Here is the original text of The Spade of Reason as published in “The Year’s Best Science Fiction” in 1997.
I wrote “The Spade of Reason” in the months after I attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop in the summer of 1995.
I applied to Clarion on the advice of Rob Kilheffer, who was then an assistant to Karen Datlow, fiction editor of Omni. Rob was the first editor to pay attention to my early SF efforts and, while rejecting my stories, suggested I might hone my skills at Clarion.
I wrote Spade after Clarion and Rob, who’d moved on to edit Century Magazine, published it in Century. Later it was picked up by Gardner Dozois for the 1997 edition of “The Year’s Best SF”.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to Jason Snell who published several of my early stories in Intertext and was even generous enough to select a few of these for “Our Best Stories”.
One of these Intertext stories is the starting point for my next big project – a full length SF novel based on “The Gardener“.
And if you’re really interested, here’s a short video about me made by NCC student Brian Shaud.