The magnificent, crucial Uncanny Magazine has given me a column called #Resistance101, to talk about community organizing for science fiction & fantasy creators & consumers, and my first one is out now! Just another reason for you to support, subscribe, and spread the word about their excellence.

For starters, I wanted to keep it super simple, and give some easy & important protest tips I wish someone had told me when I first started going to a ton of actions. Here’s a teaser!

Bring water, and snacks. Don’t go overboard—you gotta carry all this stuff around, after all—but it’s good to have a Go Bag at the ready. Oreos are excellent because you can share.

Talk to people. Make friends. Possibly with Oreos! Protest is less about convincing enemies than about building power and relationships with friends, and bringing new people into the work.

Charge your devices before leaving. Bring an external battery if possible. Turn off your phone when the battery falls to 10 percent, so you save something for emergencies.

Check the weather beforehand. Prepare for temperature extremes.

Also! My so-called credentials:

I’ve been a community organizer for fifteen years. I’ve helped organize hundreds of direct actions, ranging from tame sidewalk rallies to occupations of government office building lobbies to tent cities on vacant bank-owned properties. I’ve gotten arrested in Central Park at a midnight protest; I’ve been illegally barred from public legislative hearings; I was detained by the Secret Service while protesting outside the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Here’s the thing, though. I’m not some badass fearless radical fuck-the-man kinda dude. I am the exact opposite. Abusive cop encounters as a kid scarred me for life. I started out just making signs for protests, because I like to draw. I was scared shitless the first time I stared down a line of police officers. But that only lasted a minute. Because there were a lot of us, and we were fighting something evil. That’s the first lesson: you don’t need to be brave on your own, because you will be brave together.

I’m proud to have a guest editorial in the current issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact!

“Someone Else’s Apocalypse” is about what twelve years as a community organizer working with homeless folks has taught me about how we’ll all deal with the coming collapse of civilization. I wrote it back in May, when I was imagining that rising seas and global conflict over water would render us post-apocalyptic in a couple decades… and now, for some strange reason possibly having to do with the US presidential election, I am feeling like the apocalypse is significantly more imminent now…

Huge thank-you to Analog editor Trevor Quachri for soliciting this piece!

Here’s a taste. For the full thing, pick up the December 2016 issue of Analog!

William Gibson famously remarked that “the future is here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This is commonly understood to describe the juxtaposition between one part of the earth’s population existing in a “future” where technological and social advances have made many of science fiction’s most beloved dreams come true, and another part of the earth’s population existing in a “past” to which technological and medical advances have not yet trickled down, subject to hardships and sicknesses and that the developed world left behind long ago. Cell phone assemblers in China, for example, endure sweatshop conditions as bad as anything during the Industrial Revolution, in workshops so bad that some workers are driven to suicide, while the Silicon Valley executives whose products they put together work from lavish, high-tech fortress homes.

I suspect, however, that the William Gibson comment contains a certain degree of ominous prophecy. The “future“ that has already arrived, that snuck in without anyone noticing it, is not the tech-enabled utopia we spent the latter half of the twentieth century waiting for, the one we mostly see outside our windows, lacking only jetpacks and hoverboards and interstellar travel. The future is not the tech utopia where we carry computers in our pockets capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge at any moment.

That world, alas, is the past. The future that’s here, unevenly distributed, is the post-apocalyptic wasteland. The future is dystopia, and its population is growing.

Turn on the nightly news and you’re likely to see refugees. Displaced masses from Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan and more. People who’ve survived dangerous passages, and lost loved ones in that same process. Hungry, frightened, traumatized. Standing outside the gates of safe places they’re barred form entering.

But refugees from foreign countries aren’t the only ones living in their own personal post-apocalypse….

Incredible news: my novel BLACKFISH CITY has sold to Ecco Press, for release in April 2018!

