Jonathan Olfert

If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings.

By day I crunch spreadsheets in the nonprofit sector. By night, I write paleofiction, fantasy, sci-fi, and the occasional horror. My short stories have appeared in professional markets like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Dark Recesses Press, and Lightspeed. I hail from Alberta; I live in Atlantic Canada with my partner, our kids, and an approximation of a cat.

  • I keep an up-to-date list of links to my published work, most of it free to read. Stone Age fantasy is marked with a helpful 🍖

  • One of my Stone Age stories, "Wreckwood," is out now in Other & Different, a charity anthology supporting Rainbow Railroad and Rainbow Migration.

A book cover labeled 'Other and Different Anthology'
A book cover labeled 'The Year's Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction.'
A book cover labeled 'The Little Cozy Book' and 'Wyngraf.'
A book cover labeled 'The Little Cozy Book' and 'Wyngraf.'

LEGEND

🍖 Stone Age fantasy
🧠 Neurodiversity and cognition
⚔️ Sharp objects
🐘 Pachyderms

NOVELETTES and NOVELLAS

SHORT STORIES

ODDS and ENDS

Several of my stories share settings or use recurring characters. This page is my sandbox to lay them out and shuffle them around.

The Five Deserts and the Churchlands

I spent a year in the California high desert, and many more in dusty southern Alberta. The Five Deserts, and the hardscrabble cities and towns around their edges, are my nostalgia writ very large. Meanwhile, at the edge of the Five Deserts, the authoritarian Churchlands cannibalize local faiths and sorcerous traditions.Recurring, interwoven characters include a dye-worker-turned-sorceress named Tyrra, a cursed guard named Larkh, the disillusioned tithe collector Ander Carmora, and Carmora's muse of sorts, a looter named Liste. In no particular order:

Stone Age Stories

Much of my writing focuses on a Stone Age secondary world, or may take place in that world or ours. These pieces tend not to involve recurring characters or settings, but I'm not above the occasional cameo or paleocultural cross-pollination. Several of these stories involve nonhuman sapient characters, primarily the woolly-mammoth Blue Ochre People. Yes, I've absolutely drawn maps.

The Counters

These far-future SF stories focus on neurodiversity and cognition in the context of labour.