The Skies Our Home
Reading Time: 5 minutes The funeral was hard. But the thing that helped me smile through the tears was counting the times Tom had sat on top of hotter pyres and lived.
Classic sci-fi
Classics: The Star
Reading Time: 15 minutes A strange star is spotted in the distant sky. Scientists watch as its near miss brings humanity to its knees.
Mr. Butterfield
Reading Time: 3 minutes When a robot does something right, Dr. R says, “Look, Mr. Butterfield. A breakthrough, Mr. Butterfield. What do you think of that, Mr. Butterfield?” It goes in a box with the other good robots, then trucks come to get them. When you’re good, you go outside.
A Darker World
Reading Time: 6 minutes Technology allows us to revisit the most cherished moments of our lives. But is that a good thing?
The Wellington Methodology
Reading Time: 10 minutes Science fiction meets gothic in this story of a groundbreaking discovery gone wrong, and the horrifying fall of the titular scientist.
And Water’d Heaven With Their Tears
Reading Time: 19 minutes When a bioengineered “weapon” goes feral, a kill team is dispatched to retire it.
Nuked
Reading Time: 8 minutes When a dead scientist calls a city paper to report a nuclear accident, the night reporter goes out to investigate. What he finds is completely alien.
DC
Reading Time: 11 minutes A higher power watches a small group of primitive humans in the far future try to understand the alarms triggered by their presence in a long-abandoned city.
10207
Reading Time: 6 minutes Probably nothing bad happens after you donate your body to science, right?
Fingal’s Cave
Reading Time: 17 minutes A rogue scientist’s intrepid search for life becomes a metaphoric and existential journey of the heart that explores how we connect and communicate—with one another and the universe—a journey intimately connected with water.
It’s Not in Your Head
Reading Time: 2 minutes When The Soul© chip is implanted in the cerebral cortex at birth, it’s imagined it will create an immortal soul. But there are problems.
Reflection
Reading Time: 3 minutes I find your heart on Europa, and for a moment it is mine. I follow the signature of your thoughts, and it leads me far above the galactic plane.
Living Ship
Reading Time: 13 minutes Stranded when their ship was torn apart unexpectedly, the Crew of the Scorpion were lucky enough to find refuge on a nearby planet. Or were they? It turns out, the planet has a mind of it’s own.
A Free Man
Reading Time: 7 minutes In a world where you can purchase a synthetic replica of a person from a vending machine, the best person to frame for a crime you committed may be … yourself.
Revelations
Reading Time: 5 minutes “Everyone looks to the sky with mixed feelings, some welcoming of the arrival of Others, some dreading it. How we behave in that moment of revelation will speak volumes to those who need merely wait and watch, to know all they need to—about us.”
Chlorophylliation
Reading Time: 5 minutes Colonists struggle with a strange, addictive plant that is strangling their settlement.
For Warmth and Trinkets
Reading Time: 4 minutes Brrr’s investigation reveal his ice planet is losing cold and fledglings because of bureaucrats chasing profit with human aliens.
A Voice for the Scavengers
Reading Time: 23 minutes A government Hunter in a post apocalyptic world is challenged with either changing his allegiance or living a lie.
A Substitute for Salvation
Reading Time: 23 minutes A post-apocalyptic love triangle inspired by “Casablanca” that revolves around a misanthropic bar owner, a Mars-bound clone fighting for his freedom, and a repurposed sex droid.
Fidget
Reading Time: 3 minutes Dubious captains, drones, economies built around recycled rocket boosters, and love.
Club Fiends
Reading Time: 20 minutes The wild hunt calls, and it’s time for Ondine to depart this world, alongside her club-obsessed brothers and sisters. Yet she’s in love with a mortal – or is she? Her decision to stay or go must be made fast, for a terrible monster hunts her
Checkpoint
Reading Time: 16 minutes On a distant planet, a young alien and his human neighbor plot to escape to the paradise known as Earth.