Unlike my debut THE ART OF STARVING, forthcoming in 2017, this one isn’t young adult. A mysterious woman arrives in the floating Arctic city of Qaanaaq, in a future where rising seas have caused dramatic geopolitical changes. She’s accompanied by an orca and a polar bear, on a mission that might be bloody and might be beautiful and might be both. Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly had to say about it [under its working title THE BREAKS]:

They incorrectly identify me as a Hugo nominee (I was long-listed last year, but not a finalist!) but otherwise IT IS ALL TRUE. I adore Ecco Press and am so excited to be part of their family, and I love Zack’s work as an editor. Big love and gratitude, as always, to my magnificent agent Seth Fishman.

PS here’s a bad sketch I did, of the main character:

My new story “Things With Beards” is out now in Clarkesworld!

Essentially a fanfic sequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, my story follows MacReady after the events of the movie, returned to his life with his memory full of weird holes.

When MacReady is not MacReady, or when MacReady is simply not, he never remembers it after. The gaps in his memory are not mistakes, not accidents. The thing that wears his clothes, his body, his cowboy hat, it doesn’t want him to know it is there. So the moment when the supply ship crewman walked in and found formerly-frozen MacReady sitting up—and watched MacReady’s face split down the middle, saw a writhing nest of spaghetti tentacles explode in his direction, screamed as they enveloped him and swiftly started digesting—all of that is gone from MacReady’s mind.

And he’s watching AIDS ravage his community. And he’s supporting the work of Black liberation activists who are fighting to stop the cops from brutalizing communities of color. And he might be killing lots of people.

Apex Magazine said “As is typical of Miller’s work, “Things With Beards” delivers a satisfying emotional punch, and serves as an excellent example of contemporary fiction in conversation with a SFF classic.”

Re-watching the film recently, it occurred to me that I really don’t think that people who’ve been killed and replaced by the Thing are aware that they’re Things. This is a contentious topic in Thing fandom, evidently. But I started to think through – what would happen if they didn’t know? How would they behave? How does the Thing function?

Inverse said “A direct sequel to John Carpenters 1982 film The Thing, the short story not only asserts the characters MacReady and Childs as monstrous “things” but more importantly, gay men. Using science fiction to comment on the plight of oppressed or marginalized people is a proud tradition, but what’s telling here is that Miller plucks cinematic characters from an iconic horror/sci-fi film and inserts them into prose.”

Best SF said “another strong story from Miller.”

Tangent Online said “It wasn’t until the very end of this story that I finally understood the central point Miller was making—what The Thing, itself did —with this one change. Masks. Those masks that we wear every day, hiding our true selves from even the people we love. Very well done, and recommended.”

Editor Neil Clarke said “this is going to piss a lot of people off,” and I think he may be right!

My story “Angel, Monster, Man” has just been released by Nightmare Magazine.

It’s the height of the AIDS crisis. Medications that will help manage the illness are a decade away. Three friends, gay men overwhelmed with rage and sadness, who’ve inherited suitcases and boxes and garbage bags full of unpublished work from fellow writers killed by the virus, invent Tom Minniq: a ghost writer, a collective pseudonym under which to publish all the orphaned work of brilliant writers whose careers were cut short. And while Tom becomes a literary superstar, he doesn’t stay on the page. And he starts acting out their anger in ways that they couldn’t anticipate, and can’t control. And each of them, in turn, is visited by a very different Tom Minniq.

This story took shape in my mind while reading gay fiction and poetry of the 1980’s. [*] You can’t help but be struck by the staggering volume of young, fresh, powerful, innovative artists whose voices were silenced by HIV/AIDS before they’d had a chance to change the world like they clearly would have. And not just writers – the editors, agents, critics, audiences who supported and built these voices… it’s hard not to come away feeling like fiction was in the middle of a real revolution in terms of storytelling and voice and content and attitude, which was strangled in its crib by a deadly disease and a toxic homophobic patriarchy. But I started thinking: what could have happened, if all that rage and talent and fire hadn’t been snuffed out? What if it came to life and changed everything? All the powerful words that went unwritten, or were written and lost because there was no one left to get them out into the world – what if they all added up to something real – and terrifying?

