I do reviews of science fiction short stories. From new issues of magazines, older magazines, anthologies, collections and single stories. I just write my honest opinions as a regular fan of the genre and hope to get more people interested in reading short fiction.
This is one of those simple premise based story about astronomic discovery, filled with mystery, speculation and collection of data evidence. We follow Bradley who studies old sky photographs and manages to map what behaves like a satellite, but there are pictures of it from before Sputnik. This leads to wild speculation about the possibility of Victorian-era space faring experiments or even older…
The title of this fun, fast paced and filled with interesting concepts, points to it being about copyright law. And it is, but the great thing is how much else Schneyer manages to get from that premise. The setup is basically a less than successful writer trying to find alternative ways to earn a living. His name is Eric Weiss (probably a reference to Houdini’s real name) and his only novel is…
A pleasant well written tale about an anthropologist who starts receiving emails from what appears to be a time traveller studying the neanderthals. I mostly enjoyed the in between present day reactions, more so than the actual emails, as it is clearly written with an audience of science fiction readers in mind. With some jabs at the eternal debate between “sci-fi” and “science fiction”, and the…
Hal recently lost his wife to cancer and is trying to settle down for retirement by moving to a house in the countryside. His plans are foiled by carpenter bees. The progression in this story follows a rising curve of increased unease. At first it is mostly an annoyance to Hal as the bees make holes in his fence posts, but his determination to get rid of them only increases the aggressiveness. It…
This short story is up to a rough start with our protagonist getting very sick from what seems like bad food poisoning. It turns out she has become highly allergic to red meat and she is not alone. As the story progresses more and more people are diagnosed with this allergic reaction, and suspicion for the source points to tick bites. However, not everyone buys that explenation and wild conspiracy…
While this story doesn’t mention the Fermi paradox, it does deal with the question on why other intelligent life haven’t been discovered. The premise is pretty straight forward, as scientists have launched probes to distant planets and are now working on the data. It shows that life is pretty normal, even intelligent life, but all discovered civilizations seems to be stuck at a pre-industrial…
The title of this novella is to be taken quite literally as it describes a near-future technology of small brain implants that has the potential to mitigate Alzheimer’s disease. The story follows Gordon in his recovery after getting the implants and how he and his family, and society, deals with this new technology. Near future speculations of technology that combines AI with neurotechnology is…
I have been given free review access to The Daily Tomorrow, a new magazine of sorts for science fiction short stories. It works as a daily newsletter hosted on Substack, where subscribers get a short portion of a story every day and in a week the story is complete. This is an interesting approach to delivering short stories to readers through e-mail, so at first I tried that approach by reading…
This was a nice little Simak-esque type of story about an elderly couple who has been working as park rangers for decades, but haven’t had any visitors in years. They are comfortable living by themselves without any contact to the outside world, while they keep upholding their ranger duties. One day a humanoid robot drives up their driveway to inform them that they are no longer licensed to stay,…
The very first sentence in this well written short story establishes a simple yet mysterious premise, that hooked me right away. Set around the early 20th century Japan where 360 stars suddenly appear in the night sky, taking the form of a Go game board. The locals are intrigued as it appears whoever is controlling the stars, has made an odd first move in Go - hence the title of the story. It…