Jonathan Olfert
If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings.
By day, I crunch spreadsheets in the nonprofit world. By night, I write paleofiction, fantasy, sci-fi, and the occasional horror. I hail from Alberta and live in Atlantic Canada with my partner, our kids, an incompetent cat, and a heap of wood chips.
I keep an up-to-date list of links to my published work, most of it free to read. Paleofiction is marked with a hunk of meat: 🍖
One of my Stone Age stories, "Wreckwood," appears in Other & Different, a charity anthology supporting Rainbow Railroad and Rainbow Migration.
A weird Ice Age story, featuring the mammoth warrior Walks-like-a-Rockslide, now appears in Old Moon Quarterly #8.
A weird prairie noir story, "Kick the Can," now appears in Three-Lobed Burning Eye!
My Stone Age story "Antecessor" now appears in Tasteful: A Literary Cannibal Anthology, a charity anthology benefiting food banks.
LEGEND
🍖 Stone Age fantasy
🧠 Neurodiversity and cognition
⚔️ Sharp objects
🐘 Pachyderms
✿ The Five Deserts and the Churchlands
NOVELETTES and NOVELLAS
"Scream of the Firewood," Wyldblood #12 (2023) ⚔️ 🧠
SHORT STORIES
"Crickets in Lost Light," Lightspeed (forthcoming) ⚔️🧠 ✿
"Here-and-Now-and-Then," Beneath Ceaseless Skies (forthcoming) ⚔️🧠 ✿
"Sabertongue," A Book of Blades Volume III (forthcoming) 🍖 ⚔️
"Fixative," Analog (forthcoming) 🧠
"The Knotted Hand," On Spec (forthcoming) 🍖 ⚔️
"Ninnagan Says Remember," Lightspeed (forthcoming) ⚔️ 🐘🧠 ✿
"Antecessor," Tasteful: A Literary Cannibal Anthology (charity anthology, 2024) 🧠 🍖
"White in the Eye," New Edge Sword & Sorcery #4 (2024) 🧠 ⚔️ ✿
"Kick the Can," Three-Lobed Burning Eye #43 (2024) — with audio recording by my partner!
"A Grass Rope," Old Moon Quarterly #8 (2024) 🍖 🧠⚔️🐘
"Tell Me The Count," Swords & Sorcery Magazine #152 (2024) 🍖 ⚔️
"One Ear Left Over," Beneath Ceaseless Skies #413](2024) 🧠 ⚔️ ✿
"Arbitrage Run," Extrasensory Overload (Angry Gable Press anthology, 2024) 🧠 — Pushcart nominated
"On Slate and Skin," Beneath Ceaseless Skies #403 (2024) ⚔️ 🧠 ✿
"The Eternal Torch," Translunar Travelers Lounge #10 (2024) 🍖
"Acosar," Swords and Sorcery Magazine #140 (2023) ⚔️ ✿
"Together Under the Wing," Old Moon Quarterly #5 (2023) 🍖 ⚔️ 🐘 Black Gate said "the perspective and scope of this story are simply huge" — it also got nice words at Rogues in the House Podcast and Grimdark Magazine.
"Wreckwood," Other & Different (A Coup of Owls charity anthology, 2023) 🍖 🧠
"The Final Whisper," Hexagon #13 (2023) 🧠 ⚔️ ✿
"Red-Autumn Seeks His Father's Bones," Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #56 (2023) 🍖 ⚔️
"Made for Better Days," Swords and Sorcery Magazine #134 (2023) 🧠 ⚔️
"The Last Stand of Wilhelm Von Berlifitzing," Still of Winter (Unsettling Reads anthology, 2023)
"The Stowaway," Dream of Shadows (2023)
"A Forcible Calm," Beneath Ceaseless Skies (2023) 🍖 ⚔️ — also available as a free audiobook
"The Thousand Tongues of Sara," The Future Fire (2023) 🐘— Strange Horizons called it 'intriguing and entertaining,' and it made Maria Haskins' 2023 Recommended Reading List
"Without a Tether," Hexagon — Myriad: Remnant (2023) 🧠 — reprinted in Inner Worlds #3 (2024)
"The Last Line," Old Moon Quarterly #2 (2022) ⚔️
"The Ivory Eagle," Wyngraf #2 (2022) 🍖 🐘 — reprinted in Cast of Wonders #579 (2024)
"Whiskey Mud," Radon Journal #2 (2022) 🧠 ⚔️ 🐘— Pushcart nominated, reprinted in The Future Fire #71
"Madman of Candle Point," Dark Recesses Press #6.16 (2022) 🧠 — reprinted in The Skull & Laurel #2
"Redfin Spine," Beneath Ceaseless Skies (2022) 🍖 ⚔️ — also available as a free audiobook — reprinted in The Year's Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume One
"There Is No Release," Saints, Spells, and Spaceships (2021)
"On Festival Road," Mirror Dance (2013) ⚔️
"Never the Twain," Masked Mosaic (Tyche Books anthology, 2013)
"Lifeline," Lightspeed (2013)
ODDS and ENDS
"Let This Be The Hour When We Draw Maps Together," Swords & Sorcery Magazine #154 (2024)
"One Large Deep Fried Thistle Burr," Strange Horizons (2024)
"Crunchy Candy," Hungry Shadow Press (2024)
"Collective Bargaining,"The Future Fire #67 (2023) — featured in Tor.com Must Read Short Speculative Fiction Roundup; reprinted in The Year's Best Arthropod Short Fiction.
"Where Flap the Tatters," voidspace (2022)
"The Knot in Grandpa's Tail," Tree and Stone (2022)
"Ghost at the Shoreline," Open Heart Forgery (2022)
"Flowers of Amiole," Cold Signal (2022) 🧠 — Best Small Fictions nominated
"Up By the Gryphon," Wyngraf (2022) ⚔️ — reprinted in The Little Cozy Book (2023)
"Adopted to the Covenant of Adam," Irreantum (2022) 🍖
"A One-Goose Town," Anotherealm (2012)