Spring arrives with major news!
Read on for the details...
BIG NEWS!!!
If you missed it on my socials, I recently announced another big sale. My very first short fiction collection, The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories, will be published in August of 2026 through Stars and Sabers publishing.
The book brings together twenty-one of my favorite science fiction and fantasy stories, some of which have never been available to read for free online, and two of which are brand-new to this collection. I’m excited to share this book with everyone.
Find out more through the official press release here.
I also have a new Author Page on the Stars and Sabers Website. It includes links on all the projects I have involving this publisher.
And in more cool news, I can now share that my Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora-nominated story, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” will be part of the roster for The Long List Anthology 9.
If you’re unfamiliar with this anthology series, it’s made up of the stories from the Hugo Awards long list. My story is included to represent the category of Best Editor Short Form, which in this case means Arley Sorg and Christie Yant, editors of the former iteration of Fantasy magazine. When asked which story they wanted representing them, they chose mine, which is a real honor. I could not be more thrilled.
There’s a Kickstarter campaign for the anthology with great rewards, as always. In the past I’ve contributed to this one myself, as it’s a great way to get your hands on one of these books, or even several. You can support the Kickstarter right here.
ADD MY NEXT BOOK TO YOUR TBR TODAY!
My novelette Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl will be out in February of 2026, but it now has an official Goodreads page! Check out the page to find out more about this retro-futuristic, crime, love story, set in an alternate Toronto, and while you’re at it, click that “Want to Read” button. Every click helps build interest for this book so that it has a more successful launch in February. And this way it’s ready to go when you get your copy.
Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, official page at Stars and Sabers Publishing.
RECENT FICTION SALES
If a book sale and the Long List Anthology news wasn’t enough, I also managed to crack another dream market this past month. I can’t announce this sale publicly yet, but it’s an exciting one! I’ll share the details as soon as I can.
In addition to that, I sold a story that’s a favorite of mine to a brand new market. Can’t yet announce that one either but I will soon, so stay tuned!
But I was recently able to announce a few sales that I’ve had under wraps for a while.
The first happens to be another sale to Stars and Sabers, this time for my short story, “Spells for the Afterlife.” This story will be part of their Of Enchantment, Enigma, and the Infinite anthology, which is all about magic. Magic isn’t something I write about very much, so this is a bit of a departure for me, but I really like how this story turned out, and I’m excited for you to read it.
There’s currently an IndieGoGo campaign for this anthology. You can support it for as little as $5. Here’s the link to find out more including some of the authors forming the TOC.
Another sale I recently announced was to Trollbreath Magazine. Trollbreath will be publishing my story, “So Many Things to See,” in their June issue.
This story takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting and is about the relationship between sisters.
And another dream market I cracked this year was Escape Pod, which will be publishing my solarpunk story, “After the Rain,” in both print and audio. Escape Pod is the second of the Escape Artists podcasts to publish my work, the first being Pseudopod which reprinted, “The Body Remembers,” in 2023.
“After the Rain” involves a cooperative community that starts to notice signs of vandalism, and they decide to take action. It’ll be out in May.
Finally, my most recent sale (that I can talk about) was for my story “Twelve Things that Will Occur Immediately Following Your Invention of Teleportation” to Factor Four. This is my second sale to this publication, and the story’s kind of a sister story to “8 Laws I Wound Up Breaking While Attempting to Restore the Timeline” which was published in Nature in 2023 in that they both deal with mishaps stemming from classic sci-fi inventions.
AWARD ELIGIBILITY
Locus and Aurora awards are still open for nominations for a little while longer.
Canadian CSFFA members have until April 5 to nominate their favorite stories by Canadian authors. I’m primarily promoting my stories, “Bright Horizons” and “The Life You’ve Given Me, Rusty,” which you can find links for below. Both of these made the long-list for the BSFA awards and can also be found through the Nebula reading list.
Anyone can vote for their favorite stories for the Locus until April 15. If you don’t see your favorites on the list, you can write them in at the end. If that includes one of mine, I’d be thrilled.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…
My novella, Lost Cargo, may be out of print, but it’s still getting reviews! The most recent is a review by Dawn Vogel that you can read here.
