumed its historic status as a stop for hunted fugitives attempting to make their way to Canada and freedom. The new technology makes that more difficult than ever, forcing a game of cat and mouse between pursued and pursuers.
The anthology was the project of the Ropchester Speculative Fiction Association, R-SPEC. You can order the anthology by going to their website
I’ll be announcing the date, time, and location of the official launch party as soon as that’s know.
September 29, 2009.
“A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss” appeared in the September 24, 2009 issue of Nature. I can’t publish the story here for six months per contract, so you have go to the Nature site at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461558a.html and see if you can contrive a way to access it. Subscribers, users of an institution’s site license, and those willing to pay for the article are the lucky bunch.
Nature charges $32 to send it to you and that’s after you register at the site. You can get the story as part of Tyrannosaur Faire along with nine other – longer – stories for half as much. I think that’s the greatest deal of the century.
September 2, 2009.
My story “A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss” will be published soon in the British science journal Nature. The back page of that journal is called “Futures” and features a science fiction short short each week. With the swine flu back in the headlines I took a chance and sent them the story. The editor’s assistant had the swine flu at that very moment, and, bingo, I was in. I’ll post the exact date of the issue as soon as I know it.
In the meantime check out the review that Paul Weiss gave the book on Amazon. He gave it four stars, but did include this incredible paragraph:
I’m absolutely thrilled to say that “Forever, With Diamond” struck me as perhaps the finest, most exciting and most innovative short sci-fi story that I’ve ever been privileged to read. (And that’s mighty high praise indeed since I’m including the very gods of sci-fi writing such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, RA Heinlein) The amount of science that Steve Carper managed to stuff into this story and still keep it sensible is almost breathtaking – relativistic space travel on an asteroid, teleportation, quantum nanotechnology, virtual reality, time dilation, molecular genetics and the deceleration of the aging process, polymer based artificial organ replacements and more. And, if you can believe it, all of this was placed into the context of an obsessive love story. Now, that’s some piece of brilliant writing!
I’m thrilled and humbled. Remember, that story was printed for the first time in the collection. You can’t read it anywhere but in the pages of Tyrannosaur Faire.
