S.J. Stevenson | Updates

Croc in Class

S.J. Stevenson — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:59:27 -0500

Henry is a crocodile, though class teacher Miss Lipkiss denies it. Until Henry takes charge of class.

[Originally published by Flash Fiction Magazine on 1st April 2025]

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Her Lips Still Taste of Apples

S.J. Stevenson — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:05:05 -0500

An old woman stumbles into a silent forest glade, in which a dead dwarf lies slumped before a glass coffin holding a princess. But the old woman has her own reasons for being there.

[Originally published by Flash Fiction Magazine 4th July 2024]

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iTopia

S.J. Stevenson — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:12:23 -0500

When the algorithms know you better than you do, is it paradise or purgatory?

[This story was shortlisted for the Brighton Prize 2017 and appeared in the Brighton Prize 2017 anthology. It was first published by the Rattle Tales Group in 'Rattle Tales', 2018 ]

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The Prices Paid with Slipper Glass

S.J. Stevenson — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:16:14 -0500

"When you wish upon a star, beware the wish that breaks your heart"

A young queen owes everything to her fairy godmother - including her new born son.

But some debts can never be repaid.

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The Castle of Midnight Never

S.J. Stevenson — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 03:21:01 -0500

MIDNIGHT MUST NOT STRIKE!

When a monkey on a flying bicycle crashes through her bedroom window, it's just the start of Beattie Brown's problems. Because very soon she'll be up against the schemes of the dastardly cat Purrluyn and her crowmen, as they seek to free the evil, glass-footed Princess Spindlesleep from her prison within the Castle of Midnight Never.

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Godopoly by Shaun Stevenson & Dominic Griffiths

S.J. Stevenson — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 11:24:14 -0500

Devlin Child is on Death Row. He's really not very happy for this, especially since he hasn't committed any actual crime and also the UK banned the death penalty decades ago.

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A Miscellany of Other Authentic S.J. Stevenson Wordage

S.J. Stevenson — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 05:52:12 -0500

Why not channel your inner-mole and dig into some other slices of S.J. Stevenson's wordage?

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Time Travel, Sci-Fi and the Ozymandias View

S.J. Stevenson — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was guest blogger for Galaxy Press, where I wrote about my Writers of the Future Volume 42 story, 'The Triceratops Effect'.

I've included a link below, but I figured I might as well put the full text on my own website too! After all, I harangued all the words into place!

https://galaxypress.com/time-travel-sci-fi-and-the-ozymandias-view/

Time Travel, Sci-Fi and the Ozymandias View

Or why things matter even when they don’t

Guest blogger Shaun Stevenson

Exploring the Best New Speculative Fiction in Volume 42

Last year, I alarmed my wife by clambering onto our kitchen table and boogying to a tune that lived only in my head.
Here’s the thing: I’d learned I was a winner of the Writers of the Future Contest, with my story “The Triceratops Effect.”
This had been a fun story to write, and when I started, I thought it was about time travel and dinosaurs and bosses who knew a lot about cost—but bugger all about benefit. And if you spotted the italics, you’ve probably already clocked that I’d got that one wrong.

Time Travel Starts in Our Head
To understand how I missed the point of my own story, I need to slip back to memories of a time when it felt like life was Gatling-gunning lemons at me. Worse, it was doing so just after there’d been a series of unexpected fires in my lemonade factory.
At such times we find odd comforts in odder places. For me, it was stumbling upon a photo taken by the Cassini spacecraft of a pinprick of light as viewed through the rings of Saturn. This was accompanied by an (abbreviated) version of Carl Sagan’s magnificent pale blue dot quote:
“That’s home, a dust mote, suspended in a sunbeam.”
From this, I took the comfort that against a backdrop of thirteen billion years, my cruddy luck was unimportant. In fact, everything I’d ever do or not do? Pointless! Trivial! Not even worthy of aspiring towards irrelevance. After all, my life would barely scatter “an inconsequence of photons,” before they got lost in the immense and unforgiving blackness, stretching beyond our pinprick world.
This remains for me an important perspective, which I sometimes think of as the Ozymandias View, after Percy Shelley’s poem featuring a once-great king named Ozymandias. In this, a traveller describes the “colossal wreck” of an ancient statue inscribed with the words: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” even as: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The contrast between the inscription’s mega boast and the all-swallowing desert encapsulates how even empires eventually crumble into amnesiac nothingness.
But it wasn’t until writing “The Triceratops Effect” that a more nuanced appreciation of the Ozymandias View coalesced in my mind.

