Two short speculative stories about coping and related struggles. “Dragons” by Teresa Milbrodt (published this year) has a hard-to-quit video game: “I’ve thought about getting glasses,” the dragon said as we sat on rocks with mugs in our hands and the …
“My best friend is a dolphin and sometimes it’s weird.”
“In your first conversations with them, you’ll probably want to refer to all you’ve learned in the past year’s intensive study of dolphin history, culture, and ritual. Maybe you want to put them at ease, or maybe you kind of want to show off. I’m tel…
“Sixteen Earth years. Not quite nine, Martian.”
Wanna read action-y scifi about girls solving problems by hacking electronics? (Previously.) “Power to the People” by Kiera Lesley is shorter: “Sorry, print took longer than I expected.” Sarah said, fishing in her pockets for her offerings, all in whit…
Writing While Disabled
Strange Horizons presents a conversation between Mary Robinette Kowal and Kristy Anne Cox “In hindsight, they are things that I have dealt with my entire life and have affected my ability to move through the world, because the world is not built for pe…
“she is lonely, and skeptical of my ability to ease her loneliness”
“Unit Two Does Her Makeup” by Laura Duerr (published this year): “She is smiling, but I see and catalog and evaluate thousands of smiles every day. Hers is tentative.” “Maslow’s Howitzer” by Miriam Oudin (previously): “I shipped from the factory with s…
Nominees for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2021
The opening round nominees for the Goodreads Choice Awards have been announced. More than a dozen have previously appeared on Fanfare. Within each category, the nominees are sorted here to approximate very roughly how many Goodreads users have read the…
bamboo, beetles, gardening, and power balances
“The first time I tried to regreen our town, I was sixteen. I got sentenced to 150 hours of community service…” “Choose Your Battleground” by Andrew Leon Hudson is a short, light, triumphant science fiction story about urban ecology. “A bee man came …
Consciousness simulacra and a dusty mirror
The science fiction story “Proof by
Induction” by José Pablo Iriarte and the fantasy story “Basilisk
and Sons” by Timothy Mudie both center men trying to deal with
complicated emotions while grieving and carrying on their fathers’ work.
The former …
“Hazelnuts were from before.”
Vivid imagery about the future of our relationship with ecological surroundings in these three melancholy speculative stories. “The Wild Inside” by Angela Penrose: “We had to close up another building that day—bolt the doors shut, board over the window…
Kim Stanley Robinson & Omar El Akkad discuss the climate crisis
Kim Stanley Robinson and Omar el-Akkad discuss the responsibility science fiction writers have to address the climate crisis. See alsoIf civilization can’t get through the next 30 years without a mass extinction event, such an event will hammer human c…