It’s almost the end of the year and I’m seeing more and more writers post their eligibility lists, so here is mine. I had five pieces of original short fiction published in 2023.

My favourite pick for the awards season is probably:

1. “La Vie En Mer” (3,300 words) in Utopia Science Fiction. Formatted as a series of episode summaries, this is a story about a luxury residential cruise ship that travels to parallel worlds.

“As our global future spirals into more danger and chaos, La Vie En Mer, a luxury cruise ship with 500 occupied residential apartments, is still sailing. Fearing our earth is becoming uninhabitable, a team of four scientists (Grace, Cara, Kenji and Jackson) who live onboard create a device that can propel La Vie En Mer into an unlimited number of parallel earths, hoping to find a new perfect world for them to call home. The first parallel earth they visit is one where dinosaurs and megafauna never went extinct.”

And then:

2. “Solace” (1,500 words) in Stupefying Stories. This is about a fashion designer on a generational spaceship, an allergy to the ship’s lights, plus a sapphic romance sub-plot.

“The first half of the appointment elapsed normally, even if Cora thought she saw something unsettling from the corner of her eye. Then there was something skittering near her feet and she flinched automatically, enough to stick Meadow’s soft skin with a sewing needle and draw blood. Enough to open up the wound on Cora’s own left hand, which she’d left uncovered for ease of use, and then she felt so mortified that she fumbled with the needle and managed to mix that tiniest smear of Meadow’s blood with her own. It had been stupid, as many life-changing events often are.”

3. “The Most Powerful Witch in Witchville” (4,600 words) in Aurealis #163. Does what it says on the tin: a competition story about determining the most powerful witch in Witchville.

“They activate the first wave of mechanical spiders half an hour before sunset. Coal and her seventeen other competitors have been given equal starting positions within the outskirts of the city. Coal keeps her eye on the town wall, bare feet on the ground and broom firmly tucked between her legs, until the city-wide horn sounds to signal that this round of the competition has begun. Her body sings with excitement, like a plucked violin string.”

And finally:

4. “Nowhere, Australia” (2,200 words) in The Vanishing Point #7. This one is about a group of twenty-somethings who are mysteriously stuck in rural Australia, and then the Bad News Horse appears…

“The first thing to know about Nowhere, Australia is that no-one ever comes here. There are no roads, no paths in or out, no tyre tracks. Only a few established wooden buildings, eighty twenty-somethings, the rural dust beneath our feet in shades of ochre, smoke and caramel. I don’t remember any rain ever arriving, either, but from the stretches of sallow grass around us I presume it must fall sometime.”

5. “This is (Not) My Beautiful Cat” (800 words) in Stupefying Stories. A cosy little tale about a girl and a woman who share a cat.

“When the woman wakes up one autumn morning, there is a cat in her house. She does not own a cat.”

As usual I’ll also be doing my end-of-the year video, plus my 2023 Short Fiction Recommendations List (aka ‘some of my favourite stories I’ve read this year’), so look out for those in the not-too-distant future!