The Weather Out There - Long Now
I really liked this short story.
Link tags: short_story
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It’s OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler — Big Echo
Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.
Conway’s Game of Hope
A beautifully Borgesian fable.
Imagining a Future with Surgically Inserted Earbuds and Whale Concerts – Rolling Stone
Annalee Newitz:
When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.
Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
This short story feels like a prequel to Maneki Neko.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Morphosis: Goliath, David, Adam
A biblical short story from Adam Roberts.
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.