Author: Tobias Buckell

Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author. His novels and over seventy stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.

Sunset: August’s Patreon Short Story (read it for as little as $1)

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Patreon lets me run a monthly short story subscription service for readers. Over 100 of my readers have subscribed to have a short story a month delivered to their inboxes for as little as $1.

The August Patreon short story came out last night, a 6,300 word long classic science fiction story about a headstrong young boy who encounters a starship bent for retirement on his out-of-the-way world.

Here’s a snippet of the story for you:

NewImage

Sunset

The starship crash-landed somewhere in the dark and early hours of morning. The thunderclap sound of it striking the East Bay woke Tamuel up, heart racing and confused. He glanced out his window, but didn’t see anything. He stumbled out into the common room to see if he could see anything different from the balcony.

“What was that?” One of his siblings also was apparently out and looking around for the cause of the sound. “There’s no storm.”

Outside, through the windows opened to allow the cool land breeze rushing out toward the ocean to pass through the foundling dorm’s corridors, Tamuel saw only stars and the looming dark of the Berenthais Mountains.

Tamuel squinted through the dark to see that it was Shau who had woken with him. Several of the other boys grunted and swore from in their rooms, annoyed at the late interruption to their sleep. Group classes would start early in the morning, this was an unwelcome event.

“I—” Tamuel stopped as the horrid wail of the tsunami sirens pierced the night.

Everyone woke up and streamed out of their doors, sleep forgotten as fear jolted them awake. There was a mass of panic before some of the prefects, older and well-drilled, asserted order. “Line up! Those of you near the east corridor, march to the stairs and head to the third floor. West corridor, march! Do not go back to your rooms to take anything with you. Move now!”

The thirty boys fell into lines and the entire common room split right near Tamuel into two groups that streamed out into the two stairwells. Emergency lighting, red and calm, dappled their worried faces as they rushed upwards.

Minutes later the water struck. It rushed up Watt Street, just several inches of foaming sea, lapped at the wheels of the carts parked around the dorm, then gently poured out through the storm drains and retreated back down the street leaving only some confused small fish behind.

The warning sirens stopped, leaving a strange quiet to fall over all of Weatherly, from the distant East Bay to the Callum Docks.

They all waited for whatever came next. Some of the second floor girls started to complain about Tamuel’s siblings staring at them in nightdresses. It was creepy. Tamuel understood. They were not all really siblings, they’d all been raised in the foundling dorm together. Go stare at some other girl from Summerstown’s foundling dorm.

“Hey, get off the balcony,” one of the prefects shouted from the back. “We don’t know if something else is coming.”

Shau was pressed against a railing, looking out toward East Bay with night vision binoculars. “Nothing else is coming,” he announced. “It’s a fucking starship crashed into the bay!”

“Language!” snapped Tosha, one of the prefects. Tamuel shivered when he heard her voice. She’d been singling him out for any dorm infractions and worse for the last year. “Who was that, is that Shau? Get over here. And what are you doing with binoculars? You’re supposed to leave everything in place during a drill.”

Tamuel decided to take a chance and shoved past siblings to get to the balcony. Shau was his closest sibling. Shau would let him use the binoculars.

“Shau, let me look!” he demanded.

Shau passed the binoculars over. Tamuel looked out over Weatherly to the curve of East Bay, skipping over the roofs of hundreds of structures in grainy green, and he gasped. There it was, a shark-fin shaped mass squatting in the dark pool of water where they normally sailed their tiny catamarans on weekends.

He recognized the shape. “It’s an Interstellar. It’s a Shatter Dart.” Thousands of tons of bio-organic, semi-sentient starship. With a crew of hundreds, it could leap between the stars. Hundreds of light years with each carefully planned gulp of the void-mouth contained deep in the belly buried under the water in East Bay.

“What the hell’s it doing here?” Shau asked.

“That’s it!” Tosha had pushed through and stood right behind them both. “I gave you a language warning, and asked you to get off the balcony.”

She grabbed Tamuel from behind. It was a violation, broaching someone’s physical space like this. The last time Tamuel had formally complained there’d been a disciplinary board hearing. No one would step forward as a witness. Tosha was six years older than him. A respected prefect who had the ear of the adult board. He’d learned to try and stay invisible to her since then. He’d wished for cameras inside, like the street cams, but that would be a violation of dorm privacy.

Tamuel twisted loose from her and shoved the binoculars into her hands. “It’s a starship.”

Tosha couldn’t help but raise the binoculars. Tamuel, as he’d hoped, had completely yanked the prefect’s attention elsewhere as she succumbed to curiosity and looked out toward East Bay.

He yanked Shau away from her. “Nothing like this ever happens in Weatherly,” he said as they pushed through the crowds of siblings toward a stairwell.

“My binoculars!” Shau protested.

“Fuck your binoculars,” Tamuel hissed, just low enough none of the prefects would hear him. “Nothing like this happens in Weatherly. Or in Summerstown.” Or even, for that matter, Yelekene. Their entire world, all the archipelagos scattered across it, were far from the Core. Ships of this size had last visited Yelekene a hundred years ago, to ship terraforming equipment and raw materials here. Even the original Founders had come via smaller cargo skip-planers that had been disassembled upon arrival.

This… this was something different.

“What are you doing?” Shau asked as Tamuel pulled him down the stairwell.

“We’re going to be first to see it,” Tamuel said.

“We’ll get our asses handed to us.”

“All the prefects are upstairs herding us. We won’t get a better chance.”

Shau stopped. “You know how many demerits I have? No, I have to stay put.”

