Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
This short story feels like a prequel to Maneki Neko.
Tags: short_story
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Saturday, May 27th, 2023
Friday, April 14th, 2023
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.
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021
Wednesday, April 21st, 2021
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.
Saturday, March 27th, 2021
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.
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021
A beautiful day on Colony 12
A very affecting short story by Ben. I look forward to reading more of these.
Tuesday, November 17th, 2020
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.
Sunday, October 25th, 2020
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.
Wednesday, June 10th, 2020
“Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” by Haruki Murakami | The New Yorker
It’s just about an old monkey who speaks human language, who scrubs guests’ backs in the hot springs in a tiny town in Gunma Prefecture, who enjoys cold beer, falls in love with human women, and steals their names.
A sequel to 2006’s A Shinagawa Monkey, translated by Philip Gabriel.
Wednesday, April 1st, 2020
Home (BBC film of J. G. Ballard’s The Enormous Space) - YouTube
Here’s a BBC adaption of that J.G. Ballard short story I recorded. It certainly feels like a story for our time.
A reading of The Enormous Space by J.G. Ballard
Staying at home triggered a memory for me. I remembered reading a short story many years ago. It was by J.G. Ballard, and it described a man who makes the decision not to leave the house.
Being a J.G. Ballard story, it doesn’t end there. Over the course of the story, the house grows and grows in size, forcing the protaganist into ever-smaller refuges within his own home. It really stuck with me.
I tried tracking it down with some Duck Duck Going. Searching for “j.g. ballard weird short story” doesn’t exactly narrow things down, but eventually I spotted the book that I had read the story in. It was called War Fever. I think I read it back when I was living in Germany, so that would’ve been in the ’90s. I certainly don’t have a copy of the book any more.
But I was able to look up a table of contents and find a title for the story that was stuck in my head. It’s called The Enormous Space.
Alas, I couldn’t find any downloadable versions—War Fever doesn’t seem to be available for the Kindle.
Then I remembered the recent announcement from the Internet Archive that it was opening up the National Emergency Library. The usual limits on “checking out” books online are being waived while physical libraries remain closed.
I found The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard and borrowed it just long enough to re-read The Enormous Space.
If anything, it’s creepier and weirder than I remembered. But it’s laced with more black comedy than I remembered.
I thought you might like to hear this story, so I made a recording of myself reading The Enormous Space.
Saturday, November 16th, 2019
Morphosis: Goliath, David, Adam
A biblical short story from Adam Roberts.
Monday, May 6th, 2019
A Full Life - MIT Technology Review
A cli-fi short story by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Wednesday, November 21st, 2018
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.
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018
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.
Thursday, July 12th, 2018
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.
Monday, December 4th, 2017
The search for another intelligence (Upsideclown)
A wonderful short story from Matt. I can see this one staying with me.
Saturday, October 21st, 2017
Salvage (Upsideclown)
A tale of the Fermi paradox featuring data preservation via tardigrade as a means of transmitting information beyond the great filter.
Tuesday, September 26th, 2017
No Planes Go (Upsideclown)
A near-future tale of post-Brexit Kafkaesque isolationism in the skies.
It turned out that taking back control also meant creating an aerial deadzone. Nothing can fly in here without a Library of Alexandria’s worth of paperwork, and nothing can fly out without the same.
Tuesday, September 12th, 2017
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.