Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

It’s been a while since I posted a general update. Here goes:

Writing

Since about September of 2023 I’ve been working on a comedy novel The Best of All Possible Planets. I describe it as a space opera retelling of Candide written as a series of Futurama episodes.

My ambitious plan was to quickly write this book before moving on to the third Conradverse novel. However, I discovered that writing straight-up humor is much more difficult and slower than writing action-adventure with some humor in it. So it’s been a much longer slog for what promises to be a relatively short book. The good news is that I have only two chapters left to write and hope to complete the first draft in another week or so. I will then need to do revisions, a round of feedback from beta readers, and another round of revisions. But ultimately I expect to deliver the manuscript to my agent sometime in June!

Translation

I’ve been very short on translation projects lately. Working on one short story translation which I expect to also finish by the end of this month. The novel I translated last year still hasn’t been published yet and I have no large projects on my plate at the moment, which is probably a good thing given how busy I’ve been. But I hope to do more of this soon.

Publications

The May/June issue of Asimov’s includes my translation of Leo Kaganov’s “The Rattler.”

I’ve also had two reprints published recently: “The Golem of Deneb Seven” in the Red Stars and Shattered Shields benefit anthology for Magen David Adom and “Price of Allegiance” in the Leadership Gone Right anthology.

I have two original stories coming out in June. “The In-Between Places” in The Horror at Poo Corner (the first true horror story I’ve written!) and “Doc’s Lucky Day at the City Dump” a sci-fi story in the YA anthology Wink. One more story, “Rumspringa in Sunzheika” is slated for the Shapers of Worlds V anthology currently on Kickstarter.

Anthologies

I still plan to work on UFO10 at some point but the timing is a bit suspect. I have several other cool projects going on that I can’t announce yet and it really depends on my workload. Meantime, The Digital Aesthete is getting good press, award nominations, and other good news one of which I expect to announce later this week. Watch this space.