“Richardson is a prodigiously talented writer with a programmer's talent for structuring big, complex works.” —Cory Doctorow

“[S]ome wacky writing.” —The New Yorker

Novels

Technical books

Short Stories

• "People of the Consortium of Worlds v. Rax, God of Misery" - A legal thriller. (Analog, November/December 2025)
• "The Blanket Thief" - Cozy fantasy romance. (Baubles From Bones, Winter 2024)
• "Expert Witness" - When duty calls. (Analog, May-June 2024)
• "Race to the Bottom" - The story that explains why everything sucks. (Analog, September-October 2023)
• "Meat" - The worst restaurant inspection ever. (Analog, March/April 2023)
• "The Procedure Sign" - YA dystopia satire. (Etherea Magazine, December 2022)
• "When There is Sugar" - Cake from the ashes of war. (Diabolical Plots, December 2022)
• "Stress Response" - A castaway, rescued. (Analog, November/December 2022)
• "The Scene of the Crime" - Time travel mystery. (Clarkesworld, August 2022)
• "Two Spacesuits" - A parent trap. (Clarkesworld, April 2022)
• "We, the Unwilling" - A Thanksgiving mindfuck. (Bonus story for Situation Normal, Candlemark & Gleam, 2021)
• "Mandatory Arbitration" - Trial-by-combat legal thriller. (Analog, July/August 2021)
• "Only g62 Kids Will Remember These Five Moments" - Clickbait. (2019)
• "Four Kinds of Cargo" - Genre savvy space opera. (2012)
• "The Time Somn Died" - Post-scarcity family drama. Bonus story for Constellation Games (2012).
• "Found Objects" - How do you sculpt space junk? Bonus story for Constellation Games (2012).
• "Dana no Chousen" - My blood-soaked tribute to GameCenter CX. Bonus story for Constellation Games (2012).
• "The Day Alan Turing Came Out" - Shameless wish fulfillment. Published 2010 in Retro Spec.
• Thoughtcrime Experiments (editor): an anthology of other peoples' amazing fiction. Self-published 2009.
• "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" - Exactly what you think it is. Published 2009 in Strange Horizons.
• "Mallory" - Mundane cyberpunk. Published 2008 in Futurismic.
• "Jake Berendes West Covina" - Subversion through fiscal policy. Self-published 2000.
• "Grunion Time" - Magical realism without the magic. Incoherent but very short. Self-published 1998.

Weblogs

And other ongoing concerns.

• News You Can Bruise is my main squeeze, weblog-wise, since 1997.
• Film Roundup Roundup turns "Film Roundup", my NYCB series of film reviews, into a compact list of recommendations.
• I archive things that might disappear. My big collections are The Minecraft Archive Project and The Ephemeral Software Collection (2014-). You can see my smaller collections on my Internet Archive page.
• I put up conversations I have in podcast form.
• Roy's Postcards is a presentation of and commentary on over a thousand postcards my father wrote in the 1980s.
• The Future: A Retrospective is an audit of a 1989 book of technological predictions. It ran from June 2007 to March 2008.
• In the 2000s I contributed to the group weblog Spam as Folk Art.
• From 1998 to 2001 I edited and wrote for the geek humor site segfault.org.
• From 1993 to 1996 I ran Da Warren BBS and Grill.

• "How to maintain a popular open source library for most of your life without with burning out" (PyCon US, 2024)
• "Behold, mortal, the origins of robotfindskitten..." (Roguelike Celebration, 2017) [Video]
• "How Game Titles Work" (Penguicon, 2017)
• "The Magic Arrow" (RESTFest, 2016) [Video]
• "The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book" (RESTFest, 2015) [Video]
• "What Have I Done???" (RESTFest, 2015) [Video]
• "Painting Bots, Carving Bots" (Unofficial Bot Summit, 2015)
• "Writing Aliens", or, "Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt" (Foolscap, 2014)
• "LCODC$SSU and the coming automated web" (RESTFest, 2013)
• "How to Follow Instructions" (QCon and RESTFest, 2012)
• "How To Recognize Different Types Of Web Services From Quite A Long Way Away" (TriZPUG, 2010)
• "Developers Like Hypermedia, But They Don't Like Web Browsers" (preprint) (WS-REST, 2010)
• "Justice Will Take us Millions of Intricate Moves" (QCon, 2008)
• "The Ultra Gleeper: A Recommendation Engine for Web Pages" (CodeCon, 2005)
• "Beyond the Config File: User-Friendly Configuration For Web Apps": (Pycon and EuroPython, 2003)

