Fresh, short sci-fi for your ears, weekly!

I hope Ananth actually has a medieval hoodie like that, it would be rad. Happy Holidays!

If you're enjoying China Miéville, you should try Unlundun!

Ah, Harrison Bergeron. A true classic! And pretty hard to forget too.

Harrison Bergeron, I'm glad I got to read it again. :D And I will definitely read the others, but I do wonder, have you read The Machine Stops?

Gonta's face, oh how I lol'd.

I love the cat hair christmas XD

2081 is a short film that is based off of Vonnegut's writings Harrison Bergeron.

Paycheck by Philip K. Dick is a good short story.

Reunion by Arthur C. Clarke is a recommended read in short stories, it has a twist you will probably like.

If you're enjoying the scifi short stories, I have to recommend an author I stumbled across once - Frederik Pohl. I found an anthology of his short stories (Platinum Pohl, I think it was called) at my library once, and I honestly think they were some of the best short stories I have ever read in my life. I'm sure you'll be inundated in story recs after this post, but I just had to put my vote in.

Other scifi-ish authors I like, so you can have a sense of where I'm coming from - China Mieville, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Heinlein, Alastair Reynolds, Neil Gaiman (not really scifi, I know, but brilliant nonetheless). Never read much of Clarke or Asimov, so maybe I need to check out some of your links!

I'm really big on modern scifi authors so if your looking for some good reads, check out Ian McDonald,Paolo Bacigalupi, and Neal Stephenson.

If your looking for a collection of short stories, check this out.

http://www.amazon.com/Years-Best-Science-Fiction-Twenty-Eighth/dp/031256...

Yes, Pohl wrote some great short stories. But he also wrote terrific action science fiction novels through the 60s and 70s. You always ended a chapter on a note of suspense and wanted to jump along to the next, fast. Don't miss Clarke's 1948-1953 "Against the Fall of Night". It's actually better than his 1956 remake of the same basic story. But for Clarke as well as Asimov the best works are their short stories of the 50s and 60s, all collected in convenient books.

Then you have guys like Clifford D. Simak. These days I see a lot of people getting excited about science fiction dealing with a posthuman future. Well, Simak covered those things completely way back in the 60s, with a different vocabulary, along with a few other authors. Try his "Werewolf Principle" of 1967 for instance.

I've read a lot of Neal Stephenson and very much second the recommendation. Snowcrash is probably one of my favorite books-a great potato chip read that was definitely ahead of it's time. Clarke, Asimov, etc. also all wonderful, legendary even.
:)

When I brought my cats to my mom's for Thanksgiving we had to keep them in the bedroom so they and my mom's cat wouldn't fight. And as soon as I was gone and my mom's cat could go in that room she peed on a blanket my cats had slept on! She is a one per household kinda cat. Not to mention her nickname is Psycho Kitty....

I haven't read Embassytown, but I did slog my way through Kraken. China has good ideas, but his literary style doesn't really suit my tastes. I'd recommend him for outside the box thinking and magicky stuffs of the Terry Pratchett candor.
He's a scifi author who writes about magick and the supernatural, sometimes borderline spiritual. He focuses more on how "it" works/came to be. He does nail town the personality, atmosphere and feel of London spot on, though.

I'll always prefer Gaimans' Neverwhere on the whole for that and prose style, I think, though. I bought Perdidot Street Station by China just to see if his style maybe had a limp in Kraken. I've got too much to read already.

I love Isaac Asimov!

Better read on Stanislaw Lem then:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Lem
It's still funny how that paranoiac Philip K. Dick seen Lem for a long time. And how Lem thought that Dick is one of few (if not the only one) decent sci-fi USA writer.

