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Showing results for tags 'scifi'.
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Want to know what I've been up to recently? My first offering with Dreamspinner Press under my new publishing pen name J. Alan Veerkamp is now available! Welcome to my sci-fi holiday short story, Salvaging Claus Day, part of the Dreamspinner Press 2017 Stocking Stuffer Holiday Anthology! Blurb: For three years, Filo has reveled in silence and solitude as the sole occupant of a space station, where he maintains the communication satellite. Everything changes with the appearance of Luz Espina’s lifepod. Filo shares many interests with the flirtatious Luz, though Filo’s isolation has strained his communication skills. Still, Luz pushes all his buttons… and reminds him of the last man he was attracted to—an attraction that ended in disaster because the man was straight. When Luz learns Filo has never celebrated a holiday, he vows to cobble together a Claus Day celebration for them to share. But is it merely a friendly gesture… or something more? This story is sold exclusively on my J. Alan Veerkamp author page via Dreamspinner Press. Click this link and get your copy at Dreamspinner Press here!
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Before reading this collection of stories, put out of your mind any memory of the Tom Cruise/Stephen Spielberg film of the same name. The Cruise/Spielberg film was very loosely based on Philip K Dick’s story, taking only a few elements out of the story. The original story is far superior to the brightly coloured adventure film that bears the same name. In his best fiction, and this collection certainly contains some of that, Philip K Dick was a visionary—a dark visionary with a downbeat but all too real take on the future. The title story, Minority Report, is set in the Bureau of Pre-Crime where three pre-cogs (people so brain damaged that they live in permanent comas and constantly mutter their predictions) predict murders not yet committed, but this is where the similarity with the Cruise/Spielberg film ends. This is a post nuclear war world, where vast swathes of the country are a burnt wasteland. The central character is a middle-aged, overweight man with a much younger wife who finds himself at the centre of a political assassination plot. This is a twisting political thriller set in a world mutated by radiation, where every piece of new information causes another change of direction. Within this story Dick asks the question, if we know what the future holds does that automatically change the future to an unknown one? A lot of these stories are set in post nuclear war worlds, a theme very popular in Philip K Dick’s fiction, but they are not the same world rehashed for different stories. Whatever worlds he sets his stories in they are dark and unforgiving worlds. His future is not bright, clean and hopeful. In this collection there are stories about robots used for assassination; automatic factories that rule the world and don’t want to give that up power; the search for a war criminal who is more or less than he seems; a government sanctioned machine that controls your thoughts; an America where the first lady is the most important person and even if the presidents come and go she remains the same; a future where they look to 1960s sci-fi to solve their technological problems; a time-travelling business woman; and much, much more. A problem that can be levelled at Phillip K Dick’s novels is that, though often with an original plot premise, he did not know how to end them. This does not apply to these stories, even the longer ones. With these stories Dick ends them perfectly, whether it is an ending to a story or a question left up in the air. Most of these stories were previously published in American sci-fi magazines of the 1950s and 1960s; whether this is the reason for their solid structures I don’t know, but these are very satisfying stories to read and have not aged the way a lot of sci-fi from that period has. Forgot the bright, clean and upbeat sci-fi of Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas and Star Trek; try the dark and all too real sci-fi of Philip K Dick. Some of the peripheral details of his stories may have aged but their central themes are still fresh and still relevant today. Find it here on Amazon
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Book Review: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Drew Payne posted a blog entry in Words, Words and Words
