david steffen

StarShipSofa No 420 David Steffen and David Brin

Coming Up…

Interview: David Brin and The Best Year in Space Ever!


Fact: Science News by J J Campanella 


Main Fiction: “Catastrophic Failure” by David Steffen

Fiction originally appeared in Perihelion Science Fiction.

David is a software engineer and writer living in Minnesota. He is the editor of Diabolical Plots, a speculative fiction zine of fiction and nonfiction. In 2015 Diabolical Plots began publishing original fiction for the first time. He is also the administrator of the Submission Grinder, a web tool for writers to track their submissions and find markets for their work. His fiction has been published in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, AE and many others.

Narrated by: Mark Kilfoil

Mark “the Encaffeinated ONE” Kilfoil loves fiction, so much so that he’s written some (such as the Parsec-nominated Tainted Roses), read quite a lot (a library of over a thousand half-read books and growing) and now narrates them (sometimes actually recorded for others). He’s found that volunteering for a dozen years in radio was a decent way to get a full-time job as a Program Director at a community radio station in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, but not such a great way to finish his thesis, so he stopped at a Masters in Computer Science. He can be heard frequently on CHSRfm.ca, and two of his shows irregularly appear as podcasts, and can be found at encaffeinated.ca (CAFFEEN!) and theweirdshow.com (The WEIRD Show, winner of a Parsec Award for “Best Infotainment”). He likes cats enough to pet them but not enough to own one, and computers enough to own several but pet none of them. He will someday write a million words, but at this rate, that will require life extension, so he eagerly awaits the ability to upload into a computer, if that hasn’t already happened and this is all only a simulation.

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