Paul Di Filippo's "Wavehitcher" (flash fiction, free): Swimming solo safely in open ocean for several weeks

When I was in low teens & just started taking bicycle some distance from home, a favorite sport among the peers used to be to catch the chain at the back of one of the passing trucks with one hand, & hitch a ride without paddling. Sounds dangerous today, but at that age it was fun.

This story is a more science fictional & hi-tech hitching a ride of a similar nature.

Story summary.

A US coast guard vessel has discovered a suspicious "wavehitcher", a man hitching a free ride on an unmanned marine research robot vessel. When they catch him & get his reason for being where no one should be, it gave me a smile.

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 10 October 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Paul Di Filippo.

Ronald D Ferguson's "The meaning of life" (flash fiction, free)

It begins very well - with interesting illustrations of the idea that the ultimate purpose of life is ... to move stuff from here to there. But later parts become a bit too far fetched.

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 17 October 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.

Brian Clegg's "Quis custodiet?" (flash fiction, humor, free)

Is human mind ever satisfied? Here we see some unusual & funny political discontent against the "perfect dictatorship"...

See also.

1. Robert Heinlein's "Coventry": While the details are different, political discontent of protagonist is similar.

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 3 October 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: A.
Added to my "best of 2013" list.

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.

Related: Stories from Nature magazine.

Stories from Nature magazine, August 2013 issues

5 stories, all flash fiction length, all online. Only one that somewhat held my interest was Hecht's.

List below is in order of my preference, best first. Links on author fetch more fiction by author.

1. 29 August: Jeff Hecht's "The speed of dark energy" (B); download: A physicist has discovered that dark energy moves faster than light. And landed a job that promises faster execution of automated trades in the stock market. Only there is a minor glitch about its practicality...
2. 22 August: Marko Jankovic's "Alone" (B); download: Having perfected a robot that thinks it is human, the CEO of the company making it is getting the feeling he's the only human among his automaton-like colleagues.
3. 8 August: Milo James Fowler's "One meal a day" (B); download: There's a bit of "To Serve Man" (download as part of a larger package) here, though the story had a far lesser impact than that classic.
   
   A shapeshifting alien is on earth, looking for another of his species - a run away price who's believed to be hiding here.
4. 15 August: Grace Tang's "Time heals all wounds" (C); download: A man experiencing hallucinations is given a new brain surgery that results in an unexpected side effect - time seriously slows down for the patient whenever he is experiencing great emotion!
5. 1 August: Lee Hallison's "The best of us" (C); download: Human scavengers are hunting for usable stuff over an earth gone dead & dangerous, & with most people recently dead. No cause is given for the apocalypse; story appears to be about the toughness & human emotions among the survivors. 

Related: Stories from Nature magazine.

Stories from Nature magazine, July 2013 issues

4 stories, all flash fiction length, all online. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there. Label "download" links the online copy of the story.

List below is in order of my preference, best first.

1. 4 July: Ken Hinckley's "The ostracons of Europa" (B); download: Human explorer meets a local on Europa!
2. 18 July: Gregory Benford's "Think big" (B); download: Humans aren't the only ones modifying local atmosphere...
3. 25 July: Deborah Walker's "Surrendered human" (B); download: Man discovers another God & realizes his past Sins...
4. 11 July: Shane D Rhinewald's "All that remains" (B); download: After an earth destroying war, a man from a colony world has brought his two children back here on a nostalgia trip...

Related: Stories from Nature magazine.

Gregory Benford's "Think big" (flash fiction, climate change, free)

An astronomer looking at alien planets will find, over the years, evidence on a lot of worlds where atmospheric composition seems to be driven by intelligent design - sometimes to cool the world, sometimes to warm it.

But she's not the only one watching alien atmospheres for intelligent interventions. Others from far have seen similar evidence in earth's atmosphere too...

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 18 July 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Gregory Benford.

Ken Hinckley's "The ostracons of Europa" (flash fiction, first contact, free)

A human explorer in a submersible deep under a subsurface ocean of Europa meets a local...

Very exotic locale.

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 4 July 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.

Real science: Just how big can an iceberg be?

