Re: Article of Faith

If I believed in a god I would swear to him/her/them that I’ve read “Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick before. A priest has a robot servant who wants to understand god. The robot asks him questions and takes his answers to heart. The robot desperately wants to believe. It wants to know if it […]

Re: Exhalation

Where “Evil Robot Monkey” touched my heart, “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang engaged my brain. No, wait. It stole my brain and turned it inside out in one long thought experiment. The reading on Escape Pod perfectly matches the dry tone of the narration. Opening with the jarring image of exchanging lungs for freshly charged ones […]

Re: Evil Robot Monkey

“Evil Robot Monkey“, by Mary Robinette Kowal presents yet another talking animal for me to fall in love with.

Re: From Babel’s Fallen Glory We Fled

“From Babel’s Fallen Glory We Fled,” by Michael Swanwick takes you on a journey through another world. A sentient suit called Rosamund, tells of Carlos Quivera, who survived the ruin of towering city of Babel, one of many cities on the planet Gehenna built by giant black sentient millipedes. Quivera contrives an extremely rough alliance […]

Re: The Revolution Business

The latest installment in Charles Stross’s Merchant Prince series, The Revolution Business, is, well, it’s the latest installment of a series. You know, the one where mild mannered technology reporter Miriam Bekstein discovers that she’s a lost princess from a Clan of drug-dealing warlords from a parallel world, and now she’s a pawn in their […]

Re: Discerning Women

In “Discerning Women,” by William Highsmith, aliens invade and either they just don’t understand humans or they have a really, really dry sense of humor. The trouble begins when Alexa, newly a subject of the Braxian empire, has to take a machine quiz with questions like: > Why are Earth women the way they are? […]

Re: Apologies All Around

I’ve discovered another podcast I like, the Drabblecast. It’s a mix of 100 word drabbles and flash fiction. While I work my way through the archives, my first favorite episode is the outstanding “Apologies All Around” by Jeff Soesbe. Winston Sinclair receives an apology from a man who crossed him many years ago–delivered by a […]

Re: Dark Heaven

I managed to track down one more Nebula reading: “Dark Heaven”, by Gregory Benford, which is collected in The Year’s Best Science Fiction 25th Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois. Like most of the others, it’s a pretty good story.

Re: Standards

Told as the rejection letter from a science journal, Standards, by Richard K. Lyon, is full of deft hints of adventure and dry put-downs of the sort of mad genius who submits patents for perpetual motion machines and trisects angles in his sleep. And I think that sentence is almost as long as the story. […]

Nebula 2008 Roundup

Much like last year I didn’t manage to read all the Nebula nominees. Not for lack of trying. I was able to lay hold of all the novels, but several of the anthologies weren’t to be found in the library. Maybe there’s less room in the budget to buy obscure small press collections. While I […]