Ironically, the 5th ed was required reading in my ENG 101 course. It included a collection of Onion headlines. I will never forget "CIA realizes they have been using black highlighters all these years."
Good to see a couple stories here I first read in Clarkesworld! If you're a fan of the old-school SF magazine as form, there's no better place to go lately, in my view, and Neil's editorial taste is excellent - if you like this anthology, you'll enjoy the magazine, also. Take a look!
I occasionally encounter a story in Clarkesworld that I don't click with and skip over, but most of them range from like to love (I really hope The Apologists¹ from this month's issue wins some awards).
Even though he makes each issue free to read online, I've been buying it Kobo every month for around a year now to help support the magazine. Too bad the platform doesn't seem to support subscriptions so I don't have to manually buy each issue.
IMO, if you like every single story that a magazine publishes, the editor is playing it too safe and not doing their job properly.
The biggest advantage of short fiction magazines over longer form is that it's a lower stakes way to try out new ideas and ways of telling stories and to expose readers to new authors.
Doing that means taking some risks and publishing some stories that won't always land with readers.
I bought a copy on launch and working my way through. There's some really excellent stuff in here, fiction is a great way to analyse and get thinking about how the near-ish future could look, and that's what the theme of this collection is.
That's what makes Black Mirror so compelling. It's not flights of fancy with things like FTL traveling through space. It's taking slight twists to the darker side of where our tech leaders are taking us. At least someone is thinking these things through to the end even if our teach leaders are only thinking through to the $$$$. Too bad these stories are never enough to slow things down and used as "oooh, let's not let our tech come to that".
Yeah a lot like older sci Fi works I think we won't take the warnings. Glad we aren't completely blind to it tho. Remind me of the "1984 was not a manual" memes
OH that's the fantasy that people like watching that show under! I hate that show's premise because reality is depressing enough, my mind easily conjures up shit going wrong, and (as an adult) I don't need a TV show giving me more nightmare fuel. Plus, that one episode where we all wear glasses that let you delete people by not seeing them seems like a instruction manual to tech giants working on AR glasses. Apple airpod noise cancellation already does this for audio, Apple Vision or Meta glasses doing that for visual pollution seems not that far behind. It would be nice to walk around the neighborhood and not see any billboards. Not seeing people that wrote wrong things on Twitter seems like it's just a GitHub repo away.
Meta would never block ads. If anything, they would detect things like billboards and have the AR system replace them with ads bought through Meta's ad system. But blocking them completely so the user has an ad free life experience? Never.
Meta wouldn't just not block ads, they'd use the eye tracking system in the apple goggles to charge advertisers for time you spent actually looking at the ads, and then also the ad countdown timer would only count down while you were actually watching the ad. Look away from the ad and the ad stops playing! (See? No black mirror necessary for my brain to dredge out some dystopian ass shit)
That actually does happen in Black Mirror, in the episode Fifteen Million Merits. There's a sort of deafening siren that goes off if the characters look away from the ad without paying to skip it.
> (See? No black mirror necessary for my brain to dredge out some dystopian ass shit)
oops. you poor poor fella. haven't we pretty much gotten to the point that if you've thought about it, someone else has also already thought it and released it? at least, that's my core belief in any thing clever I think I might have just thought.
You're absolutely right! let me get back to you after these messages from Coca cola!
I'm not an absolutist. How would you find out about new products in a world without advertising? There are ads I could do without, sure,
but some do perform a useful function.
Very cool. I often wish for the ability to do something like this but with slightly friendlier GUI tools. In particular I long for a visual tool that has all the power and convenience of a spreadsheet, but supports other backends (like an SQL db or some directory-tree structure like in this post), with well-defined mechanisms for smoothly translating between them. I've looked at a few of the "database management" tools like DBeaver but it's hard to find anything that's as fluid as a spreadsheet.
I agree, but just a heads up: the front images for most scifi novels these days (and for the past few decades) have largely been out of the hands of the writer. The publishing house pretty much unilaterally decides on the cover for marketing reasons.
Hi, I'm the editor, I chose the stories. I read 391 short science fiction stories published last year (all the stories in the big science fiction magazines and a few smaller ones), and selected these sixteen.
