Fully kvelling over here: the Locus Award ballot just dropped, and my short story “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead” is a nominee!!

I spent 17 years figuring out how to write this story, and I’m so gratified that folks connected with my angry supernatural drag queen!!

People said it was an “absolute banger,” “full of beautiful queer rage,” and “equal parts chilling and beautiful”!!

Go check out the whole ballot, and READ ALL THE STORIES, they’re incredible, I would be wildly pleased to lose to any one of them.

Tachyon just published NEW ADVENTURES IN SPACE OPERA, edited by the magnificent Jonathan Strahan, and my novelette “Planetstuck” is included!!

“Planetstuck” was my first foray into space (crazy, right? After literal decades as a science fiction writer, I’d never written anything set in space! (ok maybe I did WRITE SOMETHING, but it wasn’t good and I never submitted it anywhere)). It was a finalist for the Asimov’s Reader’s Award  … and, if you’re in NYC, you can hear me read from it next week – Thursday August 8th at 6PM at Housing Works Bookstore!

In an interview with Clarkesworld Magazine, Jonathan said:

“gee, Sam Miller’s “Planetstuck” is a hoot—it’s so funny and so engaging—and I don’t think I heard anyone talk about it much. I’d love to see more from him in that world.”

And… let’s just say… between you and me, Reader… there WILL be more from me in that world!

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) just announced the Final Ballot for the  2023 Bram Stoker Award finalists, and my short story “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak” is a nominee!!

It’s my first time as a Stoker finalist, and it means the world to me – my love for horror and the horror community runs deep, and it’s so moving to be recognized by them for this weird dirty queer addiction tale.

Big big love to the incredible The Dark magazine, for publishing it in the first place!

THE BIG BOOK OF CYBERPUNK came out today, and it’s an incredible 1100-page compendium of genre magnificence – including my short story “Feral Arcade Children of the American Northeast,” originally published in The Southwest Review (yep, the Northeast meets the Southwest).

From the publisher:

“Award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five countries that both establish and subvert the classic cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic—from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine monolithic corporate overlords. Daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world. There’s dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AI, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons, and roguish hackers. These tales examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures.”

Editor Jared Shurin said of my story:

“Sam J. Miller’s “Feral Arcade Children of the American Northeast” (Southwest Review) weaponises nostalgia, bringing to life the misbegotten dark-side of a ‘more innocent time’. Although ultimately empowering, it punctures our myths of a 1980s childhood, far more Lost Boys than Ready Player One.”

I’m honored to be in the mix, alongside heroes like William Gibson and Janelle Monae and Samuel R. Delany and Ken Liu and and and and and…

…here’s the entire 108-story Table of Contents.

