Tales Of The Algorithm – Terence Eden’s Blog
I’m really enjoying these sci-fi short stories that Terence is publishing on his site—one for every day of the month.
Didn’t I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality | Tor.com
Naomi Kritzer published a short story five years ago called So Much Cooking about a food blogger in lockdown during a pandemic. Prescient.
I left a lot of the details about the disease vague in the story, because what I wanted to talk about was not the science but the individuals struggling to get by as this crisis raged around them. There’s a common assumption that if the shit ever truly hit the fan, people would turn on one another like sharks turning on a wounded shark. In fact, the opposite usually happens: humans in disasters form tight community bonds, help their neighbors, offer what they can to the community.
Related links
Stories | daverupert.com
Dave’s short’n’sweet sci-fi stories, collected in one place.
The Unreal Writer - by Joanne McNeil - All My Stars
Joanne McNeil on the retroactive pigeonholing of downright weird sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard and Octavia Butler:
The snobbery against science fiction in the past and today’s cartoon icons of some of its weirdest authors comes from the same root: an establishment that doesn’t know how to read or appreciate it.
And she absolutely nails the straitjacketed feeling I get from a lot of new sci-fi that’s laudable in its politics but lacking in other ways:
I suspect those authors are drawn to the genre for the thing that increasingly frustrates me about it: the way science fiction is mined for road maps and potential solutions in real situations of uncertainty and disaster. The way it’s “smart person” literature about systems with hyper-competent protagonists. I’m here for the losers. The losers are my people.
Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In - The New York Times
A profile of the life and work of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler.
Envisioning Our Shared Storm with Andrew Dana Hudson - Long Now
This observation feels spot-on to me:
The shift that I noticed, totally anecdotally, is literary writers are starting to write more dystopian climate futures and science fiction writers are starting to write about climate solutions.
Related posts
Talking about sci-fi
I’ve published the transcript of my sci-fi talk.
Good form
Science, the web, and user experience.
March
Out of the ordinary.
Web on the beach
Dining out safely, thanks to the World Wide Web.
Local
Think global, act local. In fact, just stay at home.