Tamuel paused. He really didn’t want to do this alone. Going out into the town at dark, it wasn’t scary, they’d snuck out before. But he’d rather have some company if he was going to head out onto the open ocean in the dark.

He briefly reconsidered, then bit his lip. “Then just cover for me as long as you can. Tell them I went to use the bathroom or something.”

“Yeah, sure,” Shau said. “Good luck, Tam. I hope it’s worth it, you’re going to be pulling weeds in the garden for weeks if you’re lucky.”

Tamuel grimaced.

Continue reading this story in text, PDF, MOBI or ePub for your ebook reader of choice by becoming a patron here for as little as $1.:

Patreon

The Placement Agency

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

If I were smarter, I would have just served out the last three months of my job contract and I wouldn’t be hiding inside a crook in a corridor that is a three-dimensional representation of four actual dimensions, holding my breath as the warden floated through the air just several feet away.

The child next to me, barely eight years old, is also holding his breath.

I hope he doesn’t make a sound. Doesn’t stir. Doesn’t fight the screaming desire to let out that breath that comes as the carbon dioxide inside starts to build and triggers the most ancient of our reflexes, the one buried deep down in the lizard brain.

The crook, or nook, or eddy in space time that we’re crouched in, is a black shard of even blacker disquiet that the eye slips across. It’s an unsettling thing from the outside, like a piece of glass that slides across the eyeball without causing pain.

Being inside of it is even more upsetting.

My back presses against something that isn’t really a wall, that both gives and doesn’t. My back of my shirt is both a million miles away and a billion years behind me. Sweat takes an epoch to slide down the small of my back, which is a world away.

And then the floating orb of the warden has passed us, humming its way deeper into the labyrinth of ultra-black, monolithic walls around us. Above us, the heavy skies of when the Earth was still being formed, thick with fire from cometary impacts. Below, the floor is a mirrored plane of dimensional space that can’t be accessed, so forms to us mere mortals a solid surface.

Pretty messed up?

Yeah, my first several weeks here I was on Xanax and would curl up into a ball in my room with the drapes drawn shut and just cry.

But when you’re broke, you’ll take just about any short-term contract that pays well, offers room and board, and has a five thousand dollar sign up bonus that pays the moment you sign the contract and gives you a week to spend it.

I had thought I was getting away with something.

“Can we run, now?” the child asks.

“Yes. We can run.”

I hold his hand and we run down the corridor. Each step is ten thousand years towards the future. Luckily, we’ve been running for three hours already. Ducking into hiding places, turning off into rooms. The child’s eyes still taking in the skies above and the infinite black walls. I’d told him what to expect, told him what lay outside the commons.

Now he was scared.

So was I.

*** 

The ad had been buried in the middle of several other similar listings. A temp agency located in the middle of a failing strip mall outside the rust-belt town of Lincoln.

SIGNING BONU`$$$`. FEEL GOOD BY HELPING OTHERS. 

I had half a tank of gas, an ashtray full of quarters, a duffel bag full of clothes, and a fuzzy, stuffed cat to my name. Guff, the cat, had been with me since the beginning. Since back when I’d had family and long before… before things got worse when I was a kid.

I’d been considering taking my friend George up on that job helping build the new nuclear plant.

I figured I’d try one last time to see if I could make Lincoln a go. I had experience doing menial work in an assisted care facility, which fit with the job description. And George was never good for me. Always had some scheme or another up his sleeve, even if a buck was a buck.

So, I’d pushed through the double glass doors, scuffed my boots on the faded industrial carpet, and stared at the scratched Formica-topped counter wondering if I’d come to the wrong place until a middle aged, pencil-thin woman in a gray suit came out and handed me a clipboard.

“Take the test, sign the application.”

There were a lot of questions. None of them, it seemed, related to medical work. Names of family. Names of friends. Was that a kind of background check? Coworkers. Pet names. I had briefly wondered if it had all been a way to get my personal info to hack any of my online accounts.

But I didn’t have any money, and I figured I had nothing to lose.

WHAT IS THE MOST EXCITING THING YOU’VE DONE IN YOUR LIFE?

What strange questions.

“They said there was a bonus?” I had asked loudly. “Who are they again?”

The woman looked at me. “It’s a five thousand dollar signing bonus. We’re the placement agency.”

Oh. Just contractors.

I had looked at the strange questions, and then set about answering them.

Five hours later, I had a five thousand dollar check and instructions to go to an empty warehouse in Lincoln. When I stepped through the doors, I fell into a time vortex that closed behind me as I screamed in incomprehension.

*** 

More running.

“How do you know we can get out?” the child asks. His brown eyes search me, looking for any hint of guile.

“Food,” I tell him. “It’s about food.”

The skies above us are no longer burning. They’re a swirl of brilliant stars.

“I don’t understand,” the child says.

“Every week the fridge gets stocked, and there’s bread in the cupboards.”

“And milk!” he adds.

“Milk. You’re right.”

“New DVDs.”

“Where,” I ask, stopping him from listing all the things that come in, “do you think all that comes from?”

He frowns. “I always thought it was magic, really.”

I shake my head. “No. It isn’t magic. They’re things. Made by people.”

He sort of remembers people. Grown-ups that aren’t the Caretakers like me. But for children younger than eight, few of those early memories persist. I remember straining to remember my parents. I’d lie on strange beds in homes that weren’t homes, closing my eyes and willing my parents’ faces back from the murkiness. But I only ever had impressions, or a faint snatch of a smell.

