Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

Artwork by Andres Mossa

I’ve been so busy with UFO2 Kickstarter and submissions that I’ve neglected to announce several of my recent publications (which I will gleefully catch up on in this post!)

Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show

This is easily the funniest story I’ve had published to date. One day I was loitering on Twitter and saw friend and fellow writer Sylvia Spruck Wrigley complain about the difficulty she was having explaining Cthulhu to grandma.

“That would make a great story title,” I told her. She agreed, and said that she would try to come up with something that fit.

A few weeks passed and the title stuck with me, so I followed up with Sylvia to see if she had made any progress. She said that she hadn’t and I asked if I could use the title myself. She said yes, and I wrote the story within a couple of days — which is super fast, for me. I named the protagonist Sylvia and named her character’s grandmother and gran-grandmother after Sylvia’s own mom and grandma.

This story is about a magic pawn shop. Somebody trades in Cthulhu on pawn (it’s stored in a handy pocket dimension which looks like a snow globe) and all sorts of wackiness ensues. I have since written a sequel where a Pandora’s box finds its way into the magic pawn shop, and plan on writing more stories in this setting.

IGMS is a great home for this story. They published it today in issue #33, and while you have to subscribe to read the entire story, you can read an excerpt and see the awesome original artwork by Andres Mossa in full size by clicking this link.

The Epistolary History at The Journal of Nature

This is a flash fiction story about a hapless time traveler I wrote in February. In honor of the letter-writing month it’s told entirely through letters. Since this one is available online for free, I will direct you to read it rather than telling you too much more about it.

Amusingly I received e-mail acceptances for these two stories within a *minute* of each other, making that pretty much the best minute of my writing career, ever. It’s fitting that they were published within 24 hours of each other, too.

The Field Trip at Cast of Wonders

The Field Trip is now my most cosmopolitan story yet. It was originally printed in the In Situ anthology from Dagan Books. It has been translated into Polish and was accepted to be translated and published in Romanian. And now it’s been podcast by a UK audio magazine. You can listen to it here. This is the first time this story is available online for free.

Putting it All Together at Toasted Cake

This story is the only one of the four that isn’t humorous. Instead, it’s very lyrical — which is well outside of my normal writing comfort zone. And Tina Connolly was the perfect performer to read it! The story was originally published at Nine Magazine, which is sadly defunct. It’s not currently available anywhere online in print form,  but you can listen and enjoy the podcast.

And that’s my recap for April. Next month I have stories coming out in Daily Science Fiction, One Sentence Stories anthology, and Buzzy Magazine. Stay tuned!