by Bryan Hurt
But then the Sparrowfall movement was born.
A certain radical, self-ordained preacher began lambasting God as the ultimate snoop.
“Does He not see each sparrow fall? Has He not numbered the hairs upon our heads and our days upon the earth? His omniscience is the unsurpassable affront to the integrity of our lives! All our mortal privacy protections are as naught before His prying eyes!”
Something about the incredible diatribe and accusations made them go viral. The preacher graduated from YouTube videos with very few views to filled stadiums. People began to panic at the thought of God piercing their otherwise inviolable barriers of privacy. A population that had forgotten the old notion of the Creator peering into their souls no longer possessed the mental immunity against such a shattering concept.
Because, of course, there were no scientific or technological impediments against God, the clamoring supplicants turned to all sorts of magic. Charlatans and scammers proliferated, offering curses, charms, and talismans that would cloak the sinner from God’s inspection. But such individual gestures failed to satisfy a populace growing more and more alarmed over surveillance by the Big Spook, that deific NSA in the sky.
At last the governments of the planet had no choice but to respond.
And so the construction of an orbital magic curtain around the entire globe began.
The project, still only partially finished after two decades, currently usurps half the combined GDP of all the world’s economies. But the majority feel that fencing themselves off from God’s view is well worth the bankrupting costs.
No one has yet raised the prospect that God is already inside the curtain, rather than outside it.
About the Contributors
DAVID ABRAMS is the author of Fobbit (Grove/Atlantic, 2012), a comedy about the Iraq War, which Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic” and named a Top 10 Pick for Literary Fiction in fall 2012. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, an Indie Next pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a Montana Honor Book, and a finalist for the LA Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His essays, reviews, and short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salon, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, Consequence, Fire and Forget (Da Capo Press, 2013), Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand (Press 53), and many other publications. He lives in Butte, Montana, with his wife. His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com. Visit his website at: www.davidabramsbooks.com.
AIMEE BENDER is the author of five books; the most recent, The Color Master, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2013. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles, and teaches creative writing at USC.
CHANELLE BENZ’s fiction has been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014, Granta, The American Reader, Fence, and others. Her work has also been selected as one of the Top Ten Longreads of 2012. She has an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University and a BFA in acting from Boston University. She teaches at the University of Houston.
SEAN BERNARD is the author of two books, the story collection Desert sonorous (2015), which received the 2014 Juniper Prize, and the novel Studies in the Hereafter (2015).
T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE is the author of twenty-five books of fiction, including, most recently, When the Killing’s Done (2011), San Miguel (2012), T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013), and The Harder They Come (2015). His next novel, The Terranauts, will be published by Ecco in 2016. Boyle’s work has been translated into more than two dozen foreign languages, and his stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The Paris Review, GQ, Antaeus, Granta, and McSweeney’s. He has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel of the year (World’s End, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (T.C. Boyle Stories, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (The Tortilla Curtain, 1997). He currently lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.
MARK CHIUSANO is the author of Marine Park, which received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His stories and essays have appeared in Guernica, Narrative Magazine, Harvard Review, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review Daily. He writes for Newsday and was born and raised in Brooklyn.
ROBERT COOVER has published fourteen novels, three short story collections, and a collection of plays since The Origin of the Brunists received the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1966. At Brown University, where he has taught for over thirty years, he established the International Writers Project, a program that provides an annual fellowship and safe haven to endangered international writers who face harassment, imprisonment, and suppression of their work in their home countries. In 1990–91, he launched the world’s first hypertext fiction workshop; he was one of the founders in 1999 of the Electronic Literature Organization, and in 2002 created CaveWriting, the first writing workshop in immersive virtual reality. His most recent novel is The Brunist Day of Wrath.
LUCY CORIN is the author of the short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney’s Books) and The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books), and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2). She spent 2012–13 at the American Academy in Rome as the John Guare Fellow in Literature.
