Two scifi stories about tech inventions that don’t work out as their designers planned. Ken Liu’s “Quality Time” (from last year) looks into “unsolved problems in home automation” and a friendship at a startup. “Nobel Prize Speech Draft of Paul Winterhoeven, with Personal Notes” by Jane Espenson (published this month) is an epistolary piece by an unreliable narrator: “My problem was the subjectivity of pain.” (Yes, this is the Jane Espenson who wrote the “I Was Made to Love You” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the “Dirty Hands” episode of Battlestar Galactica.)