IZ Story Socials with Teika Marija Smits
IZ Story Socials are a new way to read the stories we love. Find out more about them here.
Explore and discuss 24 fantastic stories with author and editor Teika Marija Smits and Interzone and IZ Digital editor Gareth Jelley.
Guest appearances by Elizabeth Bear, R.T. Ester, Seanan McGuire, Aliya Whiteley, and Lavanya Lakshminarayan.
Teika Marija Smits is a UK-based writer, freelance editor and mother-of-two. Her poetry, short fiction and non-fiction have been widely published. Teika was formerly the managing editor of Mother’s Milk Books and is now an Editor-at-Large at Valley Press alongside running The Book Stewards – a writers’ support site that she manages with her husband. In her spare moments she likes to doodle, draw and paint. Her story ‘The November Room or Leaving the Labyrinth’ will be published in IZ Digital.
Teika’s first series of IZ Story Socials will begin in July 2023 and run for 12 weeks (with some breaks) on Thursdays from 20:00 to 22:00 UTC+1.
- 12 weeks
- 2 hours each week
- Thursdays from 20:00 to 22:00 UTC+1
- reading list and dates below
- Meeting links will be sent after you sign up
€220
Reading List
Here are the stories for each IZ Story Social with Teika Marija Smits, along with links to places to find them. Bookshop links are to paperback editions wherever possible, and in most cases ebooks are available.
Week 1 // 20 July 2023
Guest writer: Elizabeth Bear
- ‘Fairy Tales for Robots’ by Sofia Samatar | in Shoreline of Infinity #32, in the anthology Made to Order: Robots and Revolution and online in Lightspeed #139
- ‘Dolly’ by Elizabeth Bear | in the anthology More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity and online in Apex Magazine
Week 2 // 27 July 2023
- ‘The Machine Stops’ by E.M. Forster | in the (free) MIT Press anthology Voices from the Radium Age (2022), in the (pricey) anthology We, Robots: Artificial Intelligence in 100 Stories, and in many other places online
- ‘Samsāra in a Teacup’ by Lavanya Lakshminarayan | online in ApexMagazine
Week 3 // 3 August 2023
Guest writer: Lavanya Lakshminarayan
- ‘The New Utopia’ by Jerome K. Jerome | online here and here, in the anthology Knights of Madness: Further Comic Tales of Fantasy (Orbit, 2000), and a reading at YouTube
- ‘When It Changed’ by Joanna Russ | in Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (PM Press, 2015), in The Big Book of Science Fiction (Vintage, 2016)
- And if you have the time… ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, by Ursula K. Le Guin | in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters & The Compass Rose (Gateway, 2015), in the anthology The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (Vintage, 2020), and online in various forms…
Week 4 // 10 August 2023
Guest writer: Aliya Whiteley
- ‘Trademark Bugs – A Legal History’ by Adam Roberts | in A Practical Guide to the Resurrected
- ‘Corwick Grows’ by Aliya Whiteley | in the collection From the Neck Up and in The Dark #34
Week 5 // 7 September 2023
Guest writer: Keith Brooke
- ‘26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’ by Kij Johnson | in the collection At the Mouth of the River of the Bees (Small Beer Press, 2012) and Clarkesworld #150
- ‘Me Two’ by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown | in Lightspeed #129
- And if you have the time… ‘The Children of Winter’ by Eric Brown | in The Disciples of Apollo (PS Publishing, 2019) and Interzone #163
Week 6 // 14 September 2023
- ‘The Redoubtables’ by Premee Mohamed | in Apparition Literary Magazine, January 2020 and the collection No One Will Come Back for Us (Undertow Publications, 2023)
- ‘Airless’ by N.J. Ramsden | in Best of British Science Fiction 2017 (NewCon Press, 2018)
Week 7 // 21 September 2023
- ‘Bloodchild’ by Octavia Butler | in the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2005), in the anthologies The Big Book of Science Fiction (Vintage, 2016) and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Tor Books, 2012), and in Drabblecast #300 (audio)
- ‘The Woman Who Didn’t Come Back’ by Rachel Pollack | available in The Beatrix Gates (PM Press, 2019)
Week 8 // 28 September 2023
Guest writer: R.T. Ester
- ‘A Moment of Zugzwang’ by Neil Williamson | in Parsec #4 and in the forthcoming anthology Best of British Science Fiction 2022 (NewCon Press, 2023) [note: it will be out in time for the Social]
- ‘The Building Across the Street’ by R.T. Ester | in Interzone #294
Week 9 // 5 October 2023
- ‘Softlight Sins’ by Peter F. Hamilton | in the anthology Burning Brightly, 50 Years of Novacon (NewCon Press, 2016), and in StarshipSofa #212 (audio)
- ‘Electric Rains’ by Kathleen Ann Goonan | in Lightspeed #22
Week 10 // 12 October 2023
- ‘The Walls of Tithonium Chasma’ by Tim Major | in Shoreline of Infinity #7, and the anthologies The Chosen from the First Age (Shoreline of Infinity, 2019) and Best of British Science Fiction 2017 (NewCon Press, 2018)
- ‘PauseTime’ by Mary Soon Lee | in Lightspeed #156 and Forever #37
- And if you have the time… ‘Lifework’ by Mary Soon Lee | in Interzone #144
Week 11 // 19 October 2023
Guest writer: Val Nolan
- ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ by Arthur C. Clarke | in The Collected Stories (Gollancz, 2001)
- ‘Cyberstar’ by Val Nolan | in Interzone #280 and in the anthology The Best of British Science Fiction 2019 (NewCon Press, 2020)
Week 12 // 26 October 2023
- ‘First Aid’ by Seanan McGuire | in the anthology Someone in Time (Rebellion, 2022)
- ‘What’s Expected of Us’ by Ted Chiang | in Nature #436
- And if you have the time… ‘Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang | in Stories of Your Life and Others (Picador, 2020)
If you have any questions, or any problems finding the stories above, please email socials [at] interzone [dot] press as early as possible, thank you.
— Gareth Jelley, Editor & Publisher of Interzone & IZ Digital
🔴 🟠 🟡