We asked New Scientist writers to pick their favourite sci-fi short story. From H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine to Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild, via stories from George R. R. Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin, here are the results
. All hail, then, the sci-fi short story, bringing you a slice of the weird, the mind-expanding and the futuristic in pocket-sized format., in 1926? “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H G Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision,” he wrote. “Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading – they are also always instructive.
). So it is only to be expected that she would also be the author of one of the most quietly disturbing speculative short stories ever written,. It takes place in a nondescript rural village, where the locals are gathering for the lottery. It sounds like it’s going to be fun. Kids are collecting stones. Everyone knows what is going to happen; they don’t think much of neighbouring villages who have got rid of their lotteries .
This 1953 story from Clarke starts gloriously whimsically – it is the first time, we learn, that “anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer” . The monks want the computer to aid them in their quest to complete a list containing all possible names of God. “What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days.
It turns out these are the first men on Whileaway seen since a plague killed the colony’s entire male population generations earlier. It was a catastrophe the surviving women adapted to, even while mourning the lost. But what will happen as men from Earth, now suffering its own catastrophes, rediscover this planet? There’s not much to say of plot: this story spans a single afternoon, just a handful of conversations that slip back and forth across lines of power and feeling.
Another of the feminist second wave, James Tiptree Jr. was in conversation with Russ and Le Guin – literally, in fact, as the author corresponded in letters with both. Ten years into Tiptree’s writing career, a determined fan discovered that Tiptree was in fact a woman named Alice Sheldon – a former intelligence officer in the second world war and, later, an experimental psychologist.
It’s a rollicking ride, and a great introduction to Gibson’s Sprawl series, which established cyberpunk as a literary movement. That series kicks off within Gibson’s collection of short stories with the same name, you will also find two other Sprawl stories there, both worth reading and both of which have inspired films. Inis a wonderful, high-tech, low-life tale of corporate espionage.
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