I could remember that I once knew them, but I couldn’t remember them.

“Maybe we shouldn’t keep running,” the child suggests. “We’re very far away from the commons, now. We don’t have any food.”

“We’re almost there,” I reassure him. “Would you like a water?”

I hand him a bottle from my small pack, and he takes it after a moment’s consideration and chugs it loudly. When he’s done, he looks down at it thoughtfully. “Will they have bottles of water where we are going?”

*** 

The child is innately curious. That’s what impressed me at first. It took my mind off the madness of my situation. Asked about the scar on my upper arm. The one I try never to look at.

There were fifteen children in the commons, which hung in the middle of a bubble of milky nothingness, spiky vines of solid black reaching from it off into the cells of other potential fractals of space and time. I fear I’m not describing it well, but the entire structure, sealed off away from space and time, was hardly comprehendible by tiny minds like my own.

What I *can* describe is that the great platter of the Commons was a garden five miles across, with gently sloping hills in the center. A modern apartment complex, clearly ripped off from Frank Lloyd Wright (or, knowing what I know now, maybe even designed by him!), hung over a babbling river.

There are basketball courts. Two treehouses built in the carefully maintained forest behind the hills. It reminded me when I first saw it of a college campus I’d visited once. A mini city, but with many clear areas for physical pursuits of the not-yet-adult.

I liked the beach by the pond. As long as I didn’t look up. I *preferred* the forest, because there, wandering among the paths, with the trees blanketing above, I could pretend I was actually in a normal forest.

I use the word campus, because then I can only describe myself as a resident advisor of sorts. I never went to college myself, but I saw movies. When I arrived, I was shown to a large apartment in the center of the first floor of the apartment complex.

The old man who took me to the Commons called himself the Keeper of Souls. He’d been waiting for me when I hit the bottom of the timeless vortex. He had been wearing an old overcoat, a raggedy fisherman’s hat, and he’d held out an old oil lamp to cast a beam of light in the infinite darkness. 

“You’re the new contractor,” he’d said in a papery-thin voice. “Come with me, the Commons is just a short walk.”

I’d said nothing, my mind quaking at the assault of passing through time and space, and then recoiling at the sight of the green disc of the Commons held by the tendrils of super-compressed dimensions in the void. The old man had held out an RFID-chipped keycard and said in a whispery voice, “If there’s anything you need, anything at all, just ask. There’s a phone by your microwave. My extension is zero. Only use it if you… absolutely must. The children are in the theater-room; they’ll be expecting you.”

And that was how I became Wendy to my tribe of little Peter Pans.

Though my name is Riley.

*** 

“What does food have to do with getting out?” the child asks, handing back the water bottle.

A water bottle might as well be magic to the child. They arrive in the refrigerators in the kitchen on the first floor when we’re asleep. Hell, it’s magic to me. I’m responsible for making dinner for the fifteen, but most of the deep freeze meals are easy to defrost, and the palettes of the under-ten are fairly straight forward. It is no problem for me to bake chicken fingers and microwave fries.

For breakfast, they have varieties of cereals and milk. I host pancake Fridays, even though days of the week don’t, as such, exist. I’m trusting my iPhone to keep time, even if it hasn’t had a signal in months.

Lunch is whatever they want to scrounge from the fridges. Usually, peanut butter and jelly. They almost never tire of it.

I have basic first aid training. I can dial zero for anything more than that.

I counsel them after fights.

But mostly they run in the forests, play in the lake, and eat voraciously when they return to the apartments. They play video games or watch movies in the theatre until they are too tired to stay up. Though I note the movies never have violence, or have anything to do with history.

I carry stragglers up to their rooms if they fall asleep.

I wonder where plumbers come from if something goes wrong with my toilet.

“How does food help us leave?” the child asks again, frustration creeping into his voice. I realize I’m losing myself in thought. It is easy to do here, where time is folding in on itself and so vast. As soon as the second week in the commons, staring at the sky, I realize I was becoming prone to long stretches of silence and contemplation.

“The food,” I say. “If I’m contracted to take care of you, then someone must be contracted to deliver the food.”

The child smiles. “You followed the man in the little van.”

I startle. “You know about the van?”

He nods. “It comes when the quiet creeps over the commons and everything stops.” The clocks, the motion of the river, the swaying of the trees from the alien wind. It happens when I’m not looking for it, out of the corner of my eye, just before I fall asleep, but before I can stop myself.

I took a caffeine pill right before sleep. An accident. Or maybe something in the back of my mind *knew*.

“I followed it,” I tell the child. “I found a way out.”

The van had been an old, museum-looking thing. The man in it wore a blue uniform, complete with a cap. He drove and drove down these corridors, and I struggled to keep up. But hours later, sweating and exhausted, I was rewarded by seeing it pass through the last of the horrible corridors and vanish into a vortex just like the one I’d come through to get here.

*** 

“What will we do on the other side?” the child asked.

“I don’t know.” I cannot leave him to the foster system. I tasted that myself. I have barely planned that far ahead. I have only known that I have seen something wrong, and have tried to fix it.

At first, I’d only done what I’d been told. Kept an eye on the children.

They ignored me. I was not the first Caretaker. I was just the latest. They obviously had lives and plans of their own. A treehouse extension. A large tunnel they were digging. Levels in video games to be beaten.

But then one of them wandered up to me. Stared right down through me and into my soul and asked, “What is it like, outside?”

And that had shaken me. Because until then, I’d assumed none of them knew there was anything other than the Commons.

