"Houses" in Robots: The Recent AI. Edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace

I am pumped. Sean Wallace and Rich Horton over at Prime books picked up "Houses" (Lightspeed Issue 18, November 2011) for their collection: Robots: The Recent AI. The line-up is pretty sweet! Check it:

“Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear, Asimov's
“A Jar of Goodwill” by Tobias S. Buckell, Clarkesworld Magazine
“Balancing Accounts” by James Cambias, F&SF
“The Rising Waters” by Benjamin Crowell, Strange Horizons
“The Shipmaker” by Aliette De Bodard, Interzone
“I, Robot” by Cory Doctorow, The Infinite Matrix
“Kiss Me Twice” by Mary Robinette Kowal, Asimov's
“Algorithms for Love” by Ken Liu, Strange Horizons
“Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Interzone
“The Djinn's Wife” by Ian McDonald, Asimov's
“Houses” by Mark Pantoja, Lightspeed Magazine
“Artifice and Intelligence” by Tim Pratt, Strange Horizons
“Stalker” by Robert Reed, Asimov's
“Droplet” by Benjamin Rosenbaum, F&SF
“Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky, Tor.com
“Under the Eaves” by Lavie Tidhar, original
“Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M.Valente, Clarkesworld
“The Nearest Thing” by Genevieve Valentine, Lightspeed Magazine

Pretty honored to be in this collection. Preorder a copy here.

"Houses" in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 18

"Houses" is out now in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 18. My first professional sale and it's a Clarion West story! Yum! The whole November 2011 Issue 18 is fantastic. It's pretty awesome to appear next to China Mieville and John Crowley. Pick up a copy here. 

I came to the Clarion West Writer's Workshop with a number of ideas, half-stories, little gems of inspiration, some of which I distilled into stories I submitted to the Workshop, but "Houses" was not one of them. One morning I woke up on my horrible little plastic mattress bunk bed (we dormed in this enormous sorority house and we all all got our own rooms, but we had to sleep on these bunk beds with these mattresses that seemed to be designed to easily hose off vomit from sorority sisters who'd done too many keg stands) and the first line just popped in my head (which I later deleted, as per Terry Bisson’s rules [he's right, by the way]): “After the humans left, the houses got bored.” I had all these ideas after that, about the society these houses and machines we humans left behind created, our toys playing house, so to speak, eventually waking up and realizing that they didn't have to our lead, our psychology, our biology. But, I didn't know how to handle such a thing, it could easily turn into a sprawling work that couldn't be contained in a short story.