Sunday, September 16, 2012

A few relatively minor stories

All stories are online. List is in no particular order.
  1. [ss] Brian Aldiss' "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (B); download; Harper's Bazaar, December 1969: In this overpopulated world, people prefer living in a dream world instead - via a combination of virtual reality & robots.
  2. [ss] Harl Vincent's "High-Frequency War" (B); download; Astounding, February 1940: A patriot will overcome an enemy mole in the US to win a war for the country. Text is littered with fancy-sounding but meaningless jargon about frequency weapons.
  3. [ff] Desi Babu's "The giant mosquitoes" (B); download; 3 August 2012 at author's blog: When a pharma company working with growth hormones dumped their lab waste carelessly in the open, they could not have seen the consequences...
  4. [ss] A Bertram Chandler's "Naval Engagement" aka "Left-Hand Way" (B); download; Australian Science Fiction Review, #10 (Jun 1967): A robot monk contemplates its "naval"...
  5. [ss] Stephen A Kallis, Jr's "The Untouchable" (B); download; Analog, December 1960: A man invented an instrument that lets you pass through solid material horizontally (e.g., lets you walk through the walls). Now he's dead, his instrument has reached government, & has been accidentally thrown on a table which accidentally flicked the button on. So now both the table & the instrument are visible but untouchable - your hands just pass through them!
  6. [ss] Robert Sheckley's "Forever" (as by Ned Lang); download; Galaxy, February 1959: Rulers should be immortal but not the ruled!

0 comments: