TEN SIGMAS is Out Today!
It is official. Ten Sigmas and Other Unlikelihoods is out today! You can order it from the Fairwood Press site or from Amazon. For those interested in the contents, I've included the story notes from the back of the collection here for your amusement.


“Ten Sigmas” is one of three parallel universe stories in this collection – yes, I’m a bit infatuated with the idea – but this one is the one with the most interesting core idea. It first appeared in Talebones and later was published in Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction, the first story from Talebones to make it into that long-running series. My pride in this story is enough that I chose it for this collection’s title.

I can not recommend Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies enough. It speculates on why societies rise and fall and boils it down to the practical aspect of domesticable plants and animals. His ideas led me to wonder how scientists could actually test them. It’s easy now to see how mankind developed in the Crescent Valley, but what if we could test those theories with real universes? “The Teosinte War” tries to answer that “what-if.”

It’s not easy being a normal person, with family and work commitments. Having a superhero’s job only makes it tougher. “Doctor Mighty and the Case of Ennui” is my take on superheros – and supervillains – who just aren’t in the right line of work. I put as many superhero jokes and puns in as I could and threw half of them out.

Stories I write end up being set in the cities I live in at the time. When I wrote “Alien Fantasies” I lived in Pittsburgh. I was also watching a lot of Late Night. I actually did write the entire top-ten list.

It’s not easy being a teen, and if there’s seven of you, you end up with seven times the pimples. “Summer of the Seven” is about growing up, jealousy, friendship, responsibility, all those things a teenager needs to learn, but also with a theme of scientific responsibility. “Summer of the Seven” is set in the same universe as my first novel Singularity’s Ring. (Tor Books, February 2008.) In the editing process, I realized the chapter didn’t add to the over plot arc, and so here it sits, cut from the final novel.

The novel begins with the novelette “Strength Alone” instead. This story made the preliminary Nebula ballot, but not the final one. Strom’s story still is moving when I read it.

“Singletons in Love” is the first story in the Ring universe that I wrote. It was a stand-alone novelette for Lou Anders’ Live Without a Net anthology. His theme for the anthology was one where the Internet was not the central technological gadget it seems to be for our world today. I posited a universe in which humans used biological means to create high-density human computers called pods. This story was reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction, a first for me.

“Dysfunctional Family Cat” is my wife Stacey’s fault. She’s allergic to cats. That, combined with the fact that many seem to hold felines sacred, caused me to make cats the clueless villains of this piece. The earlobe-based drug dispenser is still one of my favorite bits of technological extrapolation.

I grew up in a trailer park very similar to the one in “Fallow Earth.” We never did come across an alien as shown here, though the people aren’t too far from the truth.

You seldom understand what a bastion university life is until you leave it. “Death of the Egg King” draws on my emotional state during my time in graduate school at the University of Michigan.

“Walls of the Universe” takes the nurture versus nature argument and uses parallel selves to see what happens when the selves are stressed to the limit. The people you end up hurting the most are those closest to yourself, and, of course, yourself. “Walls of the Universe” made the short lists for the Nebulas, Sturgeon, and Hugo Awards in 2007. It won the Asimov's Readers Award for Best Novella.

In writing “Snail Stones” I borrowed a bit of Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered and Tiptree’s Brightness Falls From the Air, but with none of their drama. My protagonists are kids who find something wrong and do what they can to fix it. These are my favorite types of characters; these are my favorite types of drama.


Paul