“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” This is the premise of Kurt Vonnegut’s greatest novel, but it is far more than that. As a middle-aged man, Billy Pilgrim is a successful optometrist, dully married to his wife with two children. As an elderly man, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadores, and kept as an exhibit in their zoo on their home world. There he meets and starts a relationship with Montana Wildhack, a beautiful model who is abducted to be his companion. As a young man, Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain's assistant in the American army, during World War II. He is woefully undertrained and under resourced and is soon captured. As a prisoner of war, he witnesses the carpet bombing of Dresden. This novel does not have a linear format, the story jumps around in time with many sections not following on chronologically from the previous one, but this only highlights Billy Pilgrim being unstuck in time, it also highlights the fractured nature of this story. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make this novel easy to read, but it is only one of the elements that make this novel a difficult read. All that said, this is a novel worth the effort of reading it. In my opinion, it is probably Vonnegut’s best novel. The description of Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through German-occupied Europe, as a prisoner of war, is so memorable, from moments of loss and deep atrocity (the nightmare bombing of Dresden) to moments of almost farce. Vonnegut presents all of this with a cool and unsentimental approach. Lesser writers would have milked the tragedies here for every drop of forced emotion that they could, but Vonnegut just presents them as events that happen. When a character dies, the narration simply states, “So it goes.” This novel, in part, has been said to have been Vonnegut trying to understand what he saw and what happened to him during World War II, but it is no less for that. It is one of the great anti-war novels because Vonnegut wrote about real events with real-world consequences. What lifts it well above a simple anti-war sermon is Vonnegut’s storytelling and the scope of his imagination. This is not an easy read but it is worth the effort. I recommend it; even if it is the only novel of Vonnegut’s you read, it is worth reading. “So it goes.” Find it here on Amazon-
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Book Review: The Machine Stops by EM Forster
Drew Payne posted a blog entry in Words, Words and Words
It is the future and all humans live underground, each person having their own room, which they never leave. All their needs – food, drink, hygiene, medication and even sleep – are provided for them automatically from machinery within the room’s walls and ceiling. They communicate with other people without leaving their rooms, via a metal disk on which the other people’s faces are projected. They have a book that contains all required knowledge, which is being constantly updated. This world is all run, for these humans, by the mysterious Machine. This disturbing dystopian novella was published in 1909 and was written by EM Forster, more famous for the novels A Room with a View and Howard’s End than his science fiction writing. This is a strange but still fascinating read. It is written very much in the style of the Edwardian novel, as all of Forster’s fiction were, with a distanced narrative. The central character is a middle-aged woman, not a dashing male hero or strong-willed young heroine so common in later science fiction, and she doesn’t rebel against her world but embraces it, she almost worships the Machine. Neither does Forster explain how this world came into being; he just describes how it is. An early dystopian story that bucked the trends that would later be present in so much of later literature. This was a fascinating read and so surprising coming from the pen of EM Forster. The only downside was that the title gives away far too much of the plot. This was the only piece of science fiction that Forster wrote, but it is so startling and original that I wonder what else he would have written if he’d tried his hand at it again. Find it here on Amazon- 3 comments
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Just checking to see if anyone knew about a story on Nifty called Hoff or Huff. It's about an android/robot named after the 80s tv character.
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Would love to get your feedback on my story, Aeris - Guardian force. It's my first one for GA!
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Hey Guys/Girls! I’m searching for a story... and I can’t remember the name nor the author. It’s a scifi male/male story. The story in general is about a dad that moves with his son across the galaxy so his son can live on a planet where they try to develop a cure for him and others, because the son can’t have genetic modifications like everyone else and therefore has a shortened lifespan. On the transport ship he meets another guy (his love interest) and that guy is son of a governer of another planet. There are lot of other people in the story and it was quite complex but nice to read, and I guess I’m mixing up a lot of stuff. lol There were also power rangers as toys involved in the story, somehow? And also some sort of revolution on one of the planets? If anyone could give me a hint, that would be great! Cheers Alx
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In multiple genres characters that have the ability to polymorph their bodies exist. What do you call them? Shapeshifters or Shapechangers?
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At the end of chapter 58, we left Roku and Arad following one another into the shower, ending on a potential fade-to-black moment. Based on a few reader comments I decided to give you all a choice on whether to give the couple their privacy, or follow them in and show us the naughty part. The poll is below. Choose wisely and before midnight tomorrow!