We saw VERY few nominations for books in December, and I know everyone is very busy with the season. We’ll open nominations for January at the end of the month so be thinking about it.
INSTEAD… we are going to be reading some short stories for those that still want to have something to read together.
Let’s read:
- This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
- The Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
- The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
If you have other suggestions we can throw them out here too. I’ll create discussion for these three for now.
Anything by Ted Chiang is a treat but especially that one.
Feeling dystopian, so here are a couple of short story recommendations::
“The Calorie Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi
“Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “I have no mouth but i must scream” by Harlan Ellison
Not short stories, but I’d recommend two quick books by Lauren Buekes:
The Shining Girls
Zoo City
Both lean hard into human scale detective stories, with the scifi elements woven very well into the world at large.
Bacigalupi’s The Alchemist is fantastic as well. It’s an unexpected spin on his usual post apocalyptic material, this one is fantasy flavored. The entire collection (The Tangled Lands, jointly written with Tobias Buckell) is good but this is the best story of the bunch.
Incidentally, I have Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi on my reading list. I’ve heard good things.
Hes great. “The Windup girl” deserved every award it earned.
Its dystopian fiction that hits home because it’s not a speculative 60s/70s version of “robots will become our masters,” but rather possible brutal outcomes of the climate change that is already happening.
Windup Girl was fantastic. Fully agreed.
Cool idea! How about…
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
That’s a holiday experience that rivals having 4 sets of in-laws over for the week of Christmas
If anyone isn’t aware of Ted Chiang, the magnificent film Arrival is based on one of his short stories.
I’d like to recommend There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury too.
Are shortform comics on the table? The Machine by Existential Comics is a quick read but remarkably profound.
I can highly recommend The Machine Stops.
Do not look up when it was written before you read it. Read it and then take a guess.
“Manna” from Marshall Brian. It’s a available online: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
“The Green Leopard Plague” by Walter Jon William. Nebula award winning novella that blew my mind when I read it in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty First Annual Collection back in 2004.
One of my favorites was Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson, set in the Neuromancer universe.
I just finished “The hanging stranger” by Philip K. Dick recently. It was pretty good.
He also wrote Minority Report and We Will Remember It For You Wholesale which is the story on which Total Recall was based.
A Sound of Thunder, by Ray Bradbury? We have an election coming up.