PAUL DI FILIPPO sold his first story in 1977, and since then has published over thirty books of short fiction, novels, and nonfiction, including Ribofunk and The Steampunk Trilogy (just reissued by Open Road Media). He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his partner of some forty years, Deborah Newton. He suspects he is being watched.
CORY DOCTOROW (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cofounded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
STEVEN HAYWARD is a novelist and short story writer born in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of the Canadian national bestseller Don’t Be Afraid. A critical and commercial success, Don’t Be Afraid was a Globe and Mail Best Book for 2012 and was also named one of the top ten novels of the year by Toronto’s Now Magazine. His most recent book is a collection of short fiction, To Dance the Beginning of the World. He lives in Colorado and teaches creative writing at Colorado College.
BRYAN HURT is the author of Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France, winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. His work has appeared in The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Recommended Reading, Tin House, TriQuarterly, among many others. He teaches creative writing at St. Lawrence University.
MARK IRWIN’s seventh collection of poetry, Large White House Speaking, appeared from New Issues in spring of 2013, and his American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987–2014) will be published in 2015. Recognition for his work includes Discovery/The Nation Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He teaches in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and he lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.
RANDA JARRAR’s novel, A Map of Home, was published in half a dozen languages and won a Hopwood Award and an Arab-American Book Award and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes and Noble Review. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Utne Reader, Salon, Guernica, The Rumpus, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and others. She has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, H
edgebrook, Caravansarai, and Eastern Frontier, and in 2010 was named one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of forty.
DANA JOHNSON is the author of Elsewhere, California and Break Any Woman Down, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in Slake, Callaloo, and The Iowa Review, among many others. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, California, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California where she teaches literature and creative writing. She lives in downtown Los Angeles.
MIRACLE JONES is a Sagittarius. He is a very private person from Texas.
KATHERINE KARLIN’s fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology, New Stories from the South, and journals including One Story, TriQuarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, [PANK], and many others. Her 2011 collection, Send Me Work, was published by Northwestern University Press and won the Balcones Fiction Prize. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas, and teaches at Kansas State University.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, ETGAR KERET is a winner of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the author, most recently, of the memoir The Seven Good Years. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine, and on This American Life.
MILES KLEE is an editor for the web culture site the Daily Dot as well as author of Ivyland (OR Books, 2012) and the story collection True False (OR Books, 2015). His essays, reportage, fiction, and satire have appeared in Vanity Fair, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Awl, Guernica, The Collagist, and elsewhere.
ALEXIS LANDAU studied at Vassar College and received an MFA from Emerson College and a PhD from the University of Southern California in English literature and creative writing. Her first novel, The Empire of the Senses, was published by Pantheon Books in the spring of 2015. She lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles.
KEN LIU (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga also published a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
KELLY LUCE’s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (A Strange Object), won the 2013 Foreword Review’s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her work has appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her debut novel, Pull Me Under, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016. A Contributing Editor for Electric Literature, she hails from Illinois and lives in Santa Cruz, California.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, AGNI, NPR, The American Reader, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in several anthologies, including Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She has been the recipient of the Richard Yates Short Story Prize, a Millay Colony for the Arts residency, the CINTAS Foundation Fellowship in Creative Writing, and a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship, and nominated for a Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and lives in Philadelphia with her partner.
LINCOLN MICHEL is the Editor-in-Chief of electricliterature.com and the Co-Editor of Gigantic magazine. He is also the Co-Editor Gigantic Worlds, an anthology of science flash fiction. His own work has appeared in Granta, Tin House, NOON, The Believer, American Short Fiction, Pushcart Prize XXXIX, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Upright Beasts, was published by Coffee House Press in 2015. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and @thelincoln.
ANNIE MCDERMOTT studied literature in Oxford and London before spending a year in Mexico City, working as a teacher, editor, and translator. Her translations of the short fiction of the Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos have appeared in the magazines World Literature Today and The Coffin Factory, and she has also translated the Argentinian poet Karina Macció for the magazine Palabras Errantes. She also reviews fiction and poetry for The Literateur and Modern Poetry in Translation.
