Reality and Other Fictions

All these years, I've been telling you wonderful people about my novels, with scarcely a mention of my short stories. That's because my short stories have been few and far between. Nevertheless, I've published eleven shorter pieces over the years, in publications as varied as Science Fiction Age, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the Boston Sunday Herald. And now I've collected them.

The first of two collections is Reality and Other Fictions, now on sale at Book View Café, for the low, low price of $2.99! Here's what it looks like:

Here’s the blurb:

Explore an Earth being devoured by entropy, in the ultimate runaway environmental crisis. Dive the depths of the sea to prevent the mother of all oil spills. Rocket into space as a tourist. Mine the asteroids with your enhanced border collie, in the can-do spirit of classic science fiction. They include Carver’s first published short fiction, and his most recent. With new introductions, all from the author of The Chaos Chronicles and Eternity’s End.

If you've been following my blog recently, you'll have seen my mention of some new stories going up for sale as singles. Some of those are in this collection. Here's the contents page:

• Reality School: In the Entropy Zone
• Of No Return
• Seastate Zero
• Rocket Ride
• Dog Star

"Seastate Zero" is available only in this collection, as are the insightful introductions I've lovingly written for each story and for the book as a whole. At least, I hope you'll find them insightful, or at least interesting. I do share some memories I've never written down before about how these stories came to be, and how they fit into my career.

My second collection, Going Alien, is scheduled for late August. It pulls together all of my short work that involves... can you guess? Aliens.

For both of these books, I am indebted to Gretchen, the high school student (now graduated, and valedictorian!) who typed and formatted a good number of them from old paper copies, while helping me as an intern. And equally to Anna King, who provided extraordinary help in wrestling the final formatting into line. Not to mention Allysen, for catching some embarrassing typos and wordos at the eleventh hour. And finally, Vonda McIntyre, author and BVC founding member, who has been tirelessly helpful in getting this stuff up.

Available exclusively at BVC until July. After that, I'll release it to the usual suspects.

I hope you'll give it a try! (Vote for me!)