Short Story: Six Names for The End

SIX NAMES FOR THE END

Time to say goodbye.

My latest confabulation is now available at Nature, in the award-winning Futures column. It was a fun piece of fiction to write — short, sharp, and packing a mighty wallop — and I hope that you enjoy reading it, too.

As well, you can find my post about the writing of this story on The Futures Conditional blog, also hosted by Nature.

Coming up shortly, my next short story is currently slated to appear in Interzone issue #265 in July. It’s a mighty strange one, which steps on pretty much every third rail known to mankind, and with even a title that has the potential to raise a large number of eyebrows.

What can I say, I try to keep things interesting around here. (grin).

“Six Names for the End” by Ken Hinckley. In Nature, Vol. 534, No. 7607, p. 430. June 15, 2016. Futures column. [Available to read online for free]

Published by Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. DOI: 10.1038/534430a

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Nature Futures 2 Anthology, featuring “The Ostracons of Europa”

Leading speculative fiction publisher Tor Books has just come out with Nature Futures 2, an anthology of 100 provocative science-fictional visions of the future. (Available on Kindle and the other usual suspects.)

And that cover! Pretty darned spectacular:

Credit: JACEY http://www.jacey.com/

The editors, Colin Sullivan and Henry Gee, hand-picked their favorite stories for this anthology, all drawn from the last several  years of the award-winning Futures column from Nature.

The anthology thereby features many award winning authors, from Elizabeth Bear and Rachel Swirsky to Gregory Benford and Mike Resnick, to a personal favorite short-story writer of mine, the inimitable Ken Liu.

And I’m thrilled to say that my contribution, The Ostracons of Europa, made the cut as well!

 

The anthology is only available as an e-book, but just for fun, and by way of celebration, I put together a special print edition of The Ostracons of Europa available as a stand-alone story–a collector’s item of sorts.

It’s a very short story and makes for a very short book, but what the heck.

The paper-book format draws out the tension of the story–by judicious use of chapter breaks–plus it’s hard to beat the feeling of riffling through those creamy antique-white sheets of finely compacted pulp…

But just to be safe, and since in my scientific work I push at the crackling-with-electricity and fuming-with-sulfur frontiers of technology, the book also includes a coupon code so you can download a free electronic edition at your leisure 🙂

Short Story: The Ostracons of Europa

THE OSTRACONS OF EUROPA

A measure of life.

The current issue of Nature features my short story The Ostracons of Europa, a nifty story-of-revelation set on (you guessed it) Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa.

The story appears in Nature’s long-running (and award-winning) Futures column of short speculative fictions, edited by Colin Sullivan. I hope you enjoy it.

Update: The editors at Nature picked my story as their favorite of the month for July 2013, and feature it in their free podcast, read by Henry Gee! Also available as an MP3 Download.

I’ve also got a short story coming out in Fiction River: Time Streams, edited by Dean Wesley Smith, coming out next month (Aug. 20th, 2013). For details check out my Fiction tab.

“The Ostracons of Europa” by Ken Hinckley. In Nature, Vol. 499, No. 7456, p. 120. July 3rd, 2013. Futures column. [Available to read online for free]

[Also available as a Nature Futures podcast and MP3 Download.]

Published by Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. DOI: 10.1038/499120a.