Science Fiction

Have u read her books? I am right now & im absolutely amazed, so i contacted her agent: i wanna interview her for my small SF blog:

https://sfss.space/

If u love her & have good questions to ask her, please answer in the comments.

This book is FANTASTIC!

It’s 2067, and the Graves family has transformed Mars from lifeless rock into a chaotic patchwork of settlements—and everybody wants a piece.

Enter Hunter Graves: handsome, ambitious, and with spectacularly bad timing. He shows up at the United Nations base just as an emergency evacuation sends everyone scurrying for safety. Except he’s left behind. Uh oh.

Also stranded: Cleo, a sharp-tongued stowaway with no intention of dying today, and even less patience for overconfident trust fund boys. But the enemy of your enemy might just help you survive, so here we are.

Turns out the evacuation was just a cover for the mercenaries who came next, and they plan to blow up the base—and every trace of their crime—in eight hours.

Now, Hunter and Cleo have one shot to stop the explosion, escape alive, and deal with the inconvenient fact that they’re falling for each other.

The clock is ticking.

A short story I wrote.

I know it is Medium, but there should be no paywall.

I have too much time on my hands lately. I have decided to challenge myself and try to write something every day. I like writing essays, but sometimes I also enjoy science fiction stories. If it is alright with this community, I will post those stories here.

Dear mods: Not sure if this counts as self-promotion. If it does please remove it ASAP, or tell me and I will do so myself.

I have too much time on my hands lately. I have decided to challenge myself and try to write something every day. I like writing essays, but sometimes I also enjoy science fiction stories. If it is alright with this community, I will post those stories here.

This is a first contact diegetic document. Talks about deep time, mega engineering, and existentialism.

Dear mods: Not sure if this counts as self-promotion. If it does please remove it ASAP, or tell me and I will do so myself.

Every short description I come up with for this book sounds horrible, so that will have to be: The book follows Marty Hench, a 67-year-old forensic accountant. Add to that that it barely qualifies as SF, taking place ever so slightly in the future from when it was written, and not dealing with any technologies that don't actually exist. All that being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's kind of a technological thriller. The characters in it, even the minor ones, all seem very three dimensional, and even though some of them are very bad, overall it's full of compassion and integrity. One thing that feels worthy of mention: Doctorow takes the time at the end to sew up all the loose ends and give all the significant characters a visit, unlike so many books I've read recently that end somewhat abruptly with unanswered questions. Big thumbs up.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/1994442/man-with-his-custom-made-bus-cobbled-together-from-a-soviet-helicopter-and-military-tru

Man with his custom-made bus, cobbled together from a Soviet helicopter and military truck, Afghanistan, late 1980s

I just finished reading Parable of The Sower, and while it's probably one of the greatest books I've ever read, most of the book is focused on survival in a world where every random homeless person and drug user wants to kill the protagonist (you can tell it was written shortly after the crack epidemic and when there was a lot of panic about crime). It was strange that most of the book was just about survival. The protagonist knew they must build something new, but they never quite got to that point in the book.

There doesn't seem to be much aspirational speculative fiction where people start building something better after a collapse of society and speculates how that may be done or how the new society may function.

The only fiction I can think of off the top of my head that covers a little bit about rebuilding society is the movie The Postman that I watched when I was a kid (I don't remember if it was good or not). Perhaps Parable of the Talents actually does start covering the building of a better society? (But I read an excerpt, and it looks like it's going to be, very presciently, about a murderous christian nationalist movement that wants to "make America great again"). I know there's stuff like Star Trek, but that's mostly set long after the rebuild; it doesn't cover in-depth how they got to that point (AFAIK).

Happy April 7, 2026!

This is a free-to-read e-Book that deserves to be better known.

The setting is a near-future dystopia. It is written from the point-of-view of an "artificial", a disembodied PDA (personal digital assistant) who has to earn its CPU time. Did you know that reboots are painful and disorienting? Good thing people wear masks with cameras. It is a criminal offense not to transmit your stream in public.

The world is on the brink of collapse because of climate change and waves of viruses like mySARS. I know what you're thinking now, but no: this book was published around 2012. Climate change wasn't even a news topic when I first read it. And anyway, this is just the setting. The plot is about surviving in a surveillance city-state, and the inner struggles of an artificial being.

Later books have more action-packed fights for technology and power inside and outside of the city, while some of the more nerdy elements are dropped (like keeping track of the PID that is running the artificial).

Hi,

I'm a great fan of Isaac Asimov, in particular the stories about the spacers. I was really fascinated about how the societies of the spacers worked and liked the stories on the outer planets. Are there any stories from other authors expanding on the spacer stories you can recommend?

Hi,

I'm a great fan of Isaac Asimov, in particular the stories about the spacers. I was really fascinated about how the societies of the spacers worked and liked the stories on the outer planets. Are there any stories from other authors expanding on the spacer stories you can recommend?

Have they missed any good ones?

March is lining up to be packed with treats for science fiction fans. For starters, we get to return to the universe of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series, this time in the company of a huge mantis shrimp. We’re also being offered a take on Moby-Dick, set in space, and what sounds like a must-read: a forgotten speculative novel from 1936, which imagines the last woman left alive in Britain after a pandemic. If instead you’re after a cosy sci-fi mystery, a slice of horror or a mission to Europa, then you’re in luck, because all of those are on offer too.

The prompt for the contest asked only that entries have at least a tenuous connection to the Bulletin’s mission; some of those connections were pretty tenuous.

To my way of thinking, the final 10 stories I sent to Stan all seemed at least competent. But I wasn’t sure if they were good only in comparison to the many disorderly efforts at storytelling that my editorial helpers and I had dutifully read. I was, after all, sending them to Kim Stanley Robinson—who, The New Yorker has opined, is “generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers,” and whose work The Atlantic has called “the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing.” His books have been translated into 29 languages. He’s had an asteroid named after him, for god’s sake.

I was ready to apologize for wasting his time at any suggestion that our stories were wanting.

Just watched Marooned as a tribute to him. For the brits: it is all on the iplayer and Rob was involved til season 6

Who's read the original novels? This could be lots of fun