So, I published a short for Amazon last year in an anthology titled The Time Traveler’s Passport, alongside some greats like John Scalzi, RF Kuang, and Olivie Blake. Being asked to do a thing for Amazon, was… weird. But the folk behind it were good people. So, I channeled a bit of my inner Dan Freeman (look it up) and the result was… Cronus—a dystopian story of a near future that mirrors our times. And resistance.

Guess I maybe shoulda mentioned it.

So, sometime back in December 2024, I was approached by some folks at Amazon to write a short story for an anthology called The Time Traveler’s Passport. It was pitched as a 6-story anthology of short fiction for Amazon Original Stories, based on the theme of Time Travel.

A funny thing happens when you’ve been published and you win a few awards. You get contacted with invitations to be part of different anthologies. This became a surprisingly new phenomenon for me in the past five years, because I spent most of my previous writing life scanning sites like Duotrope and Submission Grinder trying to get someone to take a chance on my little stories. Anthologies were especially hard, because they’re often looking for some established names to help sell the thing–and that leaves a few slots for everyone else to fight over. Suddenly I looked up and realized, I’m somehow an established name. I mean I’m no Brandon Sanderson or NK Jemisin by any means, but I’m doing okay. Enough to get the invites.

Most times, I have to say no. That’s because I’m almost always woefully behind on contracted projects I already owe to publishers. Not to mention an academic article or book that I might be working on in my other life. There’s also the cold hard money facts. Whatever you get for churning out a short story, pales to book money. There’s no comparison, something my spiritual book godfather Daniel Jose Older once told me. But… I still like writing short stories. I like being able to tell brief tales that don’t require the heavy lift of a novella or the even heavier lift of a novel. So, if the offer’s interesting enough, and I make the time, I’ll bite.

I gotta admit, in late 2024 Amazon wasn’t exactly a top draw for me. For a host of reasons, I wondered if I even wanted to work with anything Jeff Bezos related. I’d started limiting my Amazon use, even paying more to have things shipped from elsewhere. But… I still had Amazon Prime (I’m not missing Invincible) and I couldn’t break my Whole Foods habit. That’s the problem in a world of corporate conglomerations and monopolies. Hard to have an effective boycott when the bad guys own everything. Besides this, I was being asked by a great editor who I’d worked with previously. And the anthology was going to have some great names. So I said yes. Less for the money… really, again, my time and energy would be better spent putting out my own book if it was about money. But, more so, because I wanted to be part of something that some other top names in the craft were involved in. I also decided that if I was going to do this, I was going to be as subversive as possible. Real Dan Freeman level type subversive. The idea I ended up coming up with called Cronus.

The story I ended up writing got the following synopsis:

The year is 2030. Annabeth works a stable job at CRONUS, a time travel company that caters to wealthy clients. Life is harsh, but she’s willing to keep her head down—until a vision of a past that never happened leads her to question everything she knows. They call it madness, but she’ll learn to call it memory.

That’s the story, basically. If I tell you more, I’ll give it away. I wrote the story over a five day period in early 2025, probably ingesting too much news, feeling despair, and determined (as Kara Thrace once told us) to “fight em’ till we can’t.” I don’t normally write futurism. Or dystopia. But as writer Ytasha Womack has said, Afrofuturism has its role in resistance. So here I am. CRONUS has a lot going on. But it was cathartic to write. Plus, I got to set in Baltimore–a city I haven’t written about before. I go to model a futurist liberation group after the Combahee River Collective, and I even got to use one of my favorite most disturbing bits of art by Francisco Goya.

(Yes, I know Cronus and Chronos have differences…though they have been blurred since antiquity. Take it up with Plutarch. I also address it in the story)

Anyway, if you’re up to reading CRONUS, go ahead and give a try. And check out the collage of images below created by the great “Mother of Horror,” Sadie Hartman for the story.

FYI, you can boycott Amazon retail and still financially support indie, marginalized, and debut authors through Kindle Unlimited. Amazon subscriptions account for 7% of its total profits. Kindle Unlimited accounts for -1%. Reading activity = real income for authors. Read more on this fro Sadie here.