If you also read and enjoyed Lost Cargo, it’s never too late to review it on Goodreads.
I have quite a few stories coming out starting next month. In the meantime, if you haven’t read the stories I’ve already had published this year, click the links below.
Hard Times at the Four Pines Motel
The Underlying Cause of Her Insomnia
Also, just this past week, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” was reprinted for the fourth time as part of the Nebula Awards Showcase 59. This anthology series features stories that have been nominated for or won a Nebula award, so you can be sure this book is filled with great fiction. Get your copy here.
FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
May is going to be pretty exciting for me with two publications I’ve really been looking forward to. Keep an eye out for…
“Through the Machine,” coming to Lightspeed magazine. This is a story about AI in the arts, with a focus on the film industry. This might be my favorite story I’ve got coming out this year, so don’t miss it!
And “After the Rain,” I mentioned above, is coming to Escape Pod. This one’s a little different for me in that it’s solarpunk, a subgenre I don’t write a lot.
SOME FUN STUFF
My World Fantasy finalist pin had been delayed by a number of things, but it finally showed up in my mailbox last month. So I now have all three of my pins for “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont.” Here they are together on my pin display hoop.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “A World Unto Myself”
Apex just celebrated 20 years in publishing, and with that in mind, I thought I’d delve into the story behind “A World Unto Myself,” which was published in Apex Magazine in May of 2023.
Like many of my flash fiction pieces, this story came from a prompt during Codex’s Weekend Warrior 2022 contest. This particular prompt was an image of robots standing close together.
This made me think of decommissioned robots being put into storage. But the story I wanted to tell was about a robot that somehow managed to avoid this fate. I paired this with the seed of an idea I’d had back in 2020 where a robot unable to move takes in the life happening around him.
I wondered what would happen to the robot over time. How would he feel about his situation? What would his place in the world be as something now considered obsolete?
The story begins forty years after the robot’s human owner left him seated on a bench in an abandoned scrapyard. The robot doesn’t know why his owner did this, but he realizes this is better than the alternative.
Because his owner instructed him to sit on the bench and never returned, the robot has no choice but to continue sitting on the bench forever, as he slowly deteriorates. On the surface this is a sad fate, but it comes down to his attitude toward his situation.
After all, we’re all deteriorating over time. We’re all limited by circumstances in our lives, to some extent. There are things we must all accept about our situations, some of them not so pleasant.
Generally speaking, in the style of storytelling most popular in North American markets, you’re told a protagonist must be active. They must push back against adversity and triumph in the end.
The protagonist in this story is incapable of that. This narrative breaks that rule and follows the style of other storytelling traditions. The protagonist does “fight back” in a sense, but he does so internally, for the most part. He refuses to be defeated by his fate. He determines to find purpose and meaning in this latter portion of his existence. In the end, he succeeds.
Yes, he might still wind up rusting away over time, but he’s doing so on his terms, and in a sense enjoys a kind of freedom in that, no longer having to serve human needs, he can find his place in the natural world that surrounds him.
It’s a story that has a lot to say about both life, and death, and the cycle between them. There’s a positivity that balances out the darker aspects of the piece, in that while the robot knows his end will come, he also knows he will live on through the living creatures he interacts with.
The story ended up scoring fairly well in the Codex contest, but even so, when I sent it off to Apex I didn’t think it would be their thing. I thought they would want something darker, and this story definitely had a softer side to it. I was very happy when they sent me an acceptance, and it’s still one of my favorite stories I’ve published.
Since its original publication, I’ve been approached for the right to translate this story. As a result, I’m excited that this will be my very first Spanish translation for a piece of fiction.
Much of my family still lives in South America and they speak and read in Spanish. Some exclusively, others primarily, so it’ll be nice to have a story available online that they can read in a language they’re more comfortable with.
“A World Unto Myself” was originally published in 2023 in Apex Magazine. The Spanish translation will appear in La Tuerca Andante in 2026.
Thank you for reading.
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P.A. Cornell
So many congratulations!