what Dave thinks about movies, books and everything
{5/5} “Do you think if people knew how crazy you really were no one would ever talk to you?” Charlie’s aunt was killed in an accident and his best friend committed suicide a few months ago. Now he’s starting high school — most of the kids either ignore him or treat him badly. He makes […]
{4.5/5} “Do you think dying has made me morbid?” Ned can bring people and animals back to life by touching them. But if he touches them a