2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the launch of my professional writing career. It all began with comic books, but that’s an art form I abandoned after a decade in favor of the short story. I’ve published 135 or so of those by now, and a few years ago I noticed a strange change had taken place, a transformation to my creative output which occurred long before I became consciously aware it had.
Though much of my fiction over the decades has been horrific — so much so I’ve received eight Bram Stoker Award nominations, plus Publishers Weekly has said of my 2020 collection of eerie tales, Things That Never Happened, that “his talent is undeniable” — I’ve found that as the world itself has become more horrifying, my fiction became less so. That wasn’t anything done by choice, but rather as a natural response to the terrifying tenor of the world.
And so I found myself instead writing mostly of robots rather than zombies, and deep space missions have been swapped in for serial killers. Time travel has taken the place of terror.
Oh, don’t worry. I haven’t abandoned horror. I never could. But as a percentage of tales lately told, science fiction has in recent years been winning out.
As proof of that alteration to my psyche, I offer up the contents of my newest collection, 101 Things to Do Before You’re Downloaded. Included among the thirteen stories you’ll find “The Stranded Time Traveler Embraces the Inevitable,” the writing of which released me from my despair over the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election as well as breaking the only writer’s block I’ve ever experienced; “Learning to Accept What’s to Come,” in which two robots wrestle with surviving as humanity seems headed to become merely a memory; the title story, in which our species — or some of us anyway — seeks a new home as our solar system reaches the end of its life cycle; plus ten more glimpses of the future.
You’ll also find clones, aliens, spaceships, AI starship navigators, our post-human descendants … all the science fictional elements which make our promised tomorrows so mind-blowing.
Oh, and there are jelly beans as well.
I hope you’ll allow all the above-mentioned cosmic ingredients — and more — to be downloaded into your brain so we may together journey through the day after tomorrow.
And don’t just take my word for it! Here’s what Carl R. Jennings had to say about the collection in the pages of Phantasmagoria Magazine: “Edelman traces a nearly indescribable, four-dimensional corkscrew shape with his words and delivers his story concepts brilliantly: sometimes with irreverence, sometimes with heartache, but always with skill aided by an embrace of the absurd.”
You can purchase your copy directly from PS Publishing — or wherever you buy your books.