None of the authors I reached out to refused to sell me reprint rights, so there was no bottleneck there.
I'm a software engineer who enjoys near-future concept-driven science fiction, so if that's not your thing then you might not agree with my choices. The stories I look for are the ones where I think "wow, this contains ideas that reflect something interesting about reality".
I pay a fixed rate up-front for reprint rights, which is a one-time deal. This is mostly because pro rata royalties on an anthology are a pain (I've done this before, it involves sending out lots of tiny single-digit-dollar checks), but also because it's unlikely for me to make back the money I spend on anthology creation (science fiction short stories are a tiny market).
This is a hobby project for me, I'm obsessed with trying to get more people to read science fiction short stories. I spent about $6k creating the anthology (to pay for cover art, reprint rights, proof prints, etc), and I'll probably recoup about half of what I spent? We'll see, I'm currently testing various marketing strategies.
I don't meant to be insulting about it, but I'm a little surprised you would pay for new cover art, but not for a more professional design for the cover in general. The current design seems very obviously 'amateur' to me in a way that I automatically associate with vanity press or other low-quality works, and I think it would have been more beneficial to pay more attention to the layout and typography even if that meant just using stock art.
This is really amazing, I was daydreaming recently and thought how cool it would be to create something like that. I am glad that you've taken the initiative to get it going. Looks awesome will check it out, love Greg Bear too, just recommended Blood Music to a good friend.
I would love to hear more about your point of view. I love science fiction but short stories always feel off the mark to me. Either fluff that shouldn't have been written, or something so good it's bitter-sweet that you read it and nothing more will come of it.
Where did your obsession and love for the format come from?
I think your feeling is probably the most common one, which is why short science fiction readers are a vanishingly small percentage of the population. One of the reasons novels are much more popular than short fiction (orders of magnitude more popular) is because once you find a world you enjoy you can sit in it for a while. With short fiction as soon as you build up the world in your head it's done and you have to move on to the next one.
I like jumping from world to world more than the average person -- I'm happy getting that new, novel idea and then jumping to the next thing. I understand I'm atypical, but I think there's probably a higher percentage of people like me on HN than there are in the overall population.
Thank you for offering, but I don't have any channel for donations -- I'm grateful that my software work enables me do projects like this without worrying too much about the funding part.
There are only two stories in the collection that feel a little further out:
"Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling" by David W. Goodman feels like a smart, polished successor to golden age space opera, it's set in a future where the solar system is colonized, but not thousands of years out.
Grant Collier's "The Best Version of Yourself" is also not set very far into the future, but it's a kind of post-human future so it might have far-future vibes for you. This specific story is actually available free online, so you don't have to purchase the anthology to read it: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/collier_07_24/
One of the short stories in this collection "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, won the BSFA award for short fiction, the Locus award for Best Short Story, the Nebula award for Best Short Story, and was nominated for a Hugo for Best Short Story. So I think that should pretty firmly answer your question on the relative quality of the works included.
I guess the reason it won all those awards is the same reason I dislike it as much. It's more of a political pamphlet than a sci-fi. Definitely far from "Best SciFi Ideas".
I know this site is full of ads, but isn't this a little bit too much? It's just a link to buy a book on Amazon. At least pretend to have hacker spirit, wrap it as "how I use {insert open source book layout software} to make a book" and sell DRM-free epub or something. Where is the usual HN hatred towards DRM, Amazon and copyright...
I've been enjoying The Long List anthology series put out by Diabolical Plots. Stories that were nominated for a Hugo but didn't get enough of them to make the final ballot. It's up to 9 volumes.
I'm the editor, and I actually used LaTeX to typeset the book and wrote my own Python software to keep track of all the story metadata while I was evaluating stories over the course of the last year, I should write a post about that :)
I bought the book - looks good! Would be keen to know which magazines they were originally published in. I feel you should include those references in the book (forgive me if I've missed them.)
All of the source references are in the section called "Permissions" at the end of the book, this is a common way that anthologies do references but I understand it is easy to miss!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_American_Nonrequired_...
Ironically, the 5th ed was required reading in my ENG 101 course. It included a collection of Onion headlines. I will never forget "CIA realizes they have been using black highlighters all these years."
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