I’m proud to announce that Think Weirder: The Year’s Best Science Fiction Ideas is now available. I’m really happy with the finished book, this is the most fascinating set of stories that I’ve ever had the honor to publish.

As I mentioned in my last post, I read 391 stories published in 2024 to come up with the 16 stories that I considered the best combination of concept-driven, near-future, and high writing quality. The stories that made the cut came from Clarkesworld Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Reactor Magazine (published by Tor Books). The anthology includes award-winning selections and both well-known and emerging authors. The only common factor across the entire set of stories is the quality of the ideas.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

• Death and the Gorgon by Greg Egan
• The Best Version of Yourself by Grant Collier
• Twenty-Four Hours by H.H. Pak
• Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling by David W. Goodman
• Nine Billion Turing Tests by Chris Willrich
• Stars Don’t Dream by Chi Hui, translated by John Chu
• A Gray Magic by Ray Nayler
• Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim
• The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video by Thomas Ha
• Our Chatbots Said ‘I Love You,’ Shall We Meet? by Caroline M. Yoachim
• Breathing Constellations by Rich Larson
• The Lark Ascending by Eleanna Castroianni
• Driver by Sameem Siddiqui
• How to Remember Perfectly by Eric Schwitzgebel
• LuvHome™ by Resa Nelson
• Money, Wealth, and Soil by Lance Robinson

Here are a few pictures of the proofs. I still haven’t got one of my own that doesn’t have the “Not for Resale” label, but they’re on their way!

Thank you so much for continuing to follow along with all the different science fiction projects I work on. Here’s a 50% off code for a DRM-free ebook, this is the steepest discount there is right now on the book:

Currently with Amazon I can’t provide discounts on the print version, but if you’d like to buy a paperback, here’s the link:

And finally, for completeness, here’s the ebook version on Amazon, but it is full-price:

Amazon has told me that they’ve linked the pages on the back-end, but it will take a few days to propagate, that’s why the pages are different.

Details for hard core book nerds

OK, that’s all I have in terms of the announcement, don’t stick around unless you’re really into publishing. This is the part where I explain my strategy for getting more people to read the book, and ask you for your thoughts.

In 2025 getting attention for a new book project is hard. It’s easiest to target marketing when you have a very specific reader in mind, so initially I’m targeting people like me — readers with a technical background who enjoy hard science fiction. Here are the highlights of my strategy:

• Posts on Hacker News. Readers of Hacker News tend to have high intellectual curiosity, so this is a natural fit. I’ve reached the front page of HN with science fiction posts before, but it does require some luck in submitting for the right people to see the posts before they fall off the “new” page, so I’ll have to be consistent here.
• LinkedIn. This seems like a weird channel, and it might not go anywhere, but my thesis is that there’s so much boring LinkedIn content that paid promotions about science fiction to technical folks might have some traction! We’ll see.
• Company book clubs. I know some tech folks that have internal company book clubs, and I believe this book of short stories would be a great fit. Think Weirder is all about novel ideas, and helping folks inside tech companies think 5% weirder is worth something.
• Story reviews. This is not channel-specific, but some people like knowing the kind of story they’re getting before they commit, so I’ll write a series of reviews of the individual stories in the book for those people.
• Kindle ads. This is probably the most competitive of the channels on this list, but there are lots of people in the Kindle ecosystem that love science fiction, so I’ll do some tests.

If these approaches don’t work, I’ll reevaluate regularly. If you have promotion ideas that you think have a higher ROI on my time, please let me know! Just keep in mind that I also have a full-time job and small children, so these activities have to be things that I can do after my kids go to sleep.

Also, I’d be grateful if you’d be willing to review the book. At this early point in the series, a five star review on Amazon is the best way to help the series reach more people, so if you like the book please consider giving it a review.

If you have other ideas for getting this book into the hands of people who might enjoy it, let me know! And of course those of you who are willing to share/review have my eternal gratitude, there’s nothing better than word-of-mouth. Thanks again for supporting the weird stuff you want to see more of in the world.

Joe