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lunchtime reading

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lunchtime reading

Eternal Youth For Baby Boomers Spawns A Horrendous Disease

The coolest near-future story I've read recently is now available online, as a free download. Maureen McHugh's story "Interview: On Any Given Day" wraps genetic engineering and future youth subcultures into a story that's alternately funny and super-disturbing. The story's faux-interview format and weird little hyperlinks add to the feeling that you're consuming a piece of medium-high culture from a future world where genetic tampering has led to some horrendous side effects, including a new sexually transmitted disease. Spoilers ahead. More »

10:08 AM on Wed Apr 23 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
2,127 views, 14 comments

Latest by Silver_Back: "Emma, meanwhile, belongs to a new youth subculture called "Culture Freaks," which tries to borrow from specific non-white cultures, like India or Egypt, as much as possible." Those sound alot like hippies to me! O_o more »

lunchtime reading

Mash Up Some Genres For Lunch

Gwyneth Jones, author of the fantasty-scifi-pop-music Bold As Love series, has put some of her short fiction online for free recently — plus some great essays, including the thought-provoking "Aliens In The Fourth Dimension." But my favorite story she's put online is the weird, gritty and unpredictable "Fulcrum," which is sort of a cyberpunk noir cowboy occult adventure story. It's the perfect thing to read right about now, to give you a jolt of insanity to help you get through the rest of your day. More »

10:00 AM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
948 views, 13 comments

Latest by RAHfanboy: @flexiverse: I agree totally. Shorts have to be much more tightly crafted than novels, make better movies, and anyone that says they don't like shorts probably doesn't read at all but just watches movies and TV. more »

lunchtime reading

The Most Disturbing Alternate History You'll Ever Read

If Philip K. Dick's "Axis won the war" novel Man in the High Castle made you squirm, then the 1980s novels about Lord Horror and his Nazi England will make your brain explode. The Lord Horror novels — Lord Horror, followed by Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz — are vicious, psychedelic satire about a Nazi DJ (Lord Horror) in England after Germany wins World War II. Written by underground publishers David Britton and Michael Butterworth, owners of the notorious Savoy Books, the first novel was declared obscene in court and got Britton sent to jail for four months. Now, cult author and critic Keith Seward (who wrote Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish under the name Supervert) has helped revive the long-suppressed scifi classics in a collection called Horror Panegyric. It brings together Seward's essay about the Lord Horror books with excerpts from the novels. And you can read it online for free. More »

11:08 AM on Tue Apr 8 2008
By Annalee Newitz
3,776 views, 16 comments

Latest by dead_red_eyes: "The Man in the High Castle" is such a good book. Great to see it being mentioned on here! more »

lunchtime reading

War Tourism In A Flying Bus

The latest issue of Helix Speculative Fiction just went online, and it includes a few great science fiction stories, including the alternate-universe romance "The Einstein-Rosen Hunter-Gatherer Society" by George S. Walker. But probably the best piece this time around is Clifford W. Dunbar's "Holiday In Hot Zone 16," a brutal satire that targets our easy-chair consumption of horrors around the globe. Click through for details, and then head over to Helix to check it out. More »

10:15 AM on Fri Apr 4 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
1,325 views, 8 comments

lunchtime reading

Disarming a Landmined World in Eliot Fintushel Story, Free Online

In a war-ravaged future where most urban areas are riddled with mines, a de-miner's only friends are New York street kids and his bomb dog Uxo (short for unexploded ordnance). In the short story "Uxo, Bomb Dog," available from excellent scifi blog Futurismic, author Eliot Fintushel creates a wry, sad portrait of a man who has devoted his lonely life to de-mining open spaces so people can walk freely in parks again. Eventually, the government sends him a human partner and the two of them turn their de-mining into a kind of strange comedy act, attracting locals to watch them de-mine fields while dispensing Smokey the Bear-style wisdom about how to avoid getting your face blown off while walking across Central Park ("Use your pate! Circumnavigate!") Yes, it's today's lunchtime reading. More »

8:40 AM on Fri Mar 28 2008
By Annalee Newitz
924 views, 29 comments

Latest by FrankenPC: @cde: Or use high power microwaves. You can vaporize the explosive material with enough power. more »