Begging for Treats - blog.lmorchard.com
As flies/cats to wanton boys are we to the gods/Kardashev Type II civilisations—they play with us for their sport.
Link tags: sci-fi,short,story
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Lena @ Things Of Interest
The format of a Wikipedia page is used as the chilling delivery mechanism for this piece of speculative fiction. The distancing effect heightens the horror.
Blackout in the Brain Lab - Issue 98: Mind - Nautilus
Black Mirror meets Henrietta Lacks in this short story by Erik Hoel who I had not heard of until today, when I came across his name here and also in a completely unrelated blog post by Peter Watts about the nature of dreams.
A beautiful day on Colony 12
A very affecting short story by Ben. I look forward to reading more of these.
Daily diary for April 24, 2021 – A Whole Lotta Nothing
A blog post from the future. I’m on board with the subgenre of speculative blogging.
Retriever
I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd. If it sounds sanctimonious to trace my authority to a decade-old government document that I have never read rather than my employee handbook, it’s only because I value my life.
A Full Life - MIT Technology Review
A cli-fi short story by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine
The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).
Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:
I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.
Escape from Spiderhead | The New Yorker
Madeline sent me a link to this short story from 2010, saying:
It’s like if Margaret Atwood and Thomas Pynchon wrote an episode of Black Mirror. I think you’ll like it!
Yes, and yes.
Unchained: A story of love, loss, and blockchain - MIT Technology Review
A near-future sci-fi short by Hannu Rajaniemi that’s right on the zeitgest money.
The app in her AR glasses showed the car icon crawling along the winding forest road. In a few minutes, it would reach the sharp right turn where the road met the lake. The turn was marked by a road sign she had carefully defaced the previous day, with tiny dabs of white paint. Nearly invisible to a human, they nevertheless fooled image recognition nets into classifying the sign as a tree.
The search for another intelligence (Upsideclown)
A wonderful short story from Matt. I can see this one staying with me.
Salvage (Upsideclown)
A tale of the Fermi paradox featuring data preservation via tardigrade as a means of transmitting information beyond the great filter.
Party Discipline | Tor.com
There are some delightfully dark touches to this Cory Doctorow coming-of-age near-future short story of high school students seizing the means of production.
Strange Beasts on Vimeo
A small black mirror.
Julie Rubicon
The act of linking to this story is making it true.
“I don’t think there’s any law against this,” I said. How could there be a law against something that’s not possible?
Today’s restaurant reviews ( 4 Dec., 2015, at Interconnected)
A wonderful sci-fi vignette from Matt.
Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” on Huffduffer
A classic (very) short science fiction story that posits an interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
Maneki Neko - ScottWiki
It's been years since I read this charming Bruce Sterling short story but there isn't a week goes by that I don't think of it. It has grown more relevant over time.