It’s the first horror story I’ve written since “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” won the Shirley Jackson Award for horror/dark fiction, and while I love horror it’s not the place where I feel most comfortable as a writer. But this is a story about the things that terrify me, and I’m happy with it. And I hope you like it.

Podcast of the story is here, read by the great Stefan Rudnicki!

There’s also an interview with me about the story, here, in which I say some pretentious stuff like this:

When my dear friend and writing hero Carmen Maria Machado asked me to be her co-editor for the fiction section of two issues of Interfictions, the journal of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, I immediately assumed some sophisticated hacker with intimate knowledge of my most specific desires had hacked her email account. Because I adore Interfictions, and the crucial work of the Foundation. I had volunteered to work on the IAF’s IndieGoGo fundraising appeal the year before because I believed in their mission, and the beautiful things they shepherd into the world.

Now, many months later, our first issue is out in the world. AND IT IS AMAZING!!!

Click here for the Fall issue of Interfictions, in its entirety.

There is so much excellent stuff in this issue. And not just the fiction, which Carmen and I are very proud of. There’s phenomenal stuff curated by arts editor Henry Lien, as well as nonfiction and poetry co-editors Alex Dally MacFarlane and Sofia Samatar, “intoxicating mixes and beautiful clashes of language, mythology, and memory,” as the editors’ note so aptly puts it…

Several of the issue’s pieces deal with family: in “A Primer on Separation,” Debbie Urbanski provides a heartbreaking how-to manual for navigating the gulf that opens up between parent and child, while Lisa Bradley’s “glass womb” reaches into the obscure and frightening territory between siblings. Shveta Thakrar tells a slipstream story of how our mothers’ gifts help us, and sometimes fail us, in “Shimmering, Warm and Bright.” In “Answering Crow’s Call” by Alina Rios, family history falls like a thunderclap.

Moving from personal history to spiritual heritage, “Psychopomp” by Indrapramit Das looks at life and death through the lens of Hindu philosophy in the shadow of a cosmic tsunami. In “Assemble”, theatre dybbuk, in collaboration with the Center for Jewish Culture, Leichtag Foundation, and the New School of Architecture and Design, create a unique theatre/dance/architecture piece inspired by the ancient ritual surrounding the harvest festival of Sukkot. Along with these works that engage some of the world’s oldest cultural forms, you’ll find lively interactions with more recent literature: Amy Parker reimagines the young girl of Nabokov’s Lolita, Matthew Jakubowski follows a critic who is trying to write about Mercè Rodoreda’s novelWar, So Much War, and Lauren Naturale searches for lesbian history in the imaginary space of historical fiction. Uche Ogbuji’s “The Furies of Mad Max” engages a contemporary film narrative, while Rebecca Gould’s translations of five ghazals by Hasan Sijzi (d. 1337) bring to English contemplations on gardens, birds, swords and wine.

These works ask how we perceive the world and how we communicate. Such questions lie at the heart of Nneoma Ike-Njoku’s “Old Ghosts,” which conjures the other world through sound, and “Perhaps, perhaps” by Saudamini Deo, which traces the limits of photography and ultimately the limits of sight. In Rebecca Campbell’s “I Just Think It Will Happen, Soon,” a woman and others like her are beckoned by an urgent, pulsing mystery beyond the realm of most people’s perception.

Finally, in a special roundtable dedicated to translation, the Bulgarian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian and Japanese translators of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice talk about the changes and inventions required to represent the novel’s gender ambiguity and female pronoun usage.

I must take a moment to acknowledge the real heroes here, our fearless insightful wise and tolerant slush readers! Christian Coleman, Eugene Fischer, Val Howlett, Susana Marcelo, Patrick Ropp, Gabriela Santiago, and Isabel Yap all read a staggering volume of contributions – in a submissions window of only two weeks, we received over five hundred stories!!! Many of them amazing! Many (many!) of them… not. But thanks to these hard-working and astute judges of literary quality, we knew which were which.

