In "Nothing of Value," Aimee Ogden renders a future in which teleportation throughout the Solar System has become commonplace. What are the ethical and moral implications of what is called "transit" and involves the translation of information across vast amounts of space, information rearranged in just the way it was sent out in the first... Continue Reading →
American Arcadia is Biting Social Satire | Video Game Review
https://youtu.be/F6JvtdeQXAM Now and then comes a narrative game that will glue me to the screen. 2023 has been excellent at offering me those, and all of them different experiences: from the survival narrative of The Pale Beyond to the fantastic saga of Baldur's Gate 3 to the metanarrative mind-bending horror of Alan Wake 2, I've... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #125 – Dandelions by Martin Cahill
Previous | Next What happens when strangers from the stars come and their physiology interplays with ours in so unique a way as to invite nothing but murder. Martin Cahill's "Dandelions" is a flash piece that offers a refreshing reimagining of the alien invasion. Never mind that was exactly what they wanted to happen, what... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #124 – Morag’s Boy by Fiona Moore
Previous | Next Once upon a time, some four months ago, I reviewed a little story by Fiona Moore called "The Spoil Heap". Imagine my shock when the very first story in Clarkesworld #207 is a standalone sequel, once more featuring my favourite postapocalyptic techie Morag! Now older, Morag is asked by her family to... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #123 – Maladaptive Camouflage by Ann LeBlanc
Previous | Next I discovered "Maladaptive Camouflage" thanks to a tweet by Angela Liu (whose excellent story "The Last Gamemaster in the World" I reviewed last week). What a great find this short story is--a blending of first and second-person narrative at a critical moment in three people's lives. One of them, at first glance,... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #122 – Waffles Are Only Goodbye for Now by Ryan Cole
Previous | Next Ryan Cole tells a heartfelt and intimate short story about Bertha, a refrigeration unit that puts a whole new layer of meaning to the notion of "smart appliances". Suffering from a case of PTSD after losing her family--and especially a child--Bertha bonds with a young survivor of the apocalyptic war, developing a... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #121 – The Last Gamemaster in the World by Angela Liu
The Last Gamemaster in the World by Angela Liu examines the mother-child dynamic in a beautiful, fresh way through the lens of games at the end of the world - find out this and more in my short examination of the short story.
The Short Story Reader #120 – The World’s Wife by Ng Yi-Sheng
Previous | Next Here's one of the most creative pieces of flash fiction I've read in recent memory, the story of a wife whose demand to have her husband's body recovered from the vacuum of space leads to a most unexpected development. Ng Yi-Sheng imagines this body developing its own atmosphere, becoming a planet in... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader # 119 – The Parts That Make Me by Louise Hughes
Previous | Next Here's an interesting piece of flash fiction, one that looks to the ties that bind the individual to who they are. Louise Hughes tells a familiar story in a new way from the perspective of an old freedom-fighter: We shouldn’t have existed as we did. Universal law decreed it, but in the... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #114 – Papas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Slug Monsters by Erica L. Satifka
Previous | Next Titan is as hostile as a planet gets. Yet humans have colonised it through an ingenious method: liquifying their brains and inserting them within nigh-on indestructible bodies; it's a great method to earn little, live in a cramped dome-home, and mine for mother Earth (or whatever colonial corporation trades with the citizen... Continue Reading →