I've never been close to glaciers or icebergs, so I got a shocker when looking at a recent Nature report: "Giant iceberg cut adrift Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier shed a massive iceberg last week..., breaking along a deep rift that researchers had been monitoring since 2011. The ‘calving’ event dumped a 720-square-kilometre chunk of ice into the Amundsen Sea off western Antarctica, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) reported on 9 July, on the basis of images collected by its TerraSAR-X satellite."

720 square kilometers!! By comparison, Mumbai is just 67.7 (City) + 369 (Suburban) = 436.7 sq km. This monster iceberg is the 65% bigger than the city!

Stories from "Nature" magazine, June 2013 issues

Four stories, all flash fiction length, all online. While I really liked only the first one, each of the first 3 have curious ideas.

List below is in order of my preference - best first. If I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there.

1. 20 June: John Grant's "Buzz off" (A); download; humor: Helpful aliens are baffled by human hostility...
2. 27 June: Euan Nisbet's "Probability-1: termination" (B); download; alternate history: An unusual method to change the present...
   
   Story itself didn't really interest me - it's alternate history of the world, with a lot of famous name throwing - many of which I'm not familiar with. Only the method of changing now interested me.
3. 6 June: Tony Ballantyne's "Rondo code" (B); download: Programming computers via music rather than text...
4. 13 June: Jessica May Lin's "Mortar flowers" (C); download: A man in a war ravaged town is playing "Cement Florist", decorating the scars created by bombs at public places.

Related: Fiction from Nature; fiction originally published in 2013.

Stories from Nature magazine, May 2013 issues

Five stories, all flash fiction length, all online. List below is in order of my preference, best first. Only story that somewhat worked for me is the first one, Haynes'.

1. 23 May: Michael Haynes' "An alien named Tim" (B); download: A solo alien stowaway on a human starfaring ship is captured, & tells the crew: "I'm going to steal your ship, hijack your cargo, take it to my homeworld, and thereby use it to launch an invasion of your worlds."
   
   He's confined but no one takes him seriously. Until it's too late...
2. 16 May: Ken Liu's "The plague" (B); download: A plague of man-made germs & nanobots killed off most humanity. Some descendents of the then rich still survive in domed cities; some poor in the open survived too by adapting to this environment normally poisonous to humans. The story is of irony: men in domes think outsiders are "deformed" & less than human; one of them is about to get educated.
3. 2 May: Vaughan Stanger's "Bee futures" (C); download: Anti-GM-crops activists succeed too well - by making farmers switch to non-food crops, leading to widespread starvation.
4. 9 May: Sylvia Spruck Wrigley's "The front line" (C); download: A frontline human soldier is advising a fresh recruit that just arrived. Humanity is fighting a war with "Sporians", originally probably of Mars. Only it's not a war. These are vegetable-beings with spores fatal to humans, & humans are only trying to keep them confined, & loosing.
   
   I get a feeling it might be a parable to various ongoing wars of US, but I'm not sure.
5. 30 May: S R Algernon's "A time for peace" (C); download: A man who would invent time machine in future, go back in time, & change things so his original timeline won't exist walks into the prestigious Institute for admission. He will be admitted, but the Institute director has no intention to not having ever existed as a result of this man's work!

Related: Stories from Nature magazine.

Alex Shvartsman's "The epistolary history" (flash fiction, time travel, humor, free)

While the idea is like any number of old time travel stories - a man travels to make a "minor" tweak to past to make a better present, it made me smile more than once.

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 25 April 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Alex Shvartsman.

Conor Powers-Smith's "For your information" (flash fiction, humor, free): The future of social networks

Is it so far fetched to expect everyone's genome as standard component of their online profile, just like photos are? Not entirely funny things happen when a lover decides to check her potential partner's profile...

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 4 April 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.

David G Blake's "To my father" (flash fiction, free): Lament of an unloved "child"

It read like just another story till: "to learn what it was that I felt as I stared down at you and your new family: diminished, as though I had become nothing more than an outmoded contrivance." From then on, it was a different story for me.

It's an emotional one - lament of a sentient robot, abandoned by its creator during a disaster. Replace robot with an unloved adopted child or a pet, & it might feel a little more familiar.

