On Spies and Artificial Intelligence

Dear friends,

My kids are back to school this week — 2nd and 5th grade, amazingly enough. I’m back at my desk, writing stories. My head is bursting with ideas, one more complicated than the next, and I’m doing what I can to catch them all and give them room to grow.

I’ve had two very different pieces come out this summer. The first is a horror/humor science fiction piece called “The Museum of the Office,” about what happens after we humans vote in artificial intelligence to be our leaders. This piece found home in Sci Phi Journal, a lovely magazine out of Brussels, Belgium that positions itself as being at the intersection of philosophy, anthropology and SF. Gordon Johnson, an artist affiliated with the magazine, created this nifty illustration. It’s not exactly San Francisco, but possibly a museum, and it very much jives with a Dino Buzzati book I’m currently reading, The Bewitched Bourgeois. I’ll take that.

The second publication is a much older story, back online thanks to After Happy Hour Review’s special reprint issue. “How to Tell If a Student in Your Beginning Poetry Class Is a Russian Spy” was first published in 2011, in Mad Hatters’ Revew: Back from the USSR issue edited by Mariya Gusev and Alex Cigale. In Russian, the story appeared in my 2016 book, Хлоп-страна. I wrote it as a send up on current events, and I would probably be too scared or too jaded to write anything like this now, which is why it’s wonderful to have this piece as is. Of course, this is also a satire on workshop culture. Enjoy! (It starts on page 86 of this PDF.)

Happy reading! Please stay in touch!

Olga