Story Inspirations and Asteroid Strikes
First, a quick confession. The idea for “The Triceratops Effect” stumbled into my head at about 2 a.m. on a cold walk when, for some reason, all the straight roads had turned to zigzags.
As I wobbled home, I wondered what it would be like to be a time-travelling astronomer, tracing the trajectory of the asteroid that smithereened the dinosaurs. Then, I wondered something else: what would happen if they couldn’t find it?
Incidentally, my confession isn’t that I have an alcohol problem. I can say with total honesty that I’ve no foaming glass in hand (mostly because it’s ridiculously difficult to hold the pen without slopping liquid everywhere!) My confession is just that I don’t naturally create stories to convey a message.
I’m in awe of the many excellent writers who do, including many previous winners of the Writers of the Future. However, the bit of my mind that bashes words onto pages is driven by a “what-if” engine.
In other words, I start with an idea, not a message, and no one is ever more astonished than I am, when a message sometimes pokes out shyly from within the story’s plot.

Lampooning Bureaucracy: Douglas Adams to Terry Pratchett
When I started though, it was with a different aim in mind. I’m a huge fan of speculative fiction that lampoons bureaucracy, by applying it to absurd situations. From the Earth being demolished to create a Hyperspace bypass in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to Red Dwarf’s Arnold Rimmer obsessing over space corps directives, even though the spaceship’s crew have been dead for three million years—himself included. And Terry Pratchett’s Eric, where demon king Astfgl bombastically composes plans to modernise Hell, complete with a rainbow selection of highlighter pens.
So, when I began “The Triceratops Effect,” I wanted to echo those influences. I figured, if there’s no asteroid to clear the way for humanity to evolve, then something else has to bundle the dinosaurs through the exit marked “extinction”—and officious time-travellers seemed a fun choice. Because, if the project’s run by people more worried about cost than purpose, there’s always the risk they’ll wipe out the future, just to give the spreadsheet numbers a sexier sheen.

The Butterfly Effect and the Ozymandias View
When I lobbed a triceratops called Gary into the mix (thankfully imaginary ones are much easier on the back muscles than the real thing), it was half-whim and half-wink towards Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “A Sound of Thunder.” As Bradbury’s story is often cited as the inspiration for the concept of “the butterfly effect,” it gave me my title too.
But stories are exasperating offspring, and when refusing to do what they’re told, they can grow in unexpected ways. Gary the triceratops became an outlet for my protagonist’s guilt for being complicit in the Cretaceous mass-extinction event, and saving him developed into a core part of my story.
Because having formed an attachment to Gary, my protagonist is confronted with the limits of the Ozymandias View. Once all the dust has settled (all twenty-five trillion metric tons of it), the next sixty-six million years will skedaddle by regardless. As such, is there even any point in trying to save Gary? Does his survival beyond the faked apocalypse even matter?
And the answer, for starters, is that presumably it bloody well matters to Gary.

Saving Infinity, One Triceratops at a Time

Illustration by Art Ikuta

I don’t think I’ll ever want to lose the perspective I found in Cassini’s photo of Earth. Given worries that current geopolitical tremors are merely the prelude to more seismic ruptures, there’s a peace in understanding that even apocalypses aren’t forever. Our dust mote world will still twirl about the sun sixty-six million more times, and then dance onwards a few billion more. Meanwhile, the atoms of ourselves will be reshuffled into worm burps and oceans and the bungling brains of other things.
Perhaps, if we’re lucky, a scattering of our fossilised bones will grace the museums of some successor species; no doubt including reconstructions of our appearance, with all the fun details wrong. We’ll be milky-eyed, giant-nostrilled and (hopefully!!) suffer no male pattern baldness. As for humanity’s own peculiar fascination with skin pigmentation? Barely an afterthought.
But regardless, what surprised me after I put down my pen (and mopped up the worst of the spilled beer), was that I’d finally learned that it doesn’t matter that nothing matters. The Ozymandias View never meant no one gets hurt, so it’s not an absolution from the responsibilities we face, individually and collectively, during our own nano-flicker cameo within infinity.
Hardly anyone saves the world—and no one saves it forever—but perhaps all of us should seek to save our own triceratops, should we ever get the chance.
Want to read more about Gary the triceratops? Or stories about those famed dino cousins, dragons? Or tales of body thieves, simulated consciousnesses, or honest-to-goodness classic space battles? Then why not pick up a copy of L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 42—because the best place to see infinity is from your own armchair!

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Writers of the Future Winners Recovery Guide

S.J. Stevenson — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fellow Writers of the Future Winner (WOTF) (and golden pen winner) Michael Kuester wrote an excellent ‘Survival Guide’, all about getting through the week.

It had just one minor drawback! The week itself was brilliant. Sure, surviving the pace of the week was tough, but it didn’t feel like surviving: It felt like living the dream - and not the depressing, recurring one where you’re driving your car in your shabbiest underwear, and discover the brake pedal’s stopped working, or the surreal one where the toilet’s developed a bronx accent and has started giving dodgy life advice (to be fair, now I think about it, it’s arguable it’s just regurgitating what it had to swallow).