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 31 January 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: A.

Stories from "Nature" magazine, February 2013 issues

Sorry I vanished for more than week. Actually, I've not recently seen many stories I want to talk about. This post is more in the nature of "yes, I'm still alive"; stories included are all minor.

All stories are flash fiction length. All are online.

1. 7 Feb: Donald S Crankshaw's "Local 623" (B); download; humor: Advice, on their rights, to folks who offer themselves as subjects to mad science experiments...
2. 14 Feb: Danny Dunlavey's "Peace" (B); download: Centuries after humans died out in a disaster, intelligent mantis have inherited earth. And one of their females is having pangs of guilt, having just torn the head off her mate & eaten him...
3. 21 Feb: V G Campen's "A gift of pain" (B); download: A new class of medical practitioners specialize in diagnosis of the cause of pain in a patient where ordinary procedures don't work. These folk wear a headset linked to a machine, another headset worn by patient, & literally feel the patient's pain & thereby, using practice & knowledge of pain patterns, make the diagnosis.
4. 28 Feb: John P Murphy's "Tumbleweeds and indelicate questions" (C); download: In a pub, someone is telling of an encounter with alien plant-beings called "Tumbleweeds" & of their strange burial customs.

Related: Fiction from Nature magazine.

John Frizell's "Pest control" (flash fiction, humor, free)

A way to get rid of ugly rats at home...

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 10 January 2013.
Download full text from publisher's website.
Rating: B.

Stories from "Nature" magazine, December 2012 issues

Only 3 stories during December, all flash fiction length, all online, all minor ones. List below is in order of my preference (best first):

1. 13 Dec: Tristan Scott's "An unintended future" (B); download: Consumerization of genetic modification gadgets, & over the decades, accumulated "minor" "edits" to the gene pool, has resulted in humans evolving into all sorts of creatures - where no two humans look normal & many have genes that are outright fatal.
   
   The man who was vital in invention of these gadgets is regretting his works & wants to "backtrack up the evolutionary tree?" But how?
2. 20 Dec: John Gilbey's "Review of the year: 2062" (B); download: A litany of techno-catastrophes & cynical but typical social responses.
3. 6 Dec: Moshe Sipper's "Time and again" (C); download: Someone travels back in time to stop incest in the family. But ending left me confused.

Related: Stories from Nature magazine.

Peter J Enyeart's "Transmission received" (flash fiction, humor, free)

Complications in digitization of humans...

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 29 November 2012.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.

Scott C Mikula's "Temporal ventures robbed me" (flash fiction, humor, free)

Funny report of an unhappy customer of Temporal Venture, who purchased their "'Classic Caribbean' package" traveling to "the year 1720" & came back unhappy...

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 11 October 2012.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.

Stories from "Nature" magazine, August 2012 issues

5 stories of flash fiction length, all online. I didn't find anything really noteworthy here, though I liked the first two (Meikle's & Morris') better then the rest.

1. 30 August: William Meikle's "Growth" (B); download: When the sun dimmed suddenly, food rather than global warming was the problem. A man experimenting with a fast growing fungus that liked cold dark places suddenly was in high demand. Will he be a savior of the the world?
2. 23 August: Freya Morris' "The write rules" (B); download: Thought police in a world of universal connectivity via implants, where all thoughts are online, & are monitored & censored by government. And writing on paper - thoughts that cannot be monitored - is sedition.
3. 16 August: Sue Lange's "Tige is the man" (B); download: A party in a smart house of future. Where mind reading & mind-networking is the norm. Crowd at the party is playing a dare game where each person downs his "shield" so everybody can see what he really thinks of them.
4. 9 August: Luc Reid's "Ways to enjoy Nutrient Blend 14" (C); download: Description of a world where everyone uses augmented reality gadgets. I don't really understand how people go about safely in a world where there senses don't tell them about the environment - a small room looks bigger, so how come you don't bump into a wall? 
5. 2 August: Polenth Blake's "Dead meat" (C); download: Look it up only if you have a taste in gory stuff. A woman has been building art gallries out of meat, animal & human - animate & with real blood that keeps oozing out!

Related: Stories from Nature magazine.