My new short story, “Minor Heresies”, is out in Ride the Star Wind by Broken Eye Books.
Ride the Star Wind is an anthology of Lovecraftian space opera, which, coincidentally, is also more or less the genre of my novel, FALSE GODS (currently being shopped around by my agent; *crosses fingers*). The story I ended up writing is set in the same universe as my novel, but about 200 years earlier and in a very different neck of the woods.
In “Minor Heresies”, I wanted to explore a bit about the origins of Vaurians. FALSE GODS contains a major character who is Vaurian – not an alien, but a shapeshifting human-like being, bred for espionage by the supercomputer-Gods. There’s a lot of prejudice against Vaurians in this fictional universe. The character in the novel plays into a lot of the in-world stereotypes: suave, manipulative, sinister, highly attractive, and fanatically devoted to the Gods (at least as long as it suits him). I like him a lot, for Reasons. But I also wanted space to break the stereotypes and write a Vaurian who wasn’t like that at all. So I ended up with Mimoru, the protagonist of “Minor Heresies” – a hapless little nerd from the days when Vaurians were still a new thing and mortals didn’t know what to do with them. He struggles to fit in with either Vaurians or mortals, struggles to find a place in his galaxy, and stumbles on to problems much bigger than he knows how to handle – problems which, ultimately, are as much about the repressive theocracy that created him as they are about the Lovecraftian horrors he sees.
Mimoru is also explicitly on the autism spectrum, although this was a part of his character that kind of crept up on me while I wrote. The story isn’t constructed to make any grand statement about autism, in particular. It also fleshes out a little about the non-human parts of the FALSE GODS galaxy, and how humans (cautiously) trade and communicate with aliens who don’t share their computer-religion.
Ride the Star Wind’s lineup looks pretty cool (including a story by Bogi Takács involving EVIL TRIANGLES!) so I hope some of you will go check it out.