Monday, October 7, 2013

Stories from "Nature" magazine, September 2013 issues

Four stories, all flash fiction length, all online.

Link on author fetches more fiction by author. List below is in order of my preference, best first. I found first 3 readable, but not the last one.
  1. 5 September: J R Johnson's "The scent of things to come" (B); download: A forgotten & dying human colony somewhere on a far away world. Apparently with some biological modifications forced by local environment - something that makes them far more sensitive to smells.

    An exploration ship from earth lands. A female member of its lab will eventually get an idea to hopefully restore the native colony back to health...
  2. 12 September: William Meikle's "Lacunae" (B); download: A physics researcher thinks he has found a physical reason for mysterious disappearances of people across the ages: there is a certain region of space bordering earth's orbit around the sun; when earth moves close to it, holes in time & space appear, swallowing people.

    So he's estimated the next likely occurrence of such a hole & it at site with sensitive instruments to verify the phenomenon. The hole will appear, but not the kind he had anticipated, to his horror...
  3. 26 September: Alex Shvartsman's "The rumination of what isn't" (B); download: A man with a dying daughter gets an option to make her survive, though not in human form...
  4. 19 September: Priya Chand's "Reach for the stars" (C); download: I found it completely pointless.

    A future where machine assisted direct knowledge dump into brain & "augmented" (they more sound like almost replaced!) body parts are common. Competing students use identical stuff so much they forget themselves.

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