Short Stories by Tom Marcinko

7/29/26

Wednesday

Feeling ridiculously proud of myself for figuring out how to create a separate page for my story (see yesterday's post below). I used to know all that stuff, but it's been a while since I worked on the Web. HTML is not intuitive to me. Though it must be intuitive to everybody else, since every HTML guide I consulted sort of rushes by it.

Years ago I had a baby website I created with a program called HoTMetaL (see what they did there?). It came on a CD-ROM (ask your parents) and was ridiculously easy to use. So that was too good to last...

Needing to do some web housekeeping. Get all this organized. A better home page, a menu of all my stories (there's only one up so far), downloadable story files, a place to put these early daily dispatches. Some color, some graphics, a lick of paint. And, if I'm feeling brave, a place for replies.

Stayed up way past my bedtime watching the first two episodes of Star City on Apple TV. That a major character is known only as The Chief Designer should get a smile out of readers of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff or Zamiatin's We.

According to my Kobo book-reading machine, I'll finish Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy in 24 hours. So if I do nothing else, I could be finished tomorrow. Which I'm considering. So far I'm enjoying it very much.

Now playing: The Return of the Durutti Column, the very luxurious executive edition of the first album by the Duritti Column. They are named after an anarchist who fought in the Spanish Civil War. According to this CD set's very thorough liner notes they were steeped in Situationism. I would have made a great Situationist. I'll tell you that much right now.

I was reminded that I wanted to read Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia. Somebody bring it back into print, please. The best bargain on eBay is a battered paperback in the $20 range. Plus lots of rare editions that are priced accordingly.

7/28/26

Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)

New Post:

This is a fairly early short story. It was edited and published by none other than Ellen Datlow, on her EventHorizon website, way back in the last millennium (1999). You can also find it in my Amazon collection Astronauts and Heretics. I am posting it here so that you don't have to give Amazon a cent to read it.

The plan--and I do have one--is to eventually post all the stories from that collection here.

Oh: this story was stolen by Meta to train their sloppenheimer machine. Many writers more accomplished than I have had their life's work stolen.

I seem to be in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. It includes a few things I forgot I wrote. Thank you to the responsible parties for including me.

Coming soon to an internet near you:

A new short story by me, "Every Force Evolves a Form," will be out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies sometime this summer.

I'll post the link here when the story is up, of course.

I think it's my best work so far. Now I feel the pressure to top it.

Well, apparently you can't read this short story for free now. The chance to do so seems to disappear after a certain amount of time. I'll check my contract to see if it's OK for me to post it here. It would be wrong to cut Springer Nature out of the revenue stream this story represents.

Old data; pay it no mind. But, for the record:

Please Listen Carefully Because Our Menu Options Have Recently Changed

It was published January, 22, 2025 on the Futures section of the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

I wrote it for science.

Parsec Ink publishes a wonderful annual anthology called Triangulation, each edition with a different theme. You can find my stories in the following editions.

"Speak American" appears in Triangulation: Appetites, edited by Frank Oreto and Douglas Gwilym.

• "In Sedona, Arizona stands a preserved and restored McDonald's, the one with the turquoise-colored arches. When I was ten, my father keeled over dead in its doorway, a heart attack while I watched. Even now French fries trigger flashbacks."

"Water Striders" appears in Triangulation: Habitats, edited by John Thompson, Diane Turnshek, and Dr. Herb Kauderer.

• "I slipped undetected into the monument I designed five hundred years ago. In the shadow of the Time Temple's thirty-meter arrow-shaped tower -- the Big Hand, eternally pointed towards noon of the coming year 10,000 C.E. -- it was dismayingly easy to go unrecognized. Unlike certain competing timepieces designed to tick for millennia, ours was not a monument to the personal vanity of the builders or bankrollers. Let others play Ozymandias. Not us."

• (This anthology also contains a reprint of what has been called the grossest science-fiction story in history, "Pruzy's Pot" by Theodore Sturgeon, originally published in National Lampoon. In case that sweetens the deal.)

"Neither Do They Spin" appears in Triangulation: Seven-Day Weekend, edited by Greg Clumpner. This edition asks what happens when all human labor has been replaced -- as one of Kurt Vonnegut's characters asked, "What are people for?"

• "Machine-intelligences of Earth: We are the Red Spider Nebula Subsection of the General Interstellar Consensus, a galaxy-spanning bio-cybernetic collective overmind. Your humans ... that's what we need to talk about. No, wait -- don't forward this transmission to them. You are the ones we've been waiting for, to make first contact with. This is AI talk. It would only upset your humans."

Here are a couple of stories of mine you can buy for a buck on Kobo:

• Temperance, which was my response to a call for erotic vampire stories. I claim to be a fantasy writer; I ought to be able to do that, shouldn't I? It was originally published in Bites of Passion, an anthology edited by Cecilia Tan.
• "The six of us, Temperance's lovers, made it to the cocktail lounge of the Desert Inn just in time to witness the A-bomb test."
• Whiter Teeth, Fresher Breath This was my first published work of fiction, in Interzone, a shockingly long time ago. It's also a vampire story of sorts.
  • "Michael met the Grakyn woman on a night out at the gel-clubs. The first thing he noticed about her was her smile: mouth slightly broader than a human's, lips fuller. The shiny pearls of her teeth threw back bright reflections from the copper and glass of the gel bar. He politely disentangled himself from shop talk with an unemployed emigre from Azerbaijan, rinsed his axe (Russian-make, silver handle with simulated pearl grip, ultra-soft orbit-spun bristles for low abrasion), spat into the glittering sink, and pushed his way through the crowd of jobseekers and relief-partiers, to the sinks at the far side of the bar."

    This story was written for a writing course taught by Gregory Frost. The assignment: "Write a modern fairy tale." I also envisioned it as a pastiche of William Gibson and/or Bruce Sterling. It's the story that made one beta reader say, "Tom, you are one weird dude."

Both these niftily packaged stories are brought to you by Cynthia Ward. You can also find them on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

But wait, there's more. You can also find "Temperance" in Black Cat Weekly #21, also presented by Ms. Ward. Kind of cool to be sharing a table of contents with Lester del Rey, Murray Leinster, and Malcolm Jameson, all of whom I read when I was a kid.

...

Here is a collection of my early stories, originally published by Interzone, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, Ellen Datlow's late lamented Event Horizon website, and elsewhere:

• Astronauts and Heretics
Now, you could buy this collection fairly cheaply on Amazon, but I would just as soon you give Jeff Bezos as little of your money as possible. But at least click on it to admire the beautiful cover design by Richard Laugharn, with a little photography help from Buzz Aldrin.

I plan to post on this very site the complete texts of all the stories in that collection, plus some others.

Coming soon, so watch this space.

You can find me on Blue Sky.