Five Camels for the Simplification
A novelette
The world is racing toward a cliff, carrying you and your only child with it.
In the mid-twenty-first century, it is not difficult to see what direction the world is headed. But the exact destination is hazy, inviting procrastination and doubt. GPESS+NK.01 dispels the fog, giving Thomas a view of the coming years that is crisp, unequivocal, and frightening.
Five Camels for the Simplification is a social-ecological speculative fiction novelette by Writers of the Future Award winner Lance Robinson. The near-future story weaves in climate science, rangeland ecology, environmental economics, and the political economy of a world falling apart.
It goes on sale in mid-August, 2026. To stay tuned for updates, subscribe to my newsletter.
Chasing New Suns
Collected Stories
Seven tales of mind, heart, and spirit from award winning science fiction writer Lance Robinson.
My Short Fiction in Anthologies and Magazines
Writers of the Future, Volume 40
My story “Five Days Until Sunset” appears in this volume alongside stories by 14 great writers.
Click here to find WOTF40 at your preferred bookstore.
One Step Away
Appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, November-December 2025.
America had lost billions of dollars and more than twenty thousand people to heat waves, storms, and flooding, and to the category EF6 tornado of ’42. It was no secret that domestic American politics was desperate for global climate action. Even the radical right was now calling its past denialism “fake history”. Subscribe to Analog at: www.analogsf.com. Or you can order this particular issue of the magazine here.
Interconnections and Porous Boundaries
Appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, May-June 2025.
Oxygen and carbon, instead of cycling back into the atmosphere where the humans and our livestock and the plants could breathe them… were lurking in dead twigs and leaves and rootlets and pond scum. Our ecosystem’s dominos had started to topple and our life support was on life support. Subscribe to Analog at: www.analogsf.com. Or you can order this particular issue of the magazine here.
Money, Wealth, and Soil
Appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, May-June 2024.
“This unusually thoughtful look at the way in which greed, for lack of a better word, can be used for good or bad offers appealing characters and intriguing speculative technology” – Tangent Online.
Where new grassland was spreading into the southern limit of the forest, and new forest was spreading into the southern limit of the tundra, they were impoverished versions of their parent ecosystems. Subscribe to Analog at: www.analogsf.com. Single issues may be available from Magzter (electronic) or from Amazon (print).
A (mostly) complete list of my short fiction is available here.
Want to read some of my work?
… or to read some more of my work? Subscribe to my newsletter and you will get free access to an electronic version (epub format for e-readers, or pdf) of “Money, Wealth, and Soil”.
Of course, probably the best way to support short story writers is to subscribe to one of the magazines that publish them (or, if you don’t want to subscribe, to buy individual issues of the magazine).