The only evil in this world is shame.
Anything you consign to darkness is dark.
Anything you admit lies in the light.
— from When It Was Automatic
Five stories written across a decade. Each one a different world: a space station in the near future, a war for the ruins of Heaven, a Victorian city in fog, a winter that never ended, a superhero's courtroom confession.
All of them about the same costly, stubborn thing — what happens when love is the counter-argument. Not love as comfort. Love as a technology more powerful than the thing it's pushing back against.
Stories for readers who've been disappointed by small dreams.
"Does it portray technology as a bad thing? Is it predicated on the essential shittiness of mankind? Does it rule out the possibility of the future being a better place? Because I'm not interested."— Kirby Brendan, While You Are Over There
"Take a particle, put it through something, with another particle. Just a simple thing that everybody can see. And those two things are forever entangled. So when somebody looks at you, spinning clockwise, I'm spinning the other way."
"But doesn't that mean I'm going the opposite way? Doesn't that mean we're fleeing from each other?"
"No, I like that we spin opposite ways, it's why we're a good team. But that's not what is interesting, what's interesting is that I am doing whatever I am doing, while you are over there, spinning the other way. And the only person that knows this..."
"Is the person that's watching. The one that's looking at us both."
"We don't need to know. We just are. We are filling the spots. We are twisting the perfect ways. It's only interesting to them, to the observer. The one that doesn't see us, when we're alone."
"Like a particle doesn't care which way time runs."
"Or how far: While you are over there, I am yet still entangled."
And then I was in love with Jonah Hope. That's the moon-picture. Gradeschool physics and a cold ratty blanket.
Two men built a space station together and changed the history of science. What they couldn't figure out was whether their marriage was over. Their AI daughter had opinions about this.
The collection's most loved story.The American Dream was real — born in violence on July 4, 1776, nearly invincible, troubled. So was his sidekick's love for him, his wife's patience, and the man who had him killed.
Predicted Trump. Predicted Musk. Sorry about that.Henry Wootten couldn't say what he meant, which meant he almost never said anything. On the night of his friend's worst heartbreak, in the fog of a Victorian city, he met something in the dark that helped.
The Lytton Borough stories.God went out like a light. An army assembled to assault what was left of Heaven. A field medic without a gun fell in love with an angel who used to be called Wrath.
A war story for people who don't read war stories.God came back. He was hungry. People became horses. People became dogs. One woman had a brother who'd already been changed, a house going cold, and a BB gun.
Dedicated to Will Sellari. The most intense story in the collection."Everything in him I found strange and worrisome is what will take him to the stars."— Lord Rocquefort, All the Rage
These stories were written throughout the 2010s. I think they reflect that — a decade of arguing with myself about what it costs to be a man, a queer person, an American, a person who keeps choosing to love enormous things.
There's darkness here. There's also light. I'm not sure you can have one without the other, which is more or less the argument of every story in this collection.
The website is where I'm working out what these stories mean, where they came from, and what they want from you.
Essays, letters, and behind-the-scenes work from the EAOTT world — plus updates on new writing.