Releases Nov 4, 2024
ISBNs: Print ISBN: 978-1-953736-36-9 EBook ISBN: 978-1-953736-37-6 Download the Press Kit (PDF) Online Press Kit & Additional Images Request a review copy Now Available on NetGalley |
Save the date! Join Stewart C. Baker in conversation with Wole Talabi and Cheryl S. Ntumy on Tuesday, November 12th at 4pm CST for a discussion on "Mystery, Meaning, and Mortality", virtual via the Atthisarts Youtube channel.
The Butterfly Disjunct: And Other Stories
by Stewart C Baker A short story collection exploring the expanse of human experience across infinite futures. A scientist haunted by an impossible ghost. A cocky poet attempting to outrun peace. A grieving mother looking for life beneath Europa’s icy surface. A ship AI desperate to rescue its beloved crew. An ongoing fight against the end of existence. Equal parts earnest and strange, Stewart C Baker’s stories span the breadth of human emotion, space, and time. In this debut collection, gender and genre collide to celebrate relationships and empathy in all their forms. Stories include "Elements of a Successful Exit Broadcast," 'Ghosts of Maricourt Crater," "Failsafes," "Masks," "How to Escape from the Marches," "The Future, One Summer Behind," "Six Ways to Get Past the Shadow Shogun's Goons and One Thing to Do When You Get There," "Doge Coefficient," "The Colors of Europa, The Colors of Home," "Words I've Redefined since Your Dinosaurs Invaded My Lunar Lair," "Fugue in a Minor Key," "Love and Relativity," "Festival of Lights," "How to Configure Your Quantum Disambiguator," "Images across a Shattered Sea," "How to Break Causality and Write the Perfect Time Travel Story," "The Butterfly Disjunct," "Communications from the Honeymoon Suite," "Oubliette," "Selections from the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index for after the End of Things," "The Thing about Heisenball," "The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation," "Proceedings from the First and Only Sixteenth Annual One-Woman Symposium on Time Manipulation," "Against the Dying of the Light," "Three Tales the River Told," "A Difference of Opinion," "The Robotic Poet Reads Bashō,""An Evening of Theatre at Floating World Station," "Memorial Park", "Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep," and "How They Name the Ships" About the Author Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction, poetry, and interactive fiction. His most recent game is the Nebula-nominated The Bread Must Rise, a novel-length comedic fantasy from Choice of Games written with James Beamon. Stewart’s stories and poems have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy, Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed, Nature, and other places. Born in England, Stewart has lived in South Carolina, Japan, and Los Angeles, and now lives with his family within the traditional homelands of the Luckiamute Band of Kalapuya in Oregon—although if anyone asks, he’ll usually say he’s from the Internet, where you can find him at infomancy.net.
Praise for The Butterfly Disjunct “The Butterfly Disjunct is quirky, smart, funny, and deadly serious. Narratives range from classically told to cleverly experimental, always science fiction and always a delight. Well done!”
—Kij Johnson “I absolutely adored The Butterfly Disjunct, a collection as vast and varied as the transdimensional words that appear in its pages. In this book, robotic haiku poets muse on the imperfect nature of translation, physicists host one-woman academic conferences with themselves through dubious time travel technology, women take up their swords and battle through the Shogun’s space station, and not even a breakup can get in the way of a good game of Heisenball. Stewart C Baker’s collection plays havoc with the space-time continuum, running the range from comedy to adventure to tragedy, asking big questions and daring you to answer them.” —Rachael K. Jones, Hugo and Nebula-nominated author of “The Sound of Children Screaming” “Dream-visions of alternate realities and timelines featuring researchers, ghosts, poets, explorers, rogues, survivors, and more. The stories in The Butterfly Disjunct are as varied as the styles, and just as interesting. Full of unexpected connections, recurring settings, great feats of imagination and fascinating thought threads, this is a clever collection that is very much worth reading.” —Wole Talabi, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-nominated author of Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon About the Cover Artist Dante Luiz is an illustrator and occasional writer from an island in southern Brazil. He’s the interior artist for Crema (comiXology/Dark Horse), and his work with comics has also appeared in anthologies, like Wayward Kindred (TO Comix Press), Mañana: Latinx Comics From the 25th Century (Power & Magic Press), and Shout Out (TO Comix Press), among others. Find him online on Twitter and Instagram (@dntlz), or his website (danteluiz.com). |