Day by day, he’d kept asking small questions. Did I have family? Did I remember the sky? Instead of falling into my routine of day by day, ignoring the reality I was in, he would remind me there was something else. That I was just here temporarily.

That he was a prisoner.

That I was working with his captors.

Did I think of myself as a kidnapper of children?

No.

But somehow, after two weeks, without this child ever suggesting as much, I started to believe I was.

*** 

After all these hours of walking, after all this time and space kicking up under our heels, with the skies shifting overhead, light pollution slowly fading the stars out, we arrive. I’ve been keyed up, waiting for the warden to reappear.

The child had called it that, I remember. Said they floated around the Commons, watching the children. Stopping them from leaving the island suspended in nothingness.

“Riley!”

I freeze.

It is the Keeper of Souls. This is the first time I have seen him since he took me to the Commons.

He does not look threatening, but his voice is firm. I notice that he has ink-black eyes, and I had thought he had a beard under those wrinkled cheeks, but it has never been there, I realize. He is clean-shaven.

“You cannot stop me,” I tell him. I place myself between him, the warden, and the child. The vortex, which makes our eyes water with incomprehension, swirls just a few yards away. We can almost jump into it.

“I know,” says the Keeper of Souls. He crooks his fingers, waves, and the orb fades away. It suddenly… never was. Much like the beard I had thought he had. “I am not here to harm anyone. You are safe.”

He gestures again, and I stagger back to jump. But my feet land on the balcony of my apartment. I am looking out over the river, the forest, the large pond. Children are screaming and splashing on the artificial beach. Two girls are playing badminton on a freshly mowed lawn.

The translocation twists something in my stomach. I throw up into a potted hibiscus.

The Keeper of Souls opens the sliding door and limps into my apartment. He busies himself making tea as I try to regain my bearings.

“I’m sorry I had to do that,” he says, setting a hot cup down on the coffee table where I find myself sitting. I’m unsure if he has warped time and space around me again, or if my mind is stuttering. “It’s an unpleasant sensation, even for the most prepared and familiar.”

“The…the child?”

“Yes, the child.” The Keeper of Souls strokes the several foot long beard that hangs over his chest. He props dirty feet up on my coffee table. “He is back in his room. Riley, we talked about this.”

“We did?” I’m horribly confused.

But so is the old man. He looks pained. “I’m so sorry. It’s swirls of time, maybe things got dislocated. But, this should have been a part of your briefing. Do you not remember?”

There’s a hazy recollection.

“It’s the nature of this place,” the Keeper of Souls says, not unkindly. “Memory can be complicated as well. Particularly for contractors. It’s your first time. And only a short stint.”

“It’s not fair, what you’re doing to them,” I blurt. “You’ve ripped them from their families, their places.”

I realize I’m crying.

The Keeper of Souls moves next to me, wipes a tear from my cheek with the cuff of his robe. He sighs. Pulls back his hood. He hasn’t shaved in a few days; a dark stubble makes him look a bit tired. “I think I understand. We missed something very important. Do you remember your parents, Riley?”

I swallow. “No.”

“Do you remember when your mom took that knife?”

“No.”

The Keeper of Souls shakes his head. “But you do. You remember. No matter what they wrote down, you remember. She didn’t try to kill you, she tried to protect you.”

Time fractures again, but this time it is definitely my mind. A place I have tried to avoid for a lifetime. A woman screaming. A man’s anger. And so much blood.

Murder suicide, they called it.

“Do you remember what your father did?”

I do. I don’t want to, but I do.

“Imagine the people worse than him. The ones who killed more than just a mother. Imagine the mass killers. If you could go back in time, Riley, to that moment, right now, would you try to stop him?”

I look up at the Keeper of Souls. I nod, tears dripping from my chin. “I’d kill him,” I hissed.

His ancient eyes harden. “What if you could go back in time to when he was a child? Would you? Would you stop all that pain, save your mother? Could you do that?”

I stare.

Could I?

I look at the children playing throughout the commons. “Is that…?”

The Keeper of Soul’s eyes soften. “Your father is not here. But if he were, would you do it?”

I let out a deep breath. “I… I don’t know.”

“They used to call it the Hitler dilemma.”

“Who?” I ask, puzzled.

The Keeper of Souls smiles. “If you can go back in time and stop a great mass murderer by killing his child self, would you? Far at the end of time, amazed at having survived, we asked that question. We bent time and space, and came back. But, who among us are killers? Would we be no better than the ones we are sent to judge?”

For a moment, the Keeper of Souls sips his tea thoughtfully.

“I will not do it,” I say.

“No one asks you to.” He smiles sadly. “Who would murder a child just for its potential when one could just give it to another family for adoption. Maybe even in another time. You’d be amazed what a good pre-school and decent social safety net does to a dictator, or a good psychologist can do for a serial killer. Most of our worst killers are scattered among time and space for rehabilitation. But a few, a select few, the greatest abominations… even where I come from, we cannot risk letting them out into the general population.”

The sound of children’s laughter rises to my balcony. The splash of a cannonball.

“He figured out your vulnerability. Got you to navigate the corridors of space and time. Tricked you, so he could hide in the glitches where our eyes can’t make sense of what they see, all to get you to try to take him back to where he came from.” The Keeper of Souls smiled sadly. “There’s a reason our contractors are drawn from different times and places, for short periods of time.”

I stand up slowly and walk toward the balcony. I look up at the void above.

“Take heart,” the Keeper of Souls says. “It’s only another month, and then you’ll be back in your time. You’ll have enough money to avoid having to work that construction job and avoid cutting some corners with George. Trust me, it’ll save a lot of lives.”

And then, he’s gone.

I’m alone, on a couch, watching the children slowly melting out of the woods toward the apartment complex.

It is dinner time.

And I shiver.

Only a month.

How much longer will that be in a place where time and space swirl above me in the sky?

The First Time I Had Pneumonia I Thought I Was a Medical Miracle

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

This essay came to me while I was feverish and unable to sleep at some point over the last week and a half. I woke up the next morning convinced that I’d written it, as I could remember the outlining, the main points, and the title.

Alas, I had not actually written it.

But, having remembered writing it in such vivid detail, I thought I’d give a stab at rewriting it and fulfilling a feverish prophecy, as such.

The first time I caught pneumonia I was somewhere between 1st and 3rd grade. I suspect 3rd, for reasons I’ll cover in a moment. But there’s a difference between US and Commonwealth school numbering, so I’m always getting it mixed up.

I was elementary school age for sure.

That morning I woke up feeling pretty horrible and tried to convince my mother that I was sick and didn’t want to go to school. Now, my poor mom, a single mother basically by that point, was the Attila the Hun of parents that forced you to go to school. Unless I had a compound fracture, major blood loss, a fever that was causing visible sweats, you were going. to. school.

To be fair, I was mobile that morning and deteriorated later in the day. She rowed me in our small fiberglass dinghy to shore and I caught the taxi that took me and a few neighborhood kids to the school.

I don’t remember much about the morning. I do recall slipping into a sort of daze. But I’m ADD and that wasn’t all that unusual for me. Most mornings featured me slipping off into my own little world in elementary school. It’s one of the reasons I never fully learned my times tables until college, or the order of the alphabet until late high school, or the order of the months of the year until my mid-20s.

I do remember staring at beams of sunlight outside.

See, one of the things I remember fondly about the Caribbean is that when I got sick I basically turned into a cat: I’d find a warm puddle of sunshine, curl up in it, and sleep. I’d lay out on the deck of the boat we lived on and sun. I even swam to shore when sick and just wriggled into the sand like a turtle and waited for the sun to bake the sick out of me.
All morning long, I just waited for a chance to get out in the sun as I started to shiver.
At recess I ran out with all the kids. But instead of heading to the grass to play soccer, I veered off next to the steps out of the building where the concrete was toasty and warm in the high sun. I curled up there, hugging the concrete, and then… just passed out.

I woke up because all the kids had come back inside, and class had started up and I’d gone missing. The teachers, standing on the steps and looking out over the field hadn’t seen me. A search had begun. I was found, passed out hard, feverish, soaking up sun.
If I recall right, it was the teacher a year or two ahead of us that shook me awake. They realized I was burning up and not doing well, so it was decided I would be driven home.
Now, this was where my unique living situation caused some confusion:

“We don’t seem to have a number for your mom.”

“We don’t have a phone.”

“Why not?”

“We live on a boat.”

“Oh, where is that?”

“Lance Aux Pine Harbor.”

“Can you get home if one of the teachers drives you there?”

“Sure?”

“How will we contact your mom then?”

“Shout.”

Which is how I, while out of my mind with fever and wanting to do nothing more than sleep, ended up navigating my teacher toward the harbor we were anchored at. I’m not sure they really believed I lived on a boat, there was a lot of adult humoring voice, from what I remember.

I was also a little bummed, because this teacher had what I considered a ‘sexy car.’
I don’t know what it was, but it was the first car I ever saw that didn’t have ANY RIM around the window. The doors opened, and there was just glass window over the door. Madness!
I’d wanted to ride inside a car that cool for so long. But instead I napped, and then woke up when asked where to turn.

But I got us there! Stood on the water’s edge and shouted until my mom rowed out to get me and the teacher filled her in. I was too tired to even be triumphant about being right.
I later trucked along with mom for a trip to get diagnosed. I think I was on antibiotics. Maybe X-rays? It’s fuzzy. But I do remember one thing. The doctor mentioned how serious pneumonia was, impressing on both of us how serious it was. I somehow, tired, got the idea that pneumonia was a killer and I completely failed to scale in my head how deadly it was. I thought it was like, Black Death deadly. Or Cancer deadly. Like, I was very likely to die.

I certainly felt shitty enough.

So when pneumonia broke and I got well again, I, elementary kid, was convinced I was a certified fucking medical miracle.

My school librarian explained it was quite survivable a few weeks after I came home. But for those two or three weeks, when playing soccer, or climbing trees, I threw all caution to wind.
Because I was just about fucking immortal, I knew, from having beat pneumonia.

It’s Highly Probable That ACA Cut Bankruptcies in Half.

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Yesterday I posted a link to a Consumer Reports article that suggested that the implementation of ACA likely cut US bankruptcies half.

I posted the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/tobiasbuckell/status/859490684377735168

That leads to a Consumer Reports article that has this chart of consumer bankruptcies:

And the internet blew up for me. At first I was impressed with the clip of retweets, over a couple hours the tweet hit a few hundred retweets. Which is about as far as a tweet of mine has ever gone.

Logged back in after dinner and I’d crossed a thousand retweets and climbing rapidly.
That was when I realized the damn tweet had gone viral. Right now it’s near 7,500 retweets and I’ve lost a lot of time trying to filter through angry responses and have read a lot of truly devastating stories of people summarizing their own bankruptcies due to medical debt.
People that I watch on TV or follow online have retweeted me, which is a surreal experience (geek squee when Adam Savage retweets you, right?), and I’ve had the opportunity to mute all sorts of new and exciting people who are really ANGRY with me. Not angry, but ANGRY. That special kind of online anger that REQUIRES ALL CAPS.