BONNIE NADZAM’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Iowa Review, Epoch, Tweed’s, Granta, and many other journals. Her first novel, Lamb, was the recipient of the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize in 2011 and was long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK in 2013. She is co-author with Environmental Philosopher Dale Jamieson on Love in the Anthropocene (OR Books, September 2015) and her second novel, Lions, is forthcoming from Grove Press in 2016.
ALISSA NUTTING is author of the novel Tampa and the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as The Norton Introduction to Literature, Tin House, Bomb, and Conduit; her essays have appeared in Fence, The New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, and other venues. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at John Carroll University.
DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN graduated with an MA in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. He also holds degrees from Yale College and Stanford Law School. His novel Nigerians in Space, a thriller about brain drain from Africa, was published by Unnamed Press in 2014. Olukotun’s work has been featured in Slate, Guernica, The New York Times, the LA Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, Joyland, Words without Borders, World Literature Today, and other publications. He founded the digital freedom program at PEN American Center, which focuses on online free expression and surveillance.
DALE PECK’s twelfth book, Visions and Revisions, a memoir, was published in April 2015 by Soho Press, which will also be reprinting his first five novels throughout the year. He lives in New York City with his husband.
JIM SHEPARD is the author of seven novels, including The Book of Aron, and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Playboy. He’s won a Guggenheim Fellowship, five of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches creative writing and film at Williams College, and lives in Williamstown with his wife Karen, his three children, and three beagles.
MIRIAM SHLESINGER held an honorary doctorate from the Copenhagen Business School (2001), the 2010 Danica Seleskovitch Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Israel Translators Association. She was co-editor (with Franz Pöchhacker) of the Interpreting Studies Reader (Routledge, 2002), and since 2006 was co-editor of Interpreting: International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting (John Benjamins) as well as associate editor of Benjamins Translation Library. She taught translation and interpretation (both theory and practice) at Bar Ilan University, Israel. She passed away in 2012.
CHIKA UNIGWE was born in Enugu, Enugu State. She has degrees from the University of Nigeria and the KU Leuven. She holds a PhD from the Leiden University in Holland. She is the author of three novels, including On Black Sisters Street and Night Dancer. She has won the 2012 Nigeria Prize for Literature, a BBC Short Story Competition, a Commonwealth Short Story award, and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her other writing awards include a Rockefeller Foundation award
, a UNESCO-Aschberg Fellowship, a Ledig House Fellowship, and a 2013 Cove Park Fellowship. She is the most recent winner of the Nigeria Literature Award, and a 2014 Sylt Fellowship for African writers. Her works have been translated into several languages including German, Hebrew, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, and Dutch.
JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS is the author of Down the Rabbit Hole and Quesadillas (both FSG). His work has been translated into fifteen languages. He was born in Mexico and currently lives in Barcelona.
CARMEN YILING YAN was born in China and raised in the United States. Since starting out as a fan translator, her translations of Chinese science fiction have appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Galaxy’s Edge. Her writing has been published in Daily Science Fiction. She currently attends UCLA.
CHARLES YU is the author of the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and the short story collections Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You. His fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including Oxford American, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review.
Born in 1981, ZHANG RAN graduated from Beijing Jiaotong University in 2004 with a degree in computer science. After a stint in the IT industry, Zhang became a reporter and news analyst with Economic Daily and China Economic Net, during which time his news commentary won a China News Award. In 2011, Zhang quit his job and moved to southern China to become an independent writer. He began publishing science fiction in 2012, with his debut story, “Ether,” winning the Yinhe (Galaxy) Award as well as the Xingyun (Nebula) Award. His novella, Rising Wind City, won the Yinhe Award and a Silver Xingyun Award.
Acknowledgments
MY THANKS
To Kate Johnson: super agent, who believed in this book long before it was a book and without whose wisdom, support, and guidance this book would not exist.