Seeing it online, now, with all these incredible stories we chose, alongside so many other exciting works of poetry and prose and art and all the ineffable categories in between, makes me feel proud in a totally different way from the pride I feel seeing something of mine in a table of contents. It’s more parental, almost, or like what a teacher must feel. “I have helped someone do something awesome; I am helping someone shine,” instead of “I am shining.” I understand why people are editors. These people are wonderful people. Because editing is hard. It is super super hard.

And, oh, hey, writers – as Carmen said so well on her blog:

We’ll be guest-editing the spring issue, as well. If you’re thinking about submitting, a note about stuff we saw in this submission pile: For some reason, we received quite a few stories that, while they were excellent, were not in any way interstitial. Not in form, or genre, or anything. They were straight science fiction/fantasy/realism, and traditionally told at that. The problem is that even if these sorts of stories blow our socks off, we can’t publish it in Interfictions, which is a space for weird, hybrid, unclassifiable work. (The Interstitial Arts Foundation defines interstitial art here.) So we wanna see the stuff of yours that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Send it to us! *makes grabby hands*

The full list of stories from the issue is here:

• “Kingdom by the Sea” by Amy Parker
• “A Primer on Separation” by Debbie Urbanski
• “Shimmering, Warm and Bright” by Shveta Thakrar
• “Psychopomp” by Indrapramit Das
• “I Just Think It Will Happen, Soon” by Rebecca Campbell

I credit the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop with 100% of the amazing good fortune I’ve had in the past three years. The stories I’ve sold, the awards I’ve been nominated for, the magnificent friendships I’ve formed with incredible writers and editors and agents and readers – none of that could have happened if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to end up as part of the Clarion class of 2012…. aka THE AWKWARD ROBOTS. (for a mere taste of all the wisdom and awesome that I absorbed at Clarion, check out this list of 300+ pieces of writing advice from our workshops!)

My brilliant teachers and classmates made me so so so much better than I was, and for 40+ years the Clarion Workshop has been spawning amazing new science fiction and fantasy and horror writers… Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link… the list is overwhelming, and well-nigh-endless.

Because we were so transformed by the experience, as people and as writers, my class is committed to keeping the Clarion experience alive. So for the second year in a row, we Awkward Robots have created an anthology of short fiction that’s available for sale as a fundraiser for the Clarion Foundation! These are original stories you can’t find anywhere else, from fucking amazing writers, some of whom are already setting the genre on fire, and the rest of whom are ABOUT to do so. The Awkward Robots’ Orange Volume is a collection of stories from the Clarion UCSD class of 2012, proudly presented as a fundraiser for the Clarion Foundation.

BUY IT HERE!

BoingBoing says:

“Time traveling gamers, levee-breaking mermaids, and frayed sanity on the first manned mission to Europa. It’s all packed between the pages of The Orange Volume. The cohesive Clarion class of 2012 is at it again. Last year they released The Red Volume and raised $1,500 for the Clarion Foundation. This year–just in time for Halloween–they’re following up with The Orange Volume.”

It features fifteen original stories, and is offered for a limited time on a pay-what-you-can basis. It comes in multiple, DRM-free e-book formats (epub/iBooks, mobi/Kindle, and PDF). All proceeds (after hosting fees) will be donated to the Clarion Foundation

Or, you can also donate directly via PayPal to awkwardrobots2012@gmail.com

Pay what you can… BUT REMEMBER IT’S FOR CHARITY TO MAKE AWESOME NEW SCIFI NINJAS, SO KICK US A MEANINGFUL CHUNK OF CHANGE!

