There came a dark December when David Nickle and I got fed up with jolly Santa and all the false cheer of this God of Consumerism, and decided to do something about it.  (Actually, it was summer and we were on writer's retreat in the country, but this version plays better, don't you think?)  The result was a short story, The Toy Mill, that subsequently won Canada's 1993 Aurora Award for best short spec-fic story of the year.  

A few years later we resurrected cold dead Claus in a short novel, which we wrote together over a weekend for the 3 Day Novel Contest.  The result was The Claus Effect which, while it didn't win the contest, was published by Tesseract Books in 1997.  

Fueled by a diet of chocolate-covered coffee beans, lack of sleep and an unremitting mix-tape loop of nauseatingly peppy Christmas jingles, The Claus Effect emerged from our first-generation laptops as a hallucinatory ode to the fall of Soviet Russia, the depradations of consumerism, to all the world's lost children and lost dreams, and the bizarre, terrifying figure at the center of this cyclone--his red greatcoat flapping, his beard whipped by glacial cold:  our fever-dream of timeless, pitiless, relentless Claus.

You can buy The Claus Effect in ebook form now thanks to ChiZine Publications.

I haven't got a huge backlog of short stories, but I've been lucky enough to have many of my best collected in the book The Engine of Recall, which is still available. Not all my good stuff made it into that collection, however--mostly because my editor, Robert J. Sawyer, wanted to focus on my strictly science fictional output. That naturally excluded "The Toy Mill" for instance--but it also left other fantasy I've written, as well as works I consider SF, but Rob did not. 

I've started transforming some of these works (previously published, but not collected) into individual bite-sized ebooks. Initially, you can find them on Amazon.com, but I'll be making epub versions as well; it's just a matter of finding the time for that, as it's a little more hands-on than the Amazon conversion.

As of now, you can find three of my stories on Amazon.com:

• "The Hero" - A Virga short story. In fact, this story is an integral part of the Virga series, and contains revelations that fill in major gaps in the overall story. It recounts certain key events that occur between Pirate Sun and The Sunless Countries, but it can also stand on its own--in fact, it makes an excellent introduction to the Virga universe for anybody who's considering taking the plunge.
• "Dawn" - My only vampire story to date. I call this my 'anti-Anne Rice' story; perhaps it's just the sort of vampire story that a writer with a pacifist Mennonite background would write. What's coolest (for me) is that this story came to me in one of the most cinematically visual dreams I've ever had. I can still picture it... so I had to write it.
• "Book, Theatre, and Wheel" - Is this SF at all? Slipstream, maybe. Set during the Inquisition, this is a meditation on memory systems, isolation and the self-invention of new mythologies...  

As the drum rolls in anticipation of the May 8 launch of the Trade paperback edition of The Sunless Countries, we're slashing prices to entice you holdouts into reading the first of the Virga series, Sun of Suns.  If you read on the iPad or Nook, the good news is you can get it for $2.99. If you're in the Amazon ecosystem, the price is (puzzlingly) a little steeper at $4.68. Good prices all, though. Hit one of the links below to give Virga a try!

• Sun of Suns at Amazon.com
• At Barnes & Noble
• At the Apple iTunes store.

Robert J. Sawyer originally edited and published The Engine of Recall through his imprint, and he recently contacted me to point out that I had retained the ebook rights.  So, I've prepared an ebook edition of my first collection of 'hard' science fiction short stories, and made it available (so far, on Amazon.com).  You can download it now!  (And to sweeten the pot, you can read a sample story first if you'd like.)

One of the attractions of going through Amazon is the higher royalty rate authors can achieve.  I make more from a sale of Engine at $4.99 than I would from a sale of the hardcover at $27--so buying the ebook is an inexpensive way to support my writing habit.  (Not, mind you, that the hardcover edition isn't gorgeous as well, as is the trade paperback edition.  Both are worthy of shelf space for those of us who still value the heft and sensuality of traditional books.

The Engine of Recall collects some of my best stories, including "Halo" (which inspired my novel Permanence), "The Dragon of Pripyat" (which introduces Gennady Malianov, the pathologically-shy Ukrainian arms inspector who's also the hero of my METAtropolis stories) and a story written specially for this book, "Alexander's Road."

Self-publishing an ebook is not a new experiment for me--I did it with Ventus a couple of years back.  Doing it through Amazon and selling it is new, though.  A lot of us authors are trying this route lately, with varying levels of success.  I'm going to be very interested to see how this particular experiment goes!

Just when I thought life couldn't get any stranger, MacMillan starts releasing my books as iPhone apps!  This is very cool.  Since they apparently don't have the licensing rights to sell the app into Canada, I can't confirm its presence in the iTunes Store; however, you can find my latest Virga novel, The Sunless Countries, at appshopper.com.

Not only that, but The Year's Best Science Fiction: 26th Annual Collection is also available; it contains my popular Virga story, The Hero.  

And here's what they'll look like in your iPod or iPhone:

Oh, it's terrible to play favourites.  It's just that I lived with Ventus for so long--it took seven years to write--and it was my first published solo novel.  I've offered it as a free download for nearly a year now, and it's still in high demand: for instance, last month, in July 2008, I recorded 1300 downloads from this site alone.  Since it's also available now from many public ebook sites, I have no idea what the actual numbers are like. 

Thanks to everybody who's enjoying the book, I'm gratified I've been able to share this world and these characters with you.