Showing posts with label Duncan Shields. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duncan Shields. Show all posts

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Duncan Shields' "Swimming" (flash fiction, free)

Inventing one of the most powerful viruses attacking humans needs very very low tech...

Fact sheet.

First published: 365tomorrows, 26 July 2010.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Duncan Shields.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Some recent B-fiction (16 May 2010)

I've dropped very crappy stuff, but there is nothing excellent here either; all B-stories, & on the lower side of my B-pile. Better reads tend to come early in list below.

  1. Dagoberto Gilb's "Uncle Rock"; download; The New Yorker, 10 May 2010; non-genre: A poor Mexican woman in US receives passes from all kinds of men. Told from the perspective of her 11 year old son.
  2. Denise McCune's "Shuffle Up and Deal"; download; JBU, #23 (February 2010); humor: This plot probably has been done 10,000 times in various garbs.

    Aliens have landed & one of them requested the government to let him play an about to begin

    Poker tournament. Someone overhears an alien delegate as saying the winner takes Earth! So panic sets in, & everyone must ensure the alien loses the tournament!
  3. [ff] Duncan Shields' "Shuffler"; download; 365tomorrows, 10 May 2010: Using a teleporting device to make humanity more tolerant of interracial differences!
  4. Steven Popkes' "Crocodiles"; download (online only for a couple of months); F&SF, May/June 2010; zombie: Germans, during World War II, have created zombie soldiers that can turn enemy into zombies by biting.

    Very nasty & dark story. European & US readers might identify with it in ways I cannot.

    Also included are standard prejudices of many US sources: Americans are smart, Germans are evil, Russians couldn't care less for their own.
  5. Jacqueline Rochow's "The Truth Will Out"; download; 365tomorrows, 5 May 2010; fanfic: Effectively retells an episode from Pierre Poulle's "Planet of the Apes", but without explicitly naming the original: A few scientists have evidence that their ancestors were merely lab animals of humans, & are debating the social implications of making the information public.
Related: Fiction from 2010.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Duncan Shields' "Baldy" (flash fiction, first contact, free)

I found the alien here somewhat similar to the one in John Campbell's "Who Goes There?". But alien visitor to earth in this story is benign - at least relatively.

I wonder if the title was inspired by the Baldies in a series of Henry Kuttner/C L Moore stories? (Those stories were a reaction to Hitler's brand of racism.)

Story summary.

The strange alien died soon after the human narrator found him in bad shape after a shipwreck - in 1850s. He was properly buried. But something still lived...

Fact sheet.

First published: 365tomorrows, 3 January 2009.
Rating: A.
Download full text.
Related: First contact stories (incomplete annotated list).