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 Winterh…
sign read: “PERMANENTLY CLOSED.” The lock on the door was busted.
Two short, bittersweet scifi stories about people changing their journeys. “Personal Trainer” by Meg Elison has a new way to exercise and a new kind of hammock to relax in. “Wait Calculation” by Derrick Boden has political intrigue aboard a generation …
“I am here on business and my accountant’s a real wizard.”
Alexandra Erin (previously) posts short speculative fiction stories on her Patreon, including a one-sided conversation about dead people posting status updates on Facebook, a fairy tale about a healer’s price, a political horror story about scars that …
“they were persuaded by the immediacy of suffering”
“Byzantine Empathy” is a novelette by Ken Liu about virtual reality, moral reasoning, atrocities, institutional philanthropy, geopolitics, and two very determined women at odds with each other. Content note: violence, including harm to children.
“People like him love standard procedure”
Two short scifi/fantasy stories in which customer service folks get to reward customers who treat them well, or punish those who treat them badly. Dyce writes about an isolated refueling station: “Out-of-hours fuelling requires a prior appointment.” Ai…
“We are all Martians”
Natalija Majsova (06/09/2020, Strelka Mag; also in a video lecture for the Canadian Centre for Architecture), “Soviet Sci-Fi Film and Different Modalities of Future Ecosystems”: “Irina Povolotskaia’s 1967 debut The Mysterious Wall [75 mins.] pioneered …