Fiction -- long-form, short-form, whatever form -- is one of our great joys in life. It was something we included in the early DNA of Xark, though it never really stuck.
That doesn't mean I've given up on the idea... or on thinking about ways to get the right content to the right people. So for now, click on the links to download typeset PDFs that have been optimized for home printing. And check back for more -- I haven't even gotten all the cool old stuff typeset yet!
--Dan Conover
SHORT STORIES BY DAN CONOVER
The Charleston stories
The Last Ephiphany, a 2005 science fiction short story based on wondering about the physics of consciousness. It's also one of those rare girl-physicist-time-travel-pentaquark-data-set love stories, so if you're a lonely girl physicist looking for true love, this is your story. Previously unpublished.
Abundance, a 2004 End-Of-The-World story with a new kind of monster, based on some interesting, distinctly not-warm-and-fuzzy theories about life. Previously unpublished.
The Beholder, a piece I wrote in 2005 about the intersection of pornography and console gaming. It's starting to look prescient in 2008. Previously unpublished.
Milk Run, one of three stories I wrote in one week in the summer of 2002 (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Perfect for Each Other being the companion pieces). It's ostensibly about a city editor in Charleston struggling to deal with an outbreak of UFO sightings, but it's really more about a city editor struggling to keep his sanity in an insane situation. By the way, I used to be a city editor in Charleston. What a coincidence.
Eula Makes Up Her Mind was my first attempt at a science fiction story as an adult. The version that became my first professionally published short story was a rewrite of the first draft, which I workshopped in Manhattan in February 2001 with Jay Wentworth and Orson Scott Card. It won a Phobos Fiction prize and was published for the first time in the 2002 anthology Empire of Dreams and Miracles. It was republished in 2008 in the eclectic string theory anthology Riffing On Strings.
Other stories
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
was written as a satire on UFO mythology and the George W. Bush White House in the summer of 2002.Though I later learned that the story was universally popular with the Phobos staff, which had culled the entries in that year's contest down to a manageable few, it got stiffed by conservative contest judges (led by Orson Scott Card). The story got resurrected a year later when Phobos editor Keith Olexa and president Sandra Schulberg launched their Phobos Galaxy line with the 2004 anthology Absolutely Brilliant in Chrome.
I hope you did not get too disappointed by Card stiffing you. From what I have read about him, he only knows one position...STIFF. A conservative, an advocate of the LDS, a fervent believer of same-sex marriage and gay bashing (do I hear a probable "coming out of the closet" from this guy?), he only knows one thing for certain, he is right and everyone else is wrong.
Posted by: Rosemary Paul | Wednesday, August 29, 2012 at 10:45