I Got Dem Ol’ Apocalypse Blues Again
Reading Time: 19 minutes Jackson, a wanna-be bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic city, has been hired to find the people responsible for several acts of industrial sabotage. A moral person living in a city where morality isn’t a particularly good survival trait, Jackson ends up facing a crisis of conscience.
Annihilation Plan: (Mars Wars Book 3)
Reading Time: 9 minutes If you happened to have an illegal telescope, or proxied your galaxynet address well enough to pirate your way to satellite images of Mars, you might glimpse a damaged but operational Mars Orbiter 1, alive with ‘rebels. If so, you’d be witnessing Mars Wars.
Virtually Yours
Reading Time: 12 minutes In a world of seamless surveillance where virtual and real coalesce in a teasing dance, love is the trickster
The Laws of Nature
Reading Time: 4 minutes Two space prospectors, Zdenek and Sarika, encounter an unusual unknown life form in space. Due to carelessness, the first contact with it turns out to be too harsh and the situation escalates…
Simulacra
Reading Time: 10 minutes The alarm blared. Tim Jorgensen opened his eyes and sighed. The clock was yellow. It should have been red!
Living in a buggy computer simulation is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Three Eight Two
Reading Time: 13 minutes Where past and future meet, often it’s those living in the present that feel most conflicted.
July Meeting of the WPL’s Science Fiction Book Club – WWW: Wake
Reading Time: 3 minutes Multi-award-winning hard science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer new book The Downloaded is coming out later this year, and it will be out in audiobook first. In fact, Audible is getting an exclusive for the first six months, before the print and ebook versions come out.
July Meeting of the WPL’s Science Fiction Book Club – WWW: Wake Read More »
Five Things to do on the Way to the Bottom of the Sea
Reading Time: 3 minutes Benefits and pitfalls of undersea tourism exposed!
Five Things to do on the Way to the Bottom of the Sea Read More »
Heartsick
Reading Time: 17 minutes In a world where it is illegal to be unhealthy, a young doctor must choose between her heart and the career she’s fought so hard for…
Deford’s The Eel Mixes Globalization, Crime, and Punishment
Reading Time: 12 minutes This technique of intellectual suspense and argument is a great example of fantastic storytelling that doesn’t involve rayguns or spaceships.
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Bradley’s The Planet Savers Engages Mental Health and Colonialism
Reading Time: 90 minutes In this story set in her incredible Darkover universe, Marion Zimmer Bradley masterfully blends science and fantasy, psychological suspense, and action.
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Pohl’s The Hated Explores Psychosis of Space Travel
Reading Time: 15 minutes What mental stress is waiting for our astronauts on extended journeys, and what treatment can we possibly offer them? Frederick Pohl gives us one fascinating option.
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A Drama in the Air
Reading Time: 23 minutes We were to start at noon. The impatient crowd which pressed around the enclosed space, filling the enclosed square, overflowing into the contiguous streets, and covering the houses from the ground-floor to the slated gables, presented a striking scene.
The Evil Eye
Reading Time: 26 minutes The Moreot, Katusthius Ziani, travelled wearily, and in fear of its robber-inhabitants, through the pashalik of Yannina; yet he had no cause for dread.
Silence
Reading Time: 5 minutes “Listen to me,” said the Demon as he placed his hand upon my head. “The region of which I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire. And there is no quiet there, nor silence.”
The Star
Reading Time: 15 minutes It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December.
The Crystal Egg
Reading Time: 23 minutes There was, until a year ago, a little and very grimy-looking shop near Seven Dials, over which, in weather-worn yellow lettering, the name of “C. Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities,” was inscribed. The contents of its window were curiously variegated.
A Story of the Stone Age
Reading Time: 75 minutes This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea.
A Story of the Days to Come
Reading Time: 107 minutes This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea.
The Man Who Could Work Miracles
Reading Time: 22 minutes His name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at Gomshott’s. He was greatly addicted to assertive argument. It was while he was asserting the impossibility of miracles that he had his first intimation of his extraordinary powers.