'Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling' out now in Analog!
I'm having a week off this week (both the day job and writing) and very much enjoying not being behind a computer monitor for 10+ hours a day, but I did want to mark that the September/October issue of Analog SF Magazine is now available, and my novelette 'Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling' is in it!
This is my second story in Analog (the first, 'Hull Run', was in the January/February issue) and my third published story this year. This novelette tells the story of an asteroid miner living in a post-capitalist group mind collective in deep space, who has to deal with a mysterious incomer who seems extremely determined to kill him. And there are a lot of ways to die in space.
This story is loosely set in the same fictional universe as my debut story, 'Vegvísir', so people who have read both might see some connecting strands. It was also a story that came about because of direct inspiration from a computer game - I'm a huge fan of Hardspace: Shipbreaker where you play as an orbital shipyard worker and wow there are lots of ways to die in that game.
That got me thinking - if you wanted to murder someone in an industrial space context, how would you go about it and what might motivate it? I've explored these topics in a bit more depth in a blog post that will be posted on Analog's blog in October, but if you pick up a copy of the current edition of Analog, you can find out my answer even sooner!
This is my sixth published piece of short fiction and the thrill of seeing my work out in the world will truly never get old. It's also the last of my previously sold stories to come out, so as of right now I've got nothing finished, out on submission or waiting to be published. That's largely because I've been very focused on the novels (for understandable reasons!) this year, but I'm hoping to keep the short fiction going in the last quarter of the year. If there's one thing publishing is good at, it's producing 2-4 week gaps/waiting times that are just the right length to write a couple of short stories in.