No, it was living the career dream where you’re signing books and chatting to your heroes and meeting like-minded people and learning so, so much. It’s also where writing, actual writing, is your priority, and not something you have to guiltily squeeze into your day when there are a hundred other things you should be doing instead.

The Aftermath though. Oh dearie me, the aftermath. The cratering down to earth with an extinction event level wallop. Let me admit it, surviving the come down has been tougher. It’s taken three weeks for my head to feel connected to my spine again, and even now I suspect there’s a few loose nerve endings still spraying sparks.

So anyway, here’s my own thoughts on three things to focus on to restore some level of tranquility to your head without paying a fortune in counselling fees. They may be mostly bonkers and not work for anyone else. I make no promises about their usefulness. They’re just the things I’d want to transmit back in time to the version of me that’s about four weeks younger than I am now.

1. Catch up on your sleep

The WOTF event is held in California, but it’s truly international. There were winners from Japan, South Africa, Australia, Slovakia - and I myself had gotten catapulted across the Atlantic from dear old Britain.

Anyway, mixing together jet lag, excitement, and coffee on tap - then adding a sprinkling of latish nights and early starts on top - turns out this isn’t a recipe for feeling well-rested and pinpoint sharp.

Thankfully, I shared a room on the first few nights with Mike Strickland, who once had to teach himself how to sleep on an aircraft carrier, directly beneath where the planes were taking off (the deck beneath, he wasn’t actually rolled up in his sleeping bag on the runway, because that would have been suicidally daft). This meant that when I was inventing topologically improbable ways to interweave myself with my duvet, at least he could keep sleeping soundly in his bed on the other side of the room.

So once it’s over, treat yourself to some decent naps. You deserve ‘em. With luck, there’ll be some great dreams that don’t involve chatty porcelain.

2. Keep the momentum going

Despite the gloom of it all being over, it isn’t. There’s still media appearances and - if you’re brave enough - strolling into local book stores and waving the gorgeous book with your story/art in it under the noses of the owners and saying, ‘hey, why not stock this baby? Go on, you know you want to. Go on, go on.’ [Note: you may want to work on your sales technique though, if you don’t want them to think you’re a loon.]

However, perhaps most importantly, it’s a chance to take stock of your time to work out where you can squeeze in some extra hours to do the thing that turned you into a WOTF winner in the first place. Especially now you’re better armed with some top advice on how to improve your art - and how the industry works.

3. Stay in touch

Mike’s survival guide already nails the experience of meeting other winners, and how you’ll bond and discover that these are your people. The inevitable downside is that when it’s all over, you will miss them.

What other group will you meet that can talk about encoding messages in vat-grown limbs or how colour perception works for shrimp? Who else will you get to discuss new angles on old tropes with (such as ‘World’s best user of X technology goes off the rails and it’s up to his protege to stop him’). Who else will (rightly) put you in your place when you ask about the physics of dragon-flight by telling you: “I’ll let the dragons worry about the physics of dragon flight.”

However, this is the age of social media and messages can ping across oceans in nano-seconds sliced so thinly that the light shines through.

Is it as fun as all being together in the same room? Well no. Is it as easy to bounce ideas off a group of people at once. Also, no. But getting in the habit of staying in touch immediately afterwards will still keep you connected to the people and the week.

4. Anything after this is gravy

Yes, I know I said three things. I lied. I’m good/bad at that depending on your perspective. But I’m working on the basis that if you’ve made it this far, you might not mind so much.

Anyway this is a bonus point - because anything that comes after will be a bonus too.

The week is amazing and hopefully it will be a springboard to the dream career you’ve always wanted. However, even though it turns out I struggle to count to three, I can still manage other math. There have been forty-two WOTF contests of twelve winners each (with the first winners of WOTF 43 already having been announced). That means more than five-hundred people have won before you.

The inevitable truth is only a fraction go on to make it big. Some of course do (Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss anyone?). So be kind to yourself. Perhaps you will be one of the ones who’ll get other books published and see your tomes hit best-seller lists and so on.

But you know what? If that doesn’t happen for you, that’s OK too. This isn’t to say don’t try - those able to put most time into it are those most likely to make it, in the same way that the more times you roll a dice, the more likely you are to throw a six. But if nothing else ever happens in your dream career again, you still had that great week. You still met those great people. You will always get to keep those great memories. They’re yours. They’re part of you.

So do keep writing. Do keep trying. Do keep placing one word after the next and stretching out one idea after another - keep enjoying the sheer fun of making bonkers stuff up. And if, among the inevitable aggregation of further rejections, some acceptances come glittering through, make sure you enjoy and celebrate them too.

It’s much too difficult to type with crossed-fingers, but even so I wish you every luck.

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