There have been basically two ANGRY replies to my tweet. They break down to positions:

1) You’re cheating by showing a shorter date range of 2010-2017, try 2007-2017 instead, it totally proves you’re wrong

Here’s it is more politely expressed by Twitter user @weel than by the many, many, MANY folk after him:

https://twitter.com/weel/status/859501956393336832

To be utterly honest, when I read Consumer Reports articles, I didn’t spot the 2010-2017 framing, and I can see why that would look like axis manipulation. I’ll give the opposition that. And the first thing you find if you hunt for a larger bankruptcy date range, are graphics from the American Bankruptcy Institute that seem to disagree. Take a look:

What a look at bankruptcies from 2007 looks like is that bankruptcies climbed up because of a big event. We know that 2008 and onward was the financial crisis, so it wouldn’t seem a big leap to pair those up. Then the rate fell down. That seems like a very different story than CR reported.

I was accused of manipulating data and being a liberal stooge.
Okay.

But if starting the axis from 2010 is manipulating data, then why does the ABI start its data at 2007?

See, because I considered personal bankruptcy in the eye due to overwhelming medical bills in 2008 and I did some research back then. I found out that the bankruptcy laws changed dramatically for 2006 onward due to legal changes championed by Republicans who saw consumers as skipping out on too many of their debts and hurting debtors.

The 2005 changes in the bankruptcy law had a dramatic impact on bankruptcy, and were major headlines back then. How soon we forget.

Q: What is the new bankruptcy law, and when did it take effect?
A: The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, a major reform of the bankruptcy system, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in April 2005. Bankruptcy was reformed in a number of ways, including tighter eligibility requirements. The majority of changes instituted by this new law took effect on October 17, 2005 (180 days after the law was signed), although a few changes took effect immediately after the legislation was signed by the President.

So, let’s look at bankruptcy before 2007 and see what our chart looks like:

Oh dear.

2006 and 2007 were the lowest years of bankruptcy on record because the Bush Administration sided with debtors complaining about the fact that bankruptcies reached a high of 2.1 million bankruptcies. The Bush administration was able to artificially reduce bankruptcies quickly, but they didn’t go after the root cause, but merely made it harder to declare bankruptcy. With a stroke of a pen, they cut bankruptcies. But after that they pop right back up again.

But it’s quite clear that throughout the 90s bankruptcies were rising steadily as well. And after a couple years of the new bankruptcy laws, the rate of bankruptcies began to return to right where they were prior to the late 2005 law to make it harder.

Then, in 2010, it abruptly and dramatically reverses.

The question is why the inexorable march upward?

Well, as many angry GOP twitter folk noted, ‘how can we ever know how many of those bankruptcies are medical?’

We don’t know for sure, but there is research and data. A commonly accepted amount among many folk in the industry is simply ‘more than half.’ Consumer Reports, who are well known for their digging around to focus on just data, also had a rate of roughly half.

Snopes dug into it and found some studies that went as low as 18-25% of bankruptcies being medical in 2015 (after ACA went into affect).

So, there are studies that show somewhere between 62% prior to ACA and as little as 25% post ACA are US bankruptcies related to medical debt pressure.

2) Correlation doesn’t imply causation!


Well sure, aren’t you clever. This, after complaints about the axis, was the next ‘zinger’ that everyone deployed to make my uncomfortable retweet go away.

So, just as the same time, The Oatmeal posted this awesome comic called “You’re Not Going to Believe What I’m About to Tell You:”

It’s about the BackFire Effect, where people who believe something deeply will see someone like me posting charts and data and that makes them twice (!) as likely to insist on believing what they believe and dismissing evidence. It’s why facts don’t win arguments.

So, sure. I can point to that chart that shows the inexorable march of bankruptcies up to 2.1 million, the temporary dip down to 600,000 bankruptcies due to a GOP rules change to make them harder, and then the fact that the line pops right back up. Then, in 2010, it reverses.

I can point out that the dip in 2006 was only for two years, but the dip since 2010 has show a 7 year strength in it.

All of those indicate a stronger case for my narrative: that what we’ve been doing for the past 7 years is dramatically reducing bankruptcies.

In fact, I’d argue the bankruptcy rate was climbing to get right back to its natural 2.1 million a year that it hit in 2005 and ACA didn’t just likely halve it, but prevented a shit ton of oncoming bankruptcies.

But, sarcastically, sure, dismiss it all out of hand because it makes you angry.
It doesn’t make that chart go away though. In fact, having looked into the data deeper, worried that I would have to issue a mea culpa, it looks rather likely that bankruptcies on that chart from 2006 to 2010 were rising faster than they had been previously. They freaking tripled in 4 years!

And if most bankruptcy is medical, than rather than saying ‘correlation isn’t causation’ please, one of you, for the love of anything, please explain what halted a 100% a year runaway bankruptcy growth and reversed almost as dramatically? Because so far everyone tossing that phrase out there just runs away and doesn’t offer up a counter-theory.

3) I shouldn’t have to pay for other’s medical expenses

Though a lot of people have explained that they shouldn’t ‘have to pay for other’s medical expenses.’

Now we’re at least being honest, because that isn’t arguing about whether bankruptcies are being dramatically cut. The idea of socially pooling costs upsets you. Never mind that we do that for fire, police, etc, it’s a fundamental issue.