Yasser Abdellatif – “Younis in the Belly of the Whale” (2011) – translation by Robin Moger
K.C. Alexander – “Four Tons Too Late” (2014)
Madeline Ashby – “Be Seeing You” (2015)
Ryuko Azuma – “2045 Dystopia” (2018) – first translation by Marissa Skeels
Jacques Barcia – “Salvaging Gods” (2010)
Greg Bear – “Petra” (1982)
Steve Beard – “Retoxicity” (1998)
Bef – “Wonderama” (1998) – first translation by the the author
Bruce Bethke – “Cyberpunk” (1983)
Lauren Beukes – “Branded” (2003)
Russell Blackford – “Glass Reptile Breakout” (1985)
Maurice Broaddus – “I Can Transform You” (2013)
Pat Cadigan – “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986)
Myra Çakan – “Spider’s Nest” (2004) – translation by Jim Young
Beth Cato – “Apocalypse Playlist” (2020)
Suzanne Church – “Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop” (2012)
Samuel R. Delany – “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” (1968)
Paul Di Filippo – “A Short Course in Art Appreciation” (1988)
Philip K. Dick – “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (1966)
Cory Doctorow – “0wnz0red” (2002)
Candas Jane Dorsey – “[Learning About] Machine Sex” (1988)
George Alec Effinger – “The World As We Know It” (1992)
Greg Egan – “Axiomatic” (1990)
Isabel Fall – “Helicopter Story” (2020)
Minister Faust – “Somatosensory Cortex Dog Mess You Up Big Time, You Sick Sack of S**T” (2021)
Fabio Fernandes – “WiFi Dreams” (2019) – translation by the author
Taiyo Fujii – “Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” (2013) – translation by Jim Hubbert
Ganzeer – “Staying Crisp” (2018)
William Gibson – “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981)
William Gibson and Michael Swanwick – “Dogfight” (1985)
Eileen Gunn – “Computer Friendly” (1989)
Omar Robert Hamilton – “Rain, Streaming” (2019)
Karen Heuler – “The Completely Rechargeable Man” (2008)
Saad Hossain – “The Endless” (2020)
Gwyneth Jones – “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland” (1996)
Richard Kadrey – “Surfing the Khumbu” (2002)
Khalid Kaki – “Operation Daniel” (2016) – translation by Adam Talib
James Patrick Kelly – “Rat” (1986)
John Kessel – “The Last American” (2007)
Cassandra Khaw – “Degrees of Beauty” (2016)
Christian Kirchev – “File: the death of Designer D” (2009)
Aleš Kot – “A Life of Its Own” (2019)
Nancy Kress – “With the Original Cast” (1982)
Naomi Kritzer – “Cat Pictures Please” (2015)
Lavanya Lakshminarayan – “Études” (2020)
David Langford – “comp.basilisk.faq” (1999)
Oliver Langmead – “Glitterati” (2017)
Fritz Leiber – “Coming Attraction” (1950)
Jean-Marc Ligny – “RealLife 3.0” (2014) – first translation by N.L.M. Roshak
Arthur Liu – “The Life Cycle of a Cyber Bar” (2021) – translation by Nathan Faries
Ken Liu – “Thoughts and Prayers” (2019)
Steven S Long – “Keeping Up with Mr Johnson” (2016)
M. Lopes da Silva – “Found Earworms” (2019)
James Lovegrove – “Britworld™” (1992)
Nick Mamatas – “Time of Day” (2002)
Phillip Mann – “An Old-Fashioned Story” (1989)
Lisa Mason – “Arachne” (1987)
Tim Maughan – “Flyover Country” (2016)
Ken MacLeod – “Earth Hour” (2011)
Paul J McAuley – “Gene Wars” (1991)
Sam J. Miller – “Feral Arcade Children of the American Northeast” (2021)
Misha – “Speed” (1988)
Janelle Monáe and Alaya Dawn Johnson – “The Memory Librarian” (2022)
Sunny Moraine – “I Tell Thee All, I Can No More” (2013)
Michael Moss – “Keep Portland Wired” (2020)
T.R. Napper – “Twelve Minutes to Vinh Quang” (2015)
Kim Newman – “SQPR” (1992)
Mandisi Nkomo – “Do Androids Dream of Capitalism and Slavery?” (2020)
Jeff Noon – “Ghost Codes of Sparkletown” (2011)
Brandon O’Brien – “fallenangel.dll” (2016)
Craig Padawer – “Hostile Takeover” (1985)
Victor Pelevin – “The Yuletide Cyberpunk Yarn, or Christmas_Eve-117.DIR.” (1996) – first translation by Alex Shvartsman
Harry Polkinhorn – “Consumimum Igni” (1990)
Gerardo Horacio Porcayo – “Ripped Images, Rusty Dreams” (1993) – first translation by the author
qntm – “Lena” (2021)
Jean Rabe – “Better Than” (2010)
Yurei Raita – “The Day a Computer Wrote a Novel” (2019) – translation by Marissa Skeels
Cat Rambo – “Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars” (2006)
Paul Graham Raven – “Los Pirates del Mar de Plastico” (2014)
Justina Robson – “The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One” (2007)
Pepe Rojo – “Grey Noise” (1996) – translation by Andrea Bell
Nicholas Royle – “D.GO.” (1990)
Rudy Rucker – “Juicy Ghost” (2019)
Erica Satifka – “Act of Providence” (2021)
Nisi Shawl – “I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer” (1989)
Lewis Shiner – “The Gene Drain” (1989)
John Shirley – “Wolves of the Plateau” (1988)
Zedeck Siew – “The White Mask” (2015)
J.P. Smythe – “The Infinite Eye” (2017)
Neal Stephenson – “The Great Simoleon Caper” (1995)
Bruce Sterling – “Deep Eddy” (1993)
Bruce Sterling and Paul Di Filippo – “The Scab’s Progress” (2001)
Charles Stross – “Lobsters” (2001)
E.J. Swift – “Alligator Heap” (2016)
Wole Talabi – “Aboukela52” (2019)
Molly Tanzer – “The Real You™” (2018)
K.A. Teryna – “The Tin Pilot” (2021) – translation by Alex Shvartsman
Jeffrey Thomas – “Immolation” (2000)
Lavie Tidhar – “Choosing Faces” (2012)
James Tiptree Jr. – “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973)
Vauhini Vara – “Ghosts” (2021)
Marie Vibbert – “Electric Tea” (2019)
Corey J. White – “Exopunk’s Not Dead” (2019)
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne – “The State Machine” (2020)
Neon Yang – “Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points” (2014)
E. Lily Yu – “Darkout” (2016)
Yun Ko-eun – “P.” (2011) – first translation by Sean Lin-Halbert
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro – “wysiomg” (2016)

