114 posts tagged with scifi by brainwane.
Displaying 101 through 114 of 114.
Zadie Smith on the urge "to be good. To be seen to be good."
"Now More Than Ever" is a short absurdist story by Zadie Smith about shunning, denouncing, and philosophical stances and etiquette rules (The New Yorker, July 16, 2018 - available in text & audio). "I bumped into someone on Bleecker who was beyond the pale. I felt like talking to him so I did. As we talked I kept thinking, But you’re beyond the pale, yet instead of that stopping us from talking we started to talk more and more frantically..." Related: her October 2019 essay "Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction" (previously). "...we seek to shore up the act of writing with false defenses, like the dubious idea that one could ever be absolutely 'correct' when it comes to representing fictional human behavior."
"shortly before his troubling and inexplicable disappearance"
Three soooooorta vampire-y short stories. Benjamin Rosenbaum's short story "The Book of Jashar" purports to be a recently unearthed text that "proved to be a transcription of Biblical Hebrew originally written as early as the First Temple Period" and concerns "Mezipatheh, who drank the blood of men". Claire Humphrey's "Who in Mortal Chains" and "Le lundi de la matraque (Nightstick Monday)" (audio) feature Augusta Susan Hillyard, who says of herself, "It’s in my nature, violence; it’s on my back closer than a shirt. It’s in my nature to hate it, also, and to turn from it, when I can." [more inside]
Scifi about social services, transit, reparations, & a support dog
Four science fiction stories about how we could better help each other. Two optimistic ones: "‘I’m with Muni — how can I help?’ Annalee Newitz’s short fiction imagines a new kind of social support system in San Francisco", and "Number One Draft Pick" by Claire Humphrey, in which Reshma trains a service dog to help mitigate Tyler's seizure disorder so he can keep playing pro hockey. And two cautionary stories: "A Burden Shared" by Jo Walton, on carework and chronic pain, and "How to Pay Reparations: a Documentary" by Tochi Onyebuchi, about a US city that tries to use an algorithm, plus money from defunding police, to pay reparations. (Response essay by Charlton McIlwain.)
"no, working with the WRONG people is how you get caught"
Four gripping, provocative, sometimes uncomfortable scifi/fantasy stories about violence and sacrifice in defense of communities and ideals. Three by Margaret Killjoy (previously) and one by Elizabeth Crowe. [more inside]
Stories of transness, a proposal, family, aliens, religion, & tamales
Four fantasy or scifi stories (funny, heartwarming, searching) about trans experiences. The funniest of them: “Further Arguments in Support of Yudah Cohen’s Proposal to Bluma Zilberman” by Rebecca Fraimow. "Now perhaps you’re thinking to yourself, 'What kind of a man is this Yudah Cohen after all, to boast of his ability to lie? Certainly he won’t make any kind of rabbi!'" [more inside]
"Suhela is a constant, like the acceleration of gravity"
"In the capital, where our Queen lives, there are two universities." "Fifty Years in the Virtuous City" by Leo Mandel (originally published on Archive Of Our Own as part of a fanworks exchange) is a short story, told in glimpses over fifty years, about two women growing as scientists, administrators, and rivals in a utopian alternate-history South Asia. Audio version available; Seth Dickinson interviews the author. Mandel's fanfiction responds to "Sultana's Dream," a 1905 utopian feminist short story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain.
"Her branches creaked as she walked the outer gardens"
Four scifi/fantasy stories published this year about the strange and ordinary things (our) bodies (might) do or be: "AirBody" by Sameem Siddiqui, "The Bee Thing" by Maggie Damken, "The Longest Season in the Garden of the Tea-Fish" by Jo Miles, and "Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse" by Rae Carson. All are also available as audio/podcasts. [more inside]
"Let me guess: fuel is sacred too."
InterGalactic Medicine Show was an online magazine publishing short science fiction and fantasy stories. After it ceased publication in 2019, it took down its paywall so now all its archives -- hundreds of original short stories and reprints, with original illustrations, and some also available as audio -- are free to read. Includes stories by Naomi Kritzer, Holli Mintzer, and Tim Pratt. Title is from the sweet, comic "For Sale: Veterinary Practice On Sigma 4; Certain Conditions Apply" by Jared Oliver Adams from the final issue.
"I decide that it is practical for me to find it attractive"
Silly, fun, or heartwarming scifi stories published this year about robots & AI include "A Guide for Working Breeds" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (author of "Fandom for Robots" (2017), previously), "Custom Options Available" by Amy Griswold, and "Rager in Space" by Charlie Jane Anders. [more inside]
"I apologize for disturbing you, Ensign"
Eight tiny scifi/fantasy stories and what-if suggestions about aliens, monsters, etc. trying to understand humans, and vice versa. Including "I dunno, dude. This ‘light’ stuff sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me. I mean, how do we know it’s even real?" and "This is both relateable and aspirational in some fashion, for, alive humans SUCH AS OURSELVES… self-deprecating remark…" [more inside]
"spotted cool things their listing bots had mislabeled and underpriced"
"Mika was careful. But you heard stories." In the short, sweet scifi story "Legal Salvage" by Holli Mintzer, a vintage seller navigates a forgotten building of self-storage lockers, an unfamiliar sorting bot, Geoff the sentient traffic light, and a party. Part of Slate's Future Tense Fiction series, in partnership with Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination. Thematically related to Mintzer's "Tomorrow Is Waiting" (previously; MeFi's Own!).
"I did not specifically set out to write on a theme of loneliness."
Filmmaker Dilman Dila describes the joys and difficulties of making a low-budget indie scifi feature film in Kampala. Her Broken Shadow (trailer) is a horror movie about "a single person stuck in one place".
"the U.S. government rounded up the people of Innsmouth..."
Ruthanna Emrys's debut novel Winter Tide is in the world of her novella The Litany of Earth (previously), a story about about secrets, furtive faith, government mistakes, and the silenced Other from a well-known narrative -- specifically, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Winter Tide will come out April 4th, but Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are available to read now. [more inside]
Tomorrow Is Waiting
"She also found herself liking Kermit a lot more than she'd expected to. Anji had never really watched the Muppets before; her parents, like most parents she knew, had treated TV as only slightly less corrupting an influence than refined sugar and gendered toys. But The Muppet Show was really funny—strange, and kind of hokey, but charming all the same. She ended up watching way more of it than she needed just for the project. "Tomorrow Is Waiting", a short science fiction story by Holli Mintzer, published in Strange Horizons.