Articles

• The System of the World Wide Web. (Self-published) 2007.
• Unit Testing Your Documentation. (O'Reilly Network) 2006.
• Building and filling out templates with Python and Cheetah. (IBM developerWorks, 2006)

Games

• The Minecraft Archive Project (2014-)
• Maloideae, "The game of strained but learned analogies." (2012)
• Crazy the Scorpion, a cooperative card game. (2012)
• "Loaded Dice". Data experiments run on data from BoardGameGeek.
(2011-)

Short-short

A lot of very short one-off fiction goes into News You Can Bruise. Here's some of it.

• The panspermia cannon. Reprinted in Infinity's Kitchen, as I found out much later.
• The last scene of a screenplay: "Gravlax".
• Some 101-word stories in the style of Anacrusis: Phyla, Sumana, Malcolm, Silas, Fast Jack, and Leanne.
• Fake interviews with a deep-sea coffinfish and Transformers producer Tom DeSanto.

NaNoGenMo entries

• 2022: ████
• 2020: Brutus and Cassius, at the close of the scene
• 2019: Linked By Love
• 2016 (late entry): Amazon Prime
• 2015: Alphabetical Order
• 2014: In Dialogue. Partially reprinted in Output (2024)

Bagatelles

Miscellaneous short-form stuff, some of it pretty old.

• In 2004 I co-wrote some one-off comics (1 2 3) and a storyline for Kris Straub's webcomic Checkerboard Nightmare. This one is surely the best.
• Some comics created under constraints from NYCB readers: "'Kangaroo' Jack Masters in Caution: Filling Is Hot!". Constrained Cat and Girl fan comics: "In the Black", "The Best Strategy", "Going Outside".
• Another travelogue, of my trip to PyCon 2003.
• Tonight's Episode: Show titles for a long-running, pop-culture-obsessed police procedural. When it jumped the shark, the shark jumped back. R.I.P.
• Doctor Virtual's Cyber-Couch matches the Internet's collective unconscious with the Internet's favorite psychiatrist. 3 episodes.
• Behind the Firewall, an essay on having one's open source software being made proprietary. Written while the pain was still fresh.
• Reddish Purple vs. Bluish Purple, a superior visualization of the 2000 presidential race. Much more sophisticated visualizations were available by 2004.
• Make Dan Complain, a fun game to be played with my one-time roommate Dan Helfman.
• My less successful, incomplete travelogue of my trip to a Linux World Expo in 1999. At this point I stopped doing big complicated travelogues.
• My epic travelogue of a 1998 trip to Texas, with pictures. This piece marks a turning point for my writing, where I began to rely less on obscure references and wordplay and more on...whatever I rely on now.
• Do you dare uncover The Forbidden Secrets of crummy.com?
• Jack in the Box and the International Christian Conspiracy, from 1998 when Crummy still had pretensions of being a general humor webzine. Despite my best efforts this article has not started any kind of urban legend.
• The Race For The White House, a satirical photoessay I did for my high school paper in April 1996. Still pretty funny.

The Work of Others

Finally, a few works by other people that I've put up for everyone to enjoy.

• A gem from the webzine-era Crummy. Kristofer Straub's Cool Site of the Femtosecond.
• A text dump from the 1984 IBM PC game Flightmare
• The Haunted Author, by Marcus Clarke.
• The Late Benjamin Franklin, by Mark Twain.