I usually write a bunch of posts ahead of time and save them for those occasions when I might be working on a longer series and don’t have the time to write the daily post, or when I’m pressed for time for other reasons. Sometimes those posts get pushed down in the unwritten and half-written … Continue reading Fictional Morality
Fantasy
The Cheaters
Quote of the day: We're all not quite as sane as we pretend to be.—Robert Bloch When Thriller debuted on NBC in 1960, I couldn't watch it because it came on at 9 PM on Tuesday nights, which was a school night, and so I had to get to bed by 9:00 or 9:30 at the … Continue reading The Cheaters
One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts
During Isaac Asimov’s final illness, the editor of his namesake magazine commissioned Connie Willis to write an editorial for the magazine in order to help take some of the pressure off the Good Doctor, who up till then had written an editorial for every issue. In the event, Asimov died before her editorial could be … Continue reading One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts
Rebound
Here’s another Fredric Brown short-short story which he titled “Rebound” and which appeared in the April 1960 issue of Galaxy, under the title “The Power”. That’s odd, because I think it would have been more at home in Fantasy & Science Fiction, but whatever. It’s about a man who one day discovers he has an … Continue reading Rebound
Descending
There aren’t that many short stories that stick with me over decades, but for some reason “Descending” by Thomas M. Disch is one of them. Here is the opening of the Wikipedia article on Thomas M. Disch: Thomas Michael Disch (February 2, 1940 – July 4, 2008) was an American science fiction writer and poet. … Continue reading Descending
The Fine Art of Seduction
One of the books that I received very early on from the Science Fiction Book Club when I was thirteen was A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was an anthology of stories originally published in the 1950s in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s long since been out of print, but … Continue reading The Fine Art of Seduction