Way back in 2014, I won the Shirley Jackson Award for my short story “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides.” A weird gay story from an unknown author – it had been my first pro story sale!

It was one of my proudest moments. And it wouldn’t have been possible without this awesome independent award, where the passions and perspectives of a handful of individual jurors could spotlight the oddball stuff that would be missed by the bigger awards, with their inevitable bias toward established names.

So I’m over-the-moon-honored to be part of the award jury this year, judging the short story and novelette categories.

And I want your recommendations! If there are horror / dark fiction stories that you loved (or wrote) (or published) in 2021, tell me all about them! Follow this thread for the dozens of amazing stories that have already been suggested, and to make recommendations of your own!

Beyond insanely proud and happy and humbled that I’m on the ballot for the 57th annual Nebula Awards!!

“Let All the Children Boogie” took a long time to gestate and finalize and find its way into the world, and it’s such a tingly privilege to receive this kind of recognition for my gnarled messy story of queer teen love and the transformative power of music – and Iggy Pop and David Bowie – and the very 90’s feeling of falling in love with a song you heard on the late-night radio and had no way of learning more about, might never discover again.

The short story category – and the ballot as a whole – is filled to bursting with incredible talent and brilliant writing. GO READ IT ALLLLLLLL

Tor.com just announced the Table of Contents to its annual “Best of” anthology, for the short fiction it published in 2021, and my story “Let All the Children Boogie” is included!

It’s about a bunch of my usual obsessions – queer teenage love and mysterious late night radio broadcasts and maybe time-traveling super-intelligences? But mostly it’s about David Bowie, and Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” and the lonesome magic way music can break you out of the bubble of your body.

The eBook edition will be available for free from all your favorite vendors on January 25, 2022. But in the meantime, you can click here to read my story – or walk this way to find all the other fabulous fictions!

I am super proud and profoundly humbled to have served as the judge for the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.

And after many months of reading incredible books and agonizing over the decision I had to make, I am delighted to join the Institute staff in congratulating the winners!

Debut Novel Category:
Cadwell Turnbull, The Lesson (Blackstone Publishing, 2019)

Open Category:
Ted Chiang, Exhalation (Knopf, 2019)

I am so grateful to the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College for this incredible opportunity – and to Ted and Cadwell for their incredible work.

“Few science fiction storylines are more overused than tales of alien first contact and invasion, which makes Cadwell Turnbull’s achievement in The Lesson all the more astonishing,” said Miller. “He’s managed to make it fresh and alive and painfully relevant for a moment where our histories of colonization and exploitation are poised to teach us all some terrible lessons, and we should all be paying attention. It’s the kind of debut that makes me so excited for the future of speculative fiction.”

“Ted Chiang is simply the greatest living science fiction writer, and each new story of his is cause for celebration. It’s been 17 years since his last collection, and Exhalation is exactly the kind of brain-exploding, superhuman, profoundly human work we need right now. Far and away the best speculative book of the year, and probably the decade. Ted’s stories rewrite the rules of the world and widen the scope of our dreams, and we are all in his debt,” said Miller.

Check out the full press release here.

Honestly every one of the nominated books could plausibly have been a winner, and every one of them will reward your time… and make you feel a hell of a lot better about how fucked up our world is. I refuse to believe the species that produced books like these is past saving. I took to Twitter to shout them all out individually: