Sunshine Hills Reality Edit (new story!!)
The first seed of this story came from reading an article about ChatGPT giving their users directions to imaginary places that didn't exist.
Information bubbles. The rise of AI slop. A cranky goat who likes to stand on the henhouse. Sunshine/Grumpy friendship. The importance of community. And what even are facts, anyway?
I'm really happy that this story is now live at Future Tense Fiction (a publication from the Center of Science and the Imagination at ASU.) They publish one near-future SF story a month, and they always pair it with a response essay from an expert in that topic. (If you look on their site, you'll find a whole list of amazing stories from authors like Carmen Maria Machado, Charlie Jane Anders, Malka Older, etc.)
My story is paired with a beautiful response essay from writer (and sometime Wikipedia editor) Monika Sengul-Jones, called What Happens when Information is Severed from its Source?
The first seed of this story came from reading an article about ChatGPT giving their users directions to imaginary places that didn't exist. Despite my frustration with AI, this seemed almost magical. I wondered how this would look in a science fictional setting. Who was searching for this place off-the-grid? Whom would they find there? From that developed all the rest.
I worked on this story for a long time, with the ongoing help of my amazing editor at Future Tense Fiction, Joey Eschrich, and I'm really proud of the way it turned out. (Additional thanks go here to Caroline M. Yoachim for beta reading, Mia Armstrong-López for copyediting, and my brother Andy for forestry assistance.)
Here again is the link, and if you enjoy it, I would be grateful if you would share it! (If you did not enjoy it, let us never speak of this again.)
<3 tina