E-mail Matt Jarpe at m.jarpe@comcast.net
Web design & programming by David Louis Edelman.
Think of this as my single author collection, except you don't have to pay for it and I don't have to store six boxes of unsold books in my garage until water damage and silverfish reduce them to unrecognizable mounds of pulp.
First up, my first published story, "Vasquez Orbital Salvage and Satellite Repair." This is also the first story I ever wrote. When I finished writing RADIO FREEFALL my agent at the time, Linn Prentis, suggested I try writing some short stories. I had an idea for a story kicking around in my brain so I wrote it down. I know how unusual it is to sell the first story you write (I sold the first novel I wrote, too. The way I look at it, people say you always ruin the first pancake. I never bother to make the first pancake, I just start with the griddle hot enough and make the second one first..
Vasquez Orbital Salvage and Satellite Repair
If you prefer to read things in Acrobat, here is the pdf format: Vasquez Orbital Salvage and Satellite Repair
And for you Acrobat afficionados Captains of Industry
I promised unpublished material, so here is a Sopranos in Space story that I think is quite good, but found no editor who shared that opinion. This Thing of Ours
And the pdf: This Thing of Ours
Here is the first story in my "Homesteader/Coordinator Group" universe, Language Barrier. I have to admit that this is one of my favorite of my own stories. I mean, sure, I love all my stories the same. How can you pick favorites? But still, this is the one I'm most proud of.
The second installment in the "Coordinator Group" series is called Chicken Soup for Mars and Venus. I came up with the title for this one first. I was browsing in the bookstore one day and saw two self-help books on the shelves. I put the two titles together and thought to myself "There's got to be a science fiction story in there somewhere." And this is what I came up with. It's got a smart alec hero, invisible pirates, and lots of spectacular space battles. Plus a whole lot of soup. Mmmm, chicken soup.
Now the final story in the "Coordinator Group" series, City of Reason. No, this is not the end of the Coordinator Group in my fiction. I'm taking the story into novels, the first of which is finished and the second I'm working on. I wrote this story with no idea how it was going to end. I just found the voice of the unnamed protagonist, gave him a situation to start with, and ran with it. This story has been reprinted in English (Hartwell and Kramer's Years Best SF 11), Russian (I believe the magazine is called IF, but I can't read Russian, so don't quote me) and Romanian (Sci-Fi Magazin).