THE FULL CAST OF THE AWKWARD ROBOTS! l-r: Lisa Bolekaja, Pierre Liebenberg, Deborah Bailey, Sam J. Miller, Luke R. Pebler, Sadie Bruce, E.G. Cosh, Daniel McMinn, Eliza Blair, Eric Esser, UCSD director Shelley Streeby, Sarah Mack, Lara Elena Donnelly, Danica Cummins, Joseph Kim, Jonathan Fortin, Chris Kammerud, instructor Jeffrey Ford, Carmen Maria Machado, Ruby Katigbak

The August 2015 issue of Lightspeed Magazine contains my story “Ghosts of Home.”

There’s an interview with me about the story here. 

And an audio version, read marvelously by Roxanne Hernandez, here! 

Rich Horton wrote this very kind review of it in Locus:

“The best story in the August Lightspeed comes from Sam J Miller, who has repeatedly impressed with his first several stories, and who shows a lot of range. “Ghosts of Home” is about the housing crisis of 2008 and its effects on people like the main character Agnes and her mother, but it’s set in a version of our world where household spirits are real. Agnes’s job is to placate the household spirits of foreclosed homes. She’s not supposed to directly interact with them, but when one manifests as a really attractive young man, she has a hard time resisting. It sounds sweet, but the core of the story is much less so, with rapacious banks, sad houses, and a soured relationship between the somewhat messed-up Agnes and her also messed-up mother.”

Over at i09, K. Tempest Bradford said this:

The main thing I love about this story is that it empathizes with a type of person who doesn’t often get empathy. We often hear about those mysterious people out there who vote against their own interests or support politicians, policies, and official actions that harm them personally or harm their community. Writing such people off is easy. Understanding how it is they got to that place isn’t, and that’s one of the things Miller tackles here. I also love the idea of houses having spirits that must be appeased once the house is empty for too long. Highly Recommended.

Tangent said:

What makes this interesting is the broken protagonist’s struggle to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of the financial collapse. The protagonist’s stakes in deciding how to handle choices are raised by a recovering-addict’s history of bad decisions, complicated by personal relationships with the local spirits the bank requires its contractor to placate but otherwise ignore… By imbuing homes with souls, insecurities, and emotional risks, the story places the foreclosure crisis on an entirely nonfinancial plane. The protagonist’s successive decisions to act human, instead of enforcing a bank’s soulless values on its surroundings, each invite wonder whether each represents a mistake – like that last descent into addiction’s grip in a decision to score – or represents a step toward redemption. It’s an exciting story with a feeling of real emotional stakes, set in a world built seamlessly and without pause while characters’ actions rivet readers.

My short story “Calved” is in the September issue of Asimov’s! You can also read it here. 

I’ve been submitting stories to Asimov’s off and on since I was 14 (I’m not too proud or vain to admit that that’s 22 years ago), so it’s overwhelmingly awesome to have finally gotten a story in such a great venue.

Over at Locus, Lois Tilton wrote:

“Father and son story in a near future when the Arctic melting and the rise of the oceans has led to a flood of refugees; North Americans are generally unwelcome, and Dom is relatively fortunate to have found a place on a floating city and grunt work on iceboats. The only good thing in his life has been the son whom he can only see when he gets back from three-month work shifts on the boats, but now, looking at Thede, he sees a stranger who seems to hate him… This scenario is the most science-fictional in the issue, realistically depicting likely consequences of global climate change.”

The awesome Jason Sanford wrote a really great review as well, saying in part:

“Dom is desperate to change his son’s opinion. And to accomplish this he … does something which will haunt me for years to come.

“When I finished this story I wanted to scream. I wanted to punish Miller for writing something which so gut my emotions. I wanted to hug him for creating a story so beautifully captivating and so perfectly devastating to read.

“Calved” by Sam. J. Miller is one of the year’s best stories and will likely be on my Hugo and Nebula Award short list. Seek this story out and read it.”

Asimov’s is sold in newsstands and bookstores everywhere. AIRPORTS, EVEN. You can also order a copy online, or get an excellent e-book edition for your digital reader. Check it out. It’s got a tiger on the cover. And my story inside. MY STORY INSIDE.