Buddy, welcome to being part of a civilization. I pay for your military defense out of my taxes. We pay for other people’s house fires to get put out. Ever been in a car accident? I haven’t, but my money pools in to pay. That’s how insurance works. We all pool in.

And you don’t have a choice in that. You haven’t since Ronald Regan passed EMTALA, a law that made it illegal for emergency rooms to turn down medical care. That socialized US medicine. What we’re arguing about since then is how to pay for it as a society because people refuse to approach it like any other society with good health and riches has.

And yes, ACA still cut bankruptcies.

Cosmic Powers anthology is available! Features my story Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I’m really excited about this anthology. It features my short story Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance.

I really love the story. It wasn’t an easy write. Had to do a lot of edits, as I wrote it coming off another huge project and I was exhausted. Like, blurry screen exhausted. But I had come up with the title a few years back in a twitter exchange with Christie Yant and I really, really wanted to find a story that respected the title and did something really cool.

The seed of the story came out of my reading about some ugly, tough pieces of deep Caribbean history while also thinking about the Three Laws of Robotics. After selling this story, I told a friend it was something I was deeply proud of having written, though I wasn’t sure if would resonate with anyone.

Rich Horton at Locus Mag highlighted it as a must read story out of the anthology, Publishers Weekly did as well. Rocket Stack Rank also said kind things here, so I’m hopeful others find the story.

But enough about me, there are also a ton of other great stories in there. I know because I got to see the book early for copy edits.

Six Things I Learned in My First Month of Using Patreon

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I launched a new experiment: a Patreon. What’s Patreon? Think of it like a subscription service to an artist. Some artists just post a Patreon that let us support something they’re already publicly doing, like videos on a YouTube channel. You sign up for a certain amount a month and you get the pleasure of knowing you’re helping them usher something cool into the world. I really like The Nerdwriter‘s videos, and he uses that model:

Other Patreons use more of a ‘subscriber’ model where you get access to content otherwise not available, which is what I’m doing.

Here are some things I think have jumped out at me.

1) Conversion rates for paid art are low

I launched my Patreon by first pinging my newsletter of almost 1,000 people who have indicated they’re interested in hearing about upcoming fiction of mine. That created an initial surge of 17 patrons, with maybe some more coming in on the second day when I announced the link to twitter.

I have over 9,500 followers on twitter, which is where the bulk of the growing has happened since. The Patreon is currently at 94 subscribers.

Conversion rates for art are super low because money is a finite resource and it’s one thing to have people following you, but another to make the ask. For example, here’s an article about a band with 1,000,000 Spotify streams that shows their royalties as $4,955. They made $0.004891 per stream.

Sometimes you see frustrated artists online point out that they sell thousands of books/CDs/projects, when they have tens of thousands of followers. But that’s actually a super high conversion rate. And thinking that people following us online are the prime consumers is often a blind that doesn’t represent reality.

When I set out to launch the Patreon I had no idea what the conversion rate would be. I knew that my lowest Kickstarter, another form of crowdfunding, had 170 backers, and my best had 270. When I did a poll on twitter 6 months ago over 250 people indicated an interest in a Patreon, so I had some hope that between 150-250 would eventually end up on the Patreon. But how long would it take for word to filter out, or for people to jump on, I didn’t know. Kickstarter has a definite time limit, and Patreon doesn’t. The urgency isn’t as strong usually.

2) Asking for a monthly amount is a bigger ask than a one time project

Speaking of Kickstarter, my most successful Kickstarter was a $12,500 ($1,000 came in after the Kickstarter closed), 192 backer, total for my novel The Apocalypse Ocean. That’s kind of similar to thinking of a $1,000 a month Patreon, were I to do one novel a year and one Kickstarter a year.

But for the Patreon I launched we have half the number of backers so far. It’s a tougher ask to ask someone of their hard-earned money to commit to a subscription as opposed to a one time payment for a project. Which makes total sense.
That being said, at $550 a month for short fiction the Patreon is pretty close to matching the income of doing a single short story collection via Kickstarter (my last Kickstarter was a $7,000 Kickstarter for Xenowealth: A Collection). It’s wild that 100 subscribers are in for getting a short story a month.

However, writing is a wildly variable income stream. I’ve been super, super lucky to make over half my needed income from writing every year for the last ten years. But I can never predict when checks will arrive, when deals will strike, or royalties pay out. Royalties are paid out every six months. Contracts can take six months to fourteen months to pay out. I could strike a million dollar book deal tomorrow, and still run out of money in nine months if it takes twelve for the contract to get negotiated and a check to be cut. While Patreon is a harder ask, getting a monthly check for art is worth strapping velcro to myself and jumping against a felt wall for. Having predictable income is something of a brass ring.

3) I needed to not worry about failure

Rejection is hard. Jim Hines just wrote about the fact that even at this stage in his career he still gets rejections. I still do. But that rejection is private, between the editor, my agent and me. I have almost a thousand to date in my career.
But a crowdfunding project is very, very public. The first time I did a Kickstarter a few people reached out to me, worrying about whether I’d hit the amount I set. Failure in public, if the Kickstarter didn’t fund, would be a tough hit.

Setting up a Patreon is something similar. You’re going to reveal to the world how much support and interest there is out there for what you’re doing. Then there are your own expectations. You look at other Patreons, you wondered where you’ll fit within the rankings.

