utter fiction The website of Stephen J. Anderson. Occasional writer. Frequent computer geek. Permanent ginger.

Seth Godin recently posted a piece on the inevitable demise of printed books. It scares me a little.

I’m not scared of the demise of the printed book as a route-to-market for a fiction author. I’ve been expecting—anticipating, even—that for years now, and I don’t think it’s something any author should be concerned about.

I’m scared of Black Swans.

How many backups do you have of your data? The pictures, letters, financial records, emails and all the other things that just exist in digital forms? Maybe you’ve got some key files synchronised to Dropbox or iCloud. Maybe you’ve bought some local backup in the form of a NAS or USB hard-drive. Perhaps you’re bit more paranoid, and you’ve also got a network or cloud backup solution, like one of these. Or you might not trust a single company, maybe you’ve got multiple network backups with different providers distribut...

Death in Large Numbers was my first completed short story, and by a stroke of luck was also my first published story. Not long after I finished it, Another Sky Press began looking for submissions for their anthology, Falling From The Sky.

Another Sky were one of the earlier publishers to experiment with new publishing business models. They call their model “neo-patronage”, which is pretty similar to the Humble Bundle’s “pay-what-you-want” approach. All of their publications are downloadable for a optional contribution. If you want, you can download them for free. If you enjoyed what you read, you can always go back later to contribute or buy a bound copy. You, the reader, get to say what the book is worth¹.

It was an irresistible opportunity, and I was very happy when they decided to accept Death In Large Numbers² for publication. I think the anthology turned out well, it’s full of wonderfully odd pieces and fully worthy of your time.

The original idea for the story came from the cognitive bias we have towards scary-sounding but unlikely causes of death, but it went through years of false starts before I could make any headway. It was mostly completed on the long train-ride ...