Humans and cats form a psychic bond to fight against monsters lurking in the deep space between stars.
This is a subtle and intriguing story of interspecies communication that manages to give just a glimpse into the minds of non-human intelligences.
Tag: science fiction (Page 1 of 5)
A madcap night of invention, romance, and commerce in a world where the limits on human decisions have been listed and people are able to follow their whims at breakneck speed.
This made me think a little of “Beggars in Spain,” but with a more satirical tone.
In the aftermath of a one-sided nuclear war, an entertainer travels to military bases in decline due to grief and madness to dissuade any attempt at world-ending revenge.
A weird and melancholy story.
A club-hopping Pretty Boy is tempted by representatives of a tech corporation to enter the network and become self-aware data.
A trippy cyberpunk story of temptation and resistance from the era of Max Headroom.
A retired Jewish couple is visited by a golem-like android, and they unwittingly turn the tables on its plot to subjugate humankind to its will.
This is a wonderfully charming story; Davidson nails the characters’ voices perfectly, and their utter indifference to the android’s evil plot is delightful.
A graphologist is hired to find a woman who wrote love letters to a scientist killed in an accident at a top secret lab, and discovers a surprising secret.
I like a good, subtle time-travel story where all the pieces click together in unexpected ways.
A girl befriends a pair of rambunctious kids at a test for their future placement in a cybernetic network, and goes on a quest to prevent them from being liquidated as unassimilable.
This story deftly balances a very dark and dystopian setting – people wired into a bio-engineered computer network and children euthanized if found to be out of step with the network’s needs – with some fun and playful cyberpunk imagery.
A young man in the near future reflects on his grandfather’s passing and the way technology intersects with his daily life.
This is an interesting look into the rather mundane effects that remarkable technology can have; some of the tech is familiar now some 20 years after the story was published – the narrator’s smart watch is quite relatable – while other things are a bit fantastical, like the personal flight devices that the church choir uses. It’s a largely optimistic story, though, showing the positive and sometimes unintended benefits that technology can have on daily life.
When the transfer of a person’s consciousness to another planet goes wrong, a human operator of an alien technology has to make a terrible decision.
This is an evocative and disturbing story that delves into consciousness, alien minds, and the nature of identity.
An Arab journalist interviews an American rock star who has become a demagogic focal point in a declining post-imperial world.
This has fascinating and troubling contemporary echoes – written in 1989, it would have been eerily prescient if it had been written in 2019. The world it imagines, with America in decline but grasping for an imagined glorious past while other centers of power emerge, feels closer to our world today than it would have 30 years ago.