‘I keep thinking we should have left it to die, you know, rather than do what we did …’ on Read Short Fiction today. A tale of a personal road to hell paved with the best of intentions. What choices would you have made? Continue reading ‘Baby Bird’: new SF short story
Promotion Fliss compressed her short, squat frame further into the burned out hollow of the hull, shoving Hennessey’s evacuated carcass aside and flicking indeterminate debris casually off her weapons harness. She holed up to consider strategy. Fliss was a soldier; a grunt on the peri-solar defence ring where killing aliens, not caring platitudes, got you through a shift. She looked down at her uniform, or what passed for one after this morning’s skirmish, and scraped off the residue it had collected from the blast that took out her unit’s communications array. Most of her squad had gone with it and … Continue reading ‘Promotion’
Wondering how the universe works? Here’s your answer: ‘A very particular view’ out on E Victoria Flynn’s Roadside Attractions today. Continue reading ‘A very particular view’
Out on Every Day Fiction today. Suddenly, I want to know where my council tax goes! There is actually some science behind this piece of fiction. The Google research car has travelled thousands of miles without incident (see TED talk by Sebastian Thrun), and other vehicles have been driven remotely, including one by Gadget Show presenter Jason Bradbury in a race against an F1 driver. Both cars were live on the track. This set the scene, in my fevered mind at any rate, for a virtual cab company whose ‘drivers’ operate passenger pods from call centres. Then came the idea about what … Continue reading ‘No Arrests in 2039’: you might prefer to walk home …
Good old Every Day Fiction, they’re taking a chance with another of my tales. ‘No Arrests in 2039’, in which a local council gets inventive about its crime stats, will be unleashed on August 9th. Disclaimer: Dear Elected Representatives – No, this is not a way forward, you hear me? Update: EDF is offline at the moment while they move house to new servers. EDF reports progress, and will be back on August 15th. Affected stories will transfer to September. 09/08/11 Continue reading ‘No Arrests in 2039’
I used to think creativity and imagination had nothing to do with science until I heard that a significant number of NASA scientists had developed their interests through reading and watching science fiction. While Gene Roddenberry was boldly going, courtesy of fantastic warp drive technology, these chaps were figuring out how to build it. So now we have scanners Dr McCoy would find handy, information tablets that outclass the gizmos a red shirt would offer to the Captain for signature, and communication devices that can access the world, not just one contact point. There’s probably an app in development for … Continue reading Some fact with your fiction
Two really exciting things just happened and, right now, I really don’t know which has got me gibbering most. One is an extraordinary convergence in the technologies that will underpin our next research bid (and look out world, if we’re successful, because this will change the way we get information from hospitals and doctors for ever). The other is my first fiction publication outside of the recent NOT competition and it feels like my kid came home from their first day at school with an A* in higher maths! So which to choose? Well, in fairness, there’s no showing off … Continue reading Shameless self “Promotion”
Not content with using a pre-discovered planet for a story, I’m a bit bothered I might have stumbled over another cosmic event. I have a story out to a publisher (or on its way back with a note on its collar) about the threads of the universe unravelling and now this Knot in the ribbon at the edge of the solar system ‘unties’ I’m wondering if I should develop a taste for historical tales before I accidentally destroy life as we know it.. Continue reading SF might just have become too dangerous to write
Last year, I wrote an SF story about a planet in the Gliese (gleesh) system, first identified in the early 2000s as an extra solar planetary system. Today, the first potentially inhabitable extra solar planet was identified – in the GLIESE system! OK, so my story, ‘Journey Home’, didn’t cut the mustard but heck, there’s got to be points for being on the astronomical button! Where’s the silly-big-grin icon when you need it?(*). Here’s the story at PopSci. ‘Asimov’s’, you could have had the story first – I know what these people look like! Continue reading That’s my planet!
I like my sci-fi, really I do, and having been inducted at the age of eight into this genre, I am more than familiar with the essentials of pseudo-scientific terminology. Heck, I write it myself and I appreciate both the value and the pitfalls of inventing tech-speak to describe something that isn’t yet in existence. For me, the best tech-speak conveys a sense of familiarity so that, on reading it, I have a feeling I know what this is even though that has to be impossible. The worst offers a stream of multi-hyphenated guff and tells me this is ‘normal’, … Continue reading Hugo Nominee – are we suckered by techno-twaddle?
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 