Escape the world every week - listen now for 10 minutes of sci-fi and fantasy
Liam Burke is a horror/sci-fi independent author. He is a father of one, and a husband of another. He currently works in the IT industry, studies Bujinkan Budo-Taijitsu, and enjoys several types of LARP. He has several novellas, which are collections of short stories. He will be releasing a longer fairy tale with illustrations in the next coming weeks.
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I was interviewed as the guest author on Jamie Marchant’s blog today.
Check it out and read more about Faye and Summer Solace!
Future humans will look back at this time. What will they say? Will they say we were an advanced civilization? I have been wondering quite a bit if they will say that this was the start of a civil war, or a war of some kind. All of the people who sit by the side (including me) will be looked at as entirely oblivious to the world around them.
I don’t know what else to do or how else to interact with the world in the way that would be of value. I don’t know what 12,000 years will say, I would imagine that it will mix all times with other times. It will look at this as rementants of the civil war (in the US) because that will have been just a blink of an eye ago.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-there-wasnt-an-advanced-civilization-12-000-years-ago/
Berserk was published in Jupiter Diving and Other Short Reads in Science Fiction and Fantasy by Kate Rauner
Kate writes science fiction novels and science-inspired poetry. She’s also a retired engineer and Cold War Warrior (honestly, that’s what Congress called them) because she worked in America’s nuclear weapons complex. Much to her surprise, she has a second, unpaid career as a volunteer firefighter. She left the beautiful but crowded Front Range of Colorado to live on the edge of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest with her husband, cats, llamas, and dog. She’s well on her way to achieving her life-goal of becoming an eccentric old woman.
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Brain implants are coming, and I for one welcome that day. I am very intersted in the applications that we might see in the future. There are endless possibilities. Some that would relieve problems (chronic pain), some that would enhance (memory/recording), some that we can’t even guess at.
Well…hopefully we can because we are sci-fi writers.
I recently got to hear LeVar Burton speak which was amazing, and he said that sci-fi askes one of the most powerful questions. “What if…?” So what’s your brain implant what if?
First appeared in Splickety.
Donald Jacob Uitvlugt lives on neither coast of the United States, but mostly in a haunted memory palace of his own design. His short fiction has appeared in numerous print and online venues, including Cirsova magazine and the Flametree Publishing anthology Science Fiction Stories. He is also releasing a series of self-published stories for Kindle. Donald strives to write what he calls “haiku fiction,” stories that are small in scope but big in impact. If you enjoyed “Space Opera,” please let him know via his blog or via Twitter: @haikufictiondju.
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Did you ever say “I quit”? If so, what happened to make you come back to writing?
Yes. Very yes. Absolutely I quit. I didn’t think it was something I could do. I thought it was something that was in my past. There was a tale that I wasn’t creative and I believed it. I completely bought it. I thought that writing was something I wouldn’t be able to do anymore. That part of my life was over. I needed to move on. Enjoy reading and do other things with my life.
I started to have tiny little glimpses that maybe I could. Maybe there was space somewhere for me in writing. Maybe I wasn’t too old, logical, cynical, boring, whatever else. And that little hope grew. I did some writing here and there. I tried to feed and nurture it despite all else. Let it continue to grow.
Then I read something by Lois McMaster Bujold in the course of my regular reading. And it was good and so I looped my way back into the start (I am completely unbothered by reading out of order so it was somewhere later in the series). I read Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Something about a character who was an adult. Not just old enough to drink. But overall quite reasonable and adult. That was amazing. Something about that made me double down on the writing.
Reading more, learning more, writing more. I really started back in on it. And not all my characters are like that, but it very much kicked me into feeling like there was space for me. I also really enjoyed that despite the books being old, like decades out of date, they didn’t feel like it. I didn’t read them and flinch at the language, the characters, the ideas.
So yes, I quit. And yes I came back. And I’m glad. I might do it again, and that too will be ok.
The robot uprising terrifies us. I’ve never really gotten it. Well I get it, we are afraid of ourselves and in some weird weird ways of what comes after us. I personally very much hope that the children of today are better than me, and their children are better. I want the world to get easier, and then for those kids to be able to do more.
If children don’t have to fight to be fed they’ll have all that energy to spend on much more important things. Which is amazing.
What does this have to do with robots? Because the good vision of robots could be children who don’t need to spend energy on fighting to eat and so can cure and solve all the things. Happy robot stories.
A great nerdy podcast Indoorswomen had an episode about this recently. Here’s the very short clip.
So write that great story about the robot saving the world, or making lives better, or creating opportunities for people to succeed because they aren’t struggling to eat.
Eddie D. Moore travels extensively for work, and he spends much of that time listening to audio books. The rest of the time is spent dreaming of stories to write and he spends the weekends writing them. His stories have been published by Jouth Webzine, The Flash Fiction Press, Every Day Fiction, Theme of Absence, Devolution Z, and Fantasia Divinity Magazine.
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You can support 600 Second Saga by giving us a 5-star review on iTunes.
One of my favorite non-writing blogs is Ask A Manager (if you have a day job and need advice it is the #1 through #10 spot to go, it is amazing). There was a post earlier this week about social signaling at work and the difference between “Hi, how are you?” “Fine, you?” “Fine.” in the hall while passing at work and someone seriously asking “How are you?”
Alison (the eponymous manager) said:
When the interaction is a quick one — like when you’re passing someone in the hall or greeting them in the morning — “how are you?” is a social ritual that means “I acknowledge you, fellow human!” The fact that people aren’t looking for long, genuine replies in that situation isn’t inauthentic; it’s that the words mean something different than they might in other contexts.
But the good news, is that we do not have to be bound by current social rituals. So what might a very different social ritual to acknowledge a fellow human look like? What would a world where we never acknowledged the humans in our physical space look like? What will social ritual look like with AR? VR? Or with magic? What if you had telepathy?
