My science fiction short story The Mourning Hour has been published in Giganotosaurus!
It was inspired by the near-future sci fi stories like the Martian, and targeted advertising. I only realized this year how intricately people can get tracked online by Facebook, Google etc, when we were doing an ad buy for a client. You can literally go down not just likes/dislikes, but what they’ve been browsing recently, where they live, where they work at, and tailor ads for really specific people. It’s an interesting business, and maybe a little creepy. I’ve since turned off my own ad tracking everywhere as far as I can, but I notice that research I do for client stuff still tends to bleed into all the pop ups / banner ads / facebook stuff that I see. Professionally interesting, personally offputting. And in the future, advertising is just going to get more and more targeted, more and more seamless. That’s partly what fed into this story… hope you guys like it!
Also, I didn’t know until the short story was accepted by Giganotosaurus that Ann Leckie, one of my favourite science fiction authors, apparently owns this online magazine. I’ve read stories from it before, (if you haven’t seen Ken Liu’s All the Flavors, check it out!) but when I got a paypal payment from Ann I got a shock. For a moment I thought for some weird reason I’d had my Ancillary books refunded or something, and was all “Noo! I want to pay you for them, I love them!” And yes, if you haven’t read Ann’s books, check them out too. They are incredible, and rank among my favourite science fiction books ever.
Mourning Hour Stats
Submitted: 13 April 2016
Acceptance: 3 June 2016
Contract Received: 7 June 2016
First Round Edits: 28 June 2016
Final Edits: 10 Jul 2016
Published: 2 October 2016