In the name of awards season, here’s a quick breakdown of all the stories I had in print in 2014. I don’t think I’ll have much short fiction out in 2015, since I’ve a couple books due, so this might’ve been my big year!

Very grateful to everyone who helped make these stories happen.

stories about love and war:

‘Morrigan in the Sunglare’ (Clarkesworld) – trapped aboard a dying ship falling into the sun, two wounded survivors of a desperate battle struggle to understand the meaning of the war and whether they’re in love.

‘A Tank Only Fears Four Things’ (Lightspeed) – years after her service as a truck driver in the Clinton-Yeltsin War, Tereshkova volunteers for an experimental surgery to cope with PTSD. It makes her too strong.

stories about impossible choices:

‘Anna Saves Them All’ (Shimmer) – as a child, Anna Rekani did something awful to prevent something worse. Now, sealed in the poison viscera of an alien starship, she faces the same choice on an unimaginable scale.

‘Kumara’ (Escape Pod) –  you need to let go of someone. You can’t.

stories about the underlying logic of all existence:

‘Economies of Force’ (Apex) – two young people come of age on a world terrified of the mysterious Loom and policed by a system of drone strikes with no human oversight.

‘Sekhmet Hunts the Dying Gnosis (A Computation)’ (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) – everything happening here is real. It is the story of how all things came to be, baryon and cell and language and love and you.

‘Wizard, Cabalist, Ascendant’ (Neil Clarke’s Upgraded anthology) – with the human body and mind rendered programmable, civilization races towards a final reconfiguration.

stories about a woman with a spear:

‘Our Fire, Given Freely’ (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) – in a world where power flows from the people to sleepless monarchs, Rider Bray faces a choice between her people and her queen.

stories about me:

I wrote a vast chunk of the background material and flavor text for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, one of the year’s biggest game releases. I can’t take credit or blame for all of it, and I didn’t write the game’s script or story, but if you’re curious, you can read destinygrimoire.com.

I had the pleasure of working with a number of other talented writers on this project, including E. Lily Yu, Felix Gilman, and Robert Reed.