Then there are your own internal expectations to manage. I’ll be honest and open here, I was hoping to get to $1,000 in the first month because my big goal is the $1,500 before the year’s end (when I run out of savings) that I want to replace the freelance income that vaporized in January. I looked at Kickstarters and polls and thought $1,000 was attainable. While I’m sure people may compare my Patreon to others, or make judgements, I tend not to care what people think but am harder on myself trying to get to goals I set up for myself. I’ve learned to not worry about others but pay attention to my road. But missing my own expectations was still a pain.

But getting to 55% of a goal is strong progress. I’m over halfway to my own internal goal. I’m starting something new to me, so I’m learning a lot. I’m an egg again, and that means there’s work to be done ahead. Just because I was doing well at the novel career game doesn’t mean I automatically am given a platter on this crowdfunding thing.

4) Profile matters

Since I got knocked back on the health front in 2008 I feel like I’ve been playing catch up, or just struggling to stay afloat with my career. It may not look like that from the outside, but from 2009-2012 I had limited energy. I had to split that between writing, freelancing for money, and being a father. To get the writing done, I pulled back from being a part of the general community. I twitter, but not as frequently as others. I even took a four month sabbatical from social media to finish the last novel. I don’t interact as much as I would like. I certainly backed way off the daily blogging that had become a huge traffic item for me.
When I’m in survival mode I tend to go quiet and focus on the work in front of me.

As a result of that, it is a hard sell to come out of the cold and announce that you’re twittering again, blogging, and trying to engage and ‘oh yeah, there’s a new Crowdfunding project.’ I’ve also fallen away from the habit of being open, partially because my problems are problems some people would like to have (oh, you make half your family’s income writing novels and the other half freelancing, but want to shift that ratio more toward writing, boo hoo. Your novels haven’t sold quite as much as you’d like: boo hoo. etc). I’m easing back in, but as I said, I’ve been in survival mode now for almost seven years and focused just on the writing and less on the public sphere that I used to dwell in.

(As a complete aside, part of that reason is a conversation I had with Jay Lake, where we talked about how being open about sicknesses had caused us to lose projects. In my case it was a high value three book possibility that an editor told me I was being considered for but some of my conversation on the blog about having a heart defect meant I was passed over. Since then I’ve been utterly gutted about the idea of losing projects and harming my family due to that and my old instinct to share has been dulled, I’m trying to get it back, though.)

I’ve given some speeches on how I think there’s a three-legged stool to make a crowdfunding campaign work. That is a leg of having a strong social media presence and profile. A leg of haven proven that you can deliver on the project and have delivered in the past. And lastly, a leg of a project that is compelling in and of itself.

I knew I was going in one-legged. What I mainly had was proof that I could deliver (I write). I knew that the inherent project idea “I’m going to write a story a month” was old, as others were already doing it. And I knew that my profile was a bit weak of late.

5) I needed to offer something to $1 backers

One of the ways I think I failed at the start was not offering more to $1 and $2 backers. I looked at a lot of Patreons, and a lot of them offer the stories for $1 a month. Other Patreons don’t offer anything at $1.

I decided to offer a once a week ‘5 Things Monday’ blog post for $1. For $2, behind the scenes of what I’m working on. Then, the meat of the sandwich was the $5, story once a month level. But sign ups for the $1 a month level of the Patreon were pretty anemic compared to others doing the ‘everyone gets a story.’

I adjusted the Patreon so that $1 backers knew they would get all the stories as a collection at the end of the year as long as it was over $750 a month. So the basic value proposition for a $1 backer is that for $12 you get a short story collection, once a year at the end of the year. For a $2 backer, they get a story every quarter, and then the collection at the end of the year.

6) I am in it for the long haul

The mental model I’ve had for projects like this is one month of frantic activity, and then fulfilling it down the road a bit. There was a binary result, either I reached the amount needed for the Kickstarter to fund, or I didn’t.

With the Patreon, after the first ten days of patrons jumping on board, the Patreon remained essentially flat. For the next two weeks it remained flat, with even a slight dip in the middle. Not gonna lie, if you refer back to the ‘don’t be afraid to fail in public’ point, this was a moment where I started to wonder if I had, in fact, failed in public:

One of the things about the Patreon is that, while the extra money is nice, I’ve been careful not to set up too much extra so that I don’t end up working far, far harder for the money there than if I was freelancing. I can’t afford for the Patreon to take all my writing time away and then end up not working on novels. This has to be a thing that helps my career, not slows it down. I’m making an initial investment, hoping that it will get to $1,000 to $1,500 or more so that I can work more, and harder, on novels. If it remained stuck at $500 I’d have to shut it down and walk away.

And my ego could take the hit. After being in and out of the ER in 2009 and having tasting some near death experience I know for a fact that there are worse things than screwing up in public, or failing. I can fall flat on my face here. But, I was starting to wonder if I needed to shut it down and open negotiations with a couple leads for more freelance work.

However, after that slow period, growth started up again and we’re getting close to 100 patrons on the project. So I’m realizing this isn’t a one month and I see where things are. I’ve seen some Patreons hit the amounts people need in a month, but that isn’t going to be my path.

Judging by the growth I’ve seen in mine, it looks like it’ll take 12-24 months to see if I can get to the point I’m aiming for. Whether I’ll run out of money before then, or if it will grow enough that the money lasts long enough, I have no idea. This experiment is going to take at least nine months to play out for me, when the lines cross.

But that means taking a nine month view. I said in the beginning when I first launched the Patreon it felt like jumping off a cliff, doing something new. I’m still committed to falling for another nine months and not focusing so hard on the week.

Because if the growth of the last week continues out that long, I might look back at this and be ever so grateful to myself for taking this big, public risk.