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The Daily Dose
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Okay, this isn't a short story. In fact, it's longer than a novel.
This is a link to the first page of the Daily Dose, a far term hard SF
story that I told in daily chunks over the span of a year and a half. The story is now finished and the archives contain the entire thing, in its original daily HTML format, a monthly RTF file format, and in Reader (eBook) format. As with everything else on my site, it's free to read. 135,000 words. Posted 1 Nov 1997 through 12 March 1999. Reader file posted 4 September 2000. |
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Diamond In The Roughage
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The sequel to Diamonds Are For Never and
Diamonds Are A Girls Best Fiend. Sam is stuck
in a backwater universe whose inhabitants aren't very bright. I'm not sure where to take these stories from here. This is my most popular series, but I'm running out of catchy "Diamond" phrases for titles. (-: (PG nudity (of course, you can't SEE anything. The story is text.)) 5700 words. Posted 14 May 2000. |
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Emotion
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A first contact with a creature whose facial expressions seem to have nothing to do with what's going on around it forces a researcher to rehire a problem employee. Possibly due to going through a rough time at work at the time, I had an extremely difficult time writing this story. In the end, it seems good enough to post, but it's nowhere near one of my favorites. If you only read one of my stories, please read Homeostasis Man or Diamonds Are For Never instead of this. 6100 words. Posted 18 March 2000. |
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The Price Of Peace
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A tragedy in a space station, coupled with heroics of one man puts two warring races on the road to peace. Or does it? My writer's group decided to have everyone start with the same character, setting, and conflict, and write a story. This is mine, though I hardly kept to the spirit of the agreement, much less the letter. 6200 words. Posted 13 February 2000. |
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Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Fiend
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The sequel to Diamonds Are For Never. This time
Sam is tracking down a missing person in a difficult location. Another attempt at a satirical/humorous story. I'm afraid the first one may have turned out to be funnier, though. 6200 words. Posted 9 December 1999. |
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Diamonds Are For Never
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A hard boiled detective in a future society takes a job to prove that an
imbecil didn't plagerize a floor waxing manual. Many of my readers have suggested that I try writing comedy. I've written humorous scenes in the past, but this is the first time I ever sat down to write a humorous story. 5500 words. Posted 1 November 1999. |
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Standard Gravity
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Skarab is the first creature of her race to ever get an engineering job
at Gravimetrics. And, it turns out, she's a natural at it. But, she
quickly learns that it takes more than a finely developed brain to do
her job. She finds herself wondering if she has the stomachs for it. This story is set in the Daily Dose universe, but takes place tens of thousands of years before the Dose. You should not need to have read the Dose to enjoy this. 5700 words. Posted 2 October 1999. |
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Homeostasis Criminal
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You're dying and extremely slow and painful death, and someone gives you
the opportunity to start over again with a healthy body. The trouble is,
someone else owns that body. But he's a cold blooded murderor. What do
you do? "Homeostasis Man" is generally considered my best short story, and many people have asked for a sequel. Here it is. It is not necessary to have read the first story to understand this one, but if you're going to read them both, you should read Homeostasis Man first. 5600 words. Posted 3 September 1999. |
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Power of the People
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Although sending her lover away on the colony ship was the right
thing to do, Teresa must now cope with his absence. More expirimentation with my writing. This is an emotion piece as much as it is a story. 4850 words. Posted 3 August 1999. |
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Fish Don't Scream
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Stuck in a horrible assignment on an abysmal planet, hot-headed scientist
Myami Nakamura makes a terrible discovery. This was an attempt to write a story about an "interesting" character. In other words, Myami is downright strange... 5500 words. Posted 5 July 1999. |
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Pirate
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Framed for piracy, first officer Anniston Reyes has one thing on her
mind, revenge. We're approaching the end of my backlog of stories. This is one of the last ones I wrote specifically for the hard sf market. 6700 words. Posted 5 June 1999. |
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FTL 1.0
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If you had a chance to ride on the first ship to ever go faster than
the speed of light, would you go? You know they never get these things
right until version 3.... You can quibble over my definitions of the different types of science fiction, but it would be hard to argue that this belongs anywhere other than the "Hard" category. The only way I could have made this any harder would have been to give the equations for the formulas I was using. 5300 words. Posted 3 May 1999. |
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Last Man
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A story that begs the question, "What would you do if you found
yourself alone on the planet with a beautiful member of the opposite sex?" In other words, watch out what you wish for. 3500 words. Posted 8 March 1999. |
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Kamikaze
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This is a story to remind us that, no matter how smart or powerful someone
may be, that person can still completely misread his or her opponents.
And, though the story itself does not go into the consequences of such a
mistake, they should be abundantly clear to the reader. A number of times I've tried to write a story, only to discover that it had an unfixable flaw that caused me to scrap it. The original incarnation of this story had such a flaw. This is the first time I ever found a way to fix it and keep the story. Of course, the finished version has almost nothing in common with the original. They're basically two separate stories (one of which will never see the light of day). 2500 words. Posted 4 February 1999. |
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Homeostasis Man
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If you can't lose weight, or quit smoking, etc, it's the fault of a
biological process called "homeostasis." Living organisms resist change,
even a change for the better. Now, imagine if you could have a very
strong willed person take over your body for a while, work through the
cravings, and convince your body that the change it should be resisting
is gaining weight or starting to smoke? How much would you pay for that? Basically, everyone who's ever read a decent amount of my stuff has declared that this is my best short story. Hope you enjoy it. And, if you like this one, check out the sequel: Homeostasis Criminal. 4400 words. (PG non-explicit sex, profanity) Posted 10 January 1999. |
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A Father's Gift
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What would Christmas be like for people living under the pressure of an
oppressive government? This is the first time I've ever written a story for a specific holiday (ignoring the April Fools joke in the Daily Dose). When I was writing for magazine editors instead of readers, it never made any sense to do so. Thankfully, these days, I can write what I think my readers would like to read, rather than what I think a particular editor would like to buy. 5200 words. Posted 6 December 1998. |
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Outside
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In a world where the streets are in a constant state of gang warfare,
only the foolhardy and the extremely bored go outside. This is the
story of a man who's a little of both. Just how far away from this are we? If you listen to the news, it feels like it's right around the corner. Then again, if you listen to the news, there are about ten different Armageddons just around the corner... I wrote this to experiment with adding more descriptive detail to my writing. It seemed to work out okay, but I didn't radically change my style afterward. 4200 words. (PG profanity, violence) Posted 7 September 1998. |
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Alone
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An android has been banished to a desolate planet for eternity. But
a group of humans decide that's too harsh a penalty and take it upon
themselves to shorten the sentence. If you've noticed a bias for hard science fiction stories here, it's because I spent a while chasing Analog SF. So a big chunk of my stories have content (though apparently not quality) that is acceptable for that magazine. 2700 words. Posted 5 August 1998. |
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Almost Murder
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A reporter visits an island resort where the guests are allowed to do
anything they want. Yeah, so it's Westworld meets Fantasy Island. (-: Just about every story ever written is inspired by other ones the author read. 5500 words. (PG profanity, adult concepts) Posted 5 July 1998. |
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To Err Is Human
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The story child growing up on the moon in a time of financial hardship
for his blue-collar parents. Still, children don't really notice such
things, much. I wrote this one immediately after going to a "Kris and Dean Show." Former editors and current professional writers, Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, occasionally do this fantastic seminar for budding science fiction writers (called the Kris and Dean Show). If you have any interest in writing and you have an opportunity to attend one of these seminars, I highly reccomend it. 3750 words. Posted 3 June 1998. |
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Meadows
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A scientist, in a desperate attempt to see his dead wife, creates a
device to let him find her in an alternate universe. But the device
doesn't work as planned. This story means a lot to me. Consider, where would our world be with the following two minor changes. 1) Cash is removed, leaving only credit cards. 2) The records credit card companies already keep and give to the police on demand, are posted publicly on the web. Keep this in mind as the debates over digital cash and encryption rage on. Currently the only way to buy stuff on the web is with a credit card. And if the government has its way with encryption, that will never change. 5900 words. Posted 3 May 1998. |
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I Haven't A C.L.U.E Mr. Bigeloo
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A massive space drive is stolen from a space station and an eccentric
investigator moves in to solve the case. This was my first attempt at doing a Science Fiction Mystery. After this I did a Fantasy Mystery, but you'll probably never see that one. I't just didn't work out. If you're keeping track, this is a sequel to "Einstein Was A Spy" (though the two could be read in any order.) 5300 words. Posted 2 March 1998. |
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BioComputer
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In the near future, a criminal fights to keep his way of life possible.
That everyone's way of life is also at stake doesn't seem to bother him. If you're really observant you'll notice that this is the sequel to "Competition" and is at least very similar to the story that "Schrodinger's Tale" hinged around. 4600 words. (PG profanity) Posted 1 Feb 1998. |
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Competition
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A view of the near future and what is required to be a succesful criminal
there. This takes place in the same universe as "Einstein Was A Spy,"
and Darrek shows up in both a sequel and one of my novels. Sometimes a writer will go to great lengths to satisfy a silly need. When it comes down to it, I wrote this whole story so that I could put one of the lines near the end in it. 6500 words. Posted 1 Nov 1997. |
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Schrodinger's Tale
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It's hard to say much about this without giving stuff away. It's said,
however, that all writers write a "writer's story." This is mine. This was the first time I ever tried to do a collaboration. In fact, the first three sections were largely written by my collaborator, John Douceur. Unfortunately, John's and my writing styles (as well as our goals for the story) were different enough that the collaboration didn't work out. I hope to someday be able to post his version somewhere, as it's very interesting (and a great testimonial to the fact that two people starting with the same idea, even the same seed text, will go in totally different directions). 6500 words. Posted 1 Oct 1997. |
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Einstein Was A Spy
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A young scientist learns the hard way that the scientific community is
not always appreciative of radical ideas that challenge what is
currently believed to be true. This was the first short I ever wrote. It would also be first I ever sold, but the magazine died before printing it. 3400 words. Posted 15 Sept 1997. |
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