My story Starship Day features here – “a strong science fiction story that is a joy to read”

https://literaryportals.blogspot.com/2018/10/short-stories-starship-day-by-ian-r.html

Nice to be the title story on the cover of the July/August, and, indeed, august edition of Asimov’s. My story follows a recent trend of mine, which involves destroying most if not all of mankind and life on Earth merely for the sake of telling an interesting story. You can find out more about it, and read an extract here:

http://www.asimovs.com

There’s also a Q&A about the story here…

Q&A with Ian R. MacLeod

As a previous winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award for Year’s Best Novel, I’ve been very happy to contribute a new story to this upcoming collection, which celebrates Sir Arthur and his centenary in an anthology of new fiction all written in precisely 2001 words, edited by Tom Hunter & Ian Whates. The brief was both difficult and intriguing in equal measure, but the general consensus among contributing writers seems to have been that the restriction, and the obvious need to keep things taunt and on-subject, actually helped. It certainly did with me. My offering is called Ouroboros, and probably owes more to the famous Clarke story The Nine Billion Names of God than it does to E R Eddison’s elaborate heroic fantasy, much though I love both works. I’m also pleased to see that it’s already met its Kickstarter target, but you can keep track of progress (and contribute) here…

My story “The Fall of the House of Kepler” appears in the brand new anthology Extrasolar, edited by the estimable Nick Gevers, which is themed around the many discoveries of spectacular and surprising exoplanets which have been made in recent years, and the many more which will surely be discovered in the years to come. The list of other contributors is, in itself, pretty stellar. As someone who grew up in an era when astronomers and physicists found it hard to come up with good reasons why planets should be a common feature of other solar systems, this whole idea still feels pretty extraordinary, and makes what once seemed like wishful thinking in SF much more probable and real. As to how we reach those places, well, that’s another matter. And, as my story – whose pessimistic nature is signalled by the nod to Edgar Allan Poe in its title – suggests, we shouldn’t get too yet confident about ever making that leap.

This is the newly released Best of Subterranean. A big anthology filled with 750 pages of the works of some great writers including Harlan Ellison, George R R Martin, Robert Silverberg, Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, Michael Bishop, Jonathan Carroll, Joe R Lansdale… and me – my contribution being a homage to M R James called The Crane Method. Thanks to Bill Schafer for bringing out such a significant body of fantastic fiction. I’m really looking forward to reading this.

http://subterraneanpress.com/best-of-subterranean