Aaron Starr - Five Stars [Kindle azw3]

FIVE STARS is the new STUPEFYING STORIES sampler package. These five carefully selected tales from our earliest issues are each an outstanding example of the kinds of stories we're looking for, and the kinds of stories we love to publish. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes brimming over with adventure and excitement and other times simply dripping with terror, these are the sorts of stories that made us fall in love with reading short fiction in the first place, back when we were simply reading for the fun of it, and long before we ever dreamed of becoming professional writers or editors.

Whether you're a new friend who's wondering whether to start following STUPEFYING STORIES, an aspiring contributor who's wondering what kinds of stories we like to see, or an old friend who just happened to miss these stories the first time around, check out FIVE STARS.

FIVE STARS was edited by Bruce Bethke, who is best known for either his genre-naming 1980 short story, "Cyberpunk," his Philip K. Dick Award-winning 1995 novel, HEADCRASH, or lately, as the editor-in-chief of Stupefying Stories magazine. What very few readers have known about him until recently is that he actually started out in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI standard and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but now works in the supercomputer industry, doing things that are absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics. In his spare time he runs Rampant Loon Press, purely for the love of short stories.