He's also known for his words:
"I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet."
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stanisław_Lem

Clarke's best long form imo is "Childhood's End. It and Demolished Man by Bester are two SF novels that have me in tears.

other shorts I'd suggest are:
Let's Go to Golgotha
Hi-Lifter by Gordon R. Dickson (it's in Analog 3 is a fantastic Collection, it's seriously good. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?292989 Project Gutenberg has many of its stories)

Larry Nivens Short fiction is never less than good, choose anything you simply can't go wrong.. his writing has several "series"/universes/themes and many standalone short stories

Larry and Poul Anderson both paid dues under Campbell and Ben Bova they write great tight short fiction

Short story-wise, Ursella not only does the Sci-Fi thing but also She exemplifies a writer who knows her craft. She puts many sic-fi authors to shame.

http://www.moondance.org/2007/spring/fiction/findings.html

More short stories and novels listed here:
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Index-Work.html#Ebooks

And to cap it off, here's a six word short story she wrote for Wired:

Easy. Just touch the match to
- Ursula K. Le Guin

I love Sci Fi short stories! But my favorite author MUST be Philip K. Dick. Pick up one of his anthologies for good times.
Check it:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.html/?default_prefix=author_id&so...

Also check out some Bradbury, I love The Silent Towns

The amount of cats in the last frame reminds me too much about this clip: http://youtu.be/TyEqvpixkug

Oh my god, this is my life. All the cat fur.
This comic literally made me laugh out loud.
Love you guys.

The Nine Billion Names of God and Harrison Bergeron are two truly excellent short stories!!

Although this one is not a short novel, its a fascinating one for me:

When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger. I love the touches of humour spread through the book (is either that, or I have a dark sense of comedy)

Long term reader first time commenter. Love the comic, the art work, the writing.

Loved the sci fi shorts. Read a lot of them before but tons of fun on the re-read.

You should check out "They're made out of meat."

Here is a link to it, not quite as classic but pretty funny and clever.

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

My favorite sci-fi series has to be the Gaunt's Ghosts books by Dan Abnett. There are plenty of them and usually they can be found at Barns &Nobles.

Yep Our tree was decorated with cats this year too! So much fun. So much shedding for a artificial tree.

To avoid painting myself as more of an idiot in Lem's eyes... I will limit this to a simple "thanks! and merry christmas!" in response to the original story links. Read "the last question" before, but did so again, and all the others, with enjoyment.

Captain Nemo: damn, I thought I was about the only person in the world who had read When Gravity Fails, rather than the much more famous book with a very similar title I keep confusing it with... Though only a very small amount has stuck in my mind, I remember it as being quite cool. I was heavily into Gibson and Otomo (as in Akira) at the time, and it's got a similar overall feel.

You've probably already decided what to read, but for the record Clark's "Childhood's End" really blew my mind, which not many books do anymore.

And that's why my two kitties are sphynxes. Oi.

The phoenix down shirt arrived today! Thank you for the sticker and the little dinosaur figures!

Burning Chrome:
http://www.kejvmen.sk/burning-chrome.html

Really excellent philosophical chunk of a sci-fi novel by John C. Wright, set eons in the future & provoking every question of man's will, starring Phaethon, prince of the House of Victorian Romanticism in a time when people can choose their own windows to reality. Genuinely great scifi, & great literature. (Plus abundant adamantium).

Part of a trilogy, this first one is intense & pretty enjoyable on its own, but I highly recommend reading the continuations, "The Phoenix Exultant" & "The Golden Transcendence" for some utterly mind shattering reading.

& the kindle edition is not half bad.

stay warm in this freezing pocket between now & the new year.
& a happy one to you!

The Feeling of Power is my second favorite Asimov short story! (Favorite: "Reason.")

You should read Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," which consists of several short stories that together paint a picture of the colonization of Mars.

Also, this is hardly one of my top scifi stories, but I was just reading it last night and have the link ready: The Sound of Thunder. http://www.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses/hon462/hon462_assets/sound_of_thun...
It's by Bradbury; it has its high points, but if you want to see him at his best, you should read The Martian Chronicles.

Sorry, that should have been "A Sound of Thunder."

That's not a Christmas tree... >.<

i have to deal with this problem myself. there are 4 cats living in my house currently, and they love to sleep on literally everything in my house. cat fur everywhere!!
it's especially awkward in the winter, because of all the static. i'll sit up from one of those annoying plastic chairs and there'll be cat fur from my clothes all over the back of the seat... buh.

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Science fiction short stories are really interesting to read. I love reading such stories. Thanks for this nice post.

I love Harrison Bergeron!! We read that in my high school English class, but I think I was the only one who got it... :/ I'll have to check out all of those short stories, my dad's been trying to get me to read Arthur C. Clark and Asimov for YEARS

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