My Story “Kevin Was Bees” in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine!

Very happy to say that my SFF story “Kevin Was Bees” is in the current issue of Andromeda Spaceways Magazine (ASM #78)!

This story starts from the POV of someone who has been turned into a swarm of bees. The first two sentences:

This was a first. No one had ever been bees before.

The premise: on an advanced starship, they need someone to investigate a problem in a bio-preservation sector where humans aren’t allowed, so the computer makes Kevin into bees; Kevin finds out that, during the procedure, the problem was resolved, so his mission is complete. But he’s bees now.

Kevin’s consciousness gradually fractures into competing subgroups of bees, who develop their own hierarchy, mythology, and competing kingdoms, and whose control over the environmental regulators constitutes a kind of magic.

This story makes a lot of use of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law–that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. One POV is science fiction, and takes place on a futuristic starship, where a person made out of genetically engineered bees is in dialogue with an advanced AI; the other POV is fantasy, and takes place in a fantasy world with magic, myth, and warring kingdoms–that is, the world formed from the fractured pieces of Kevin’s consciousness.

I hope you check out the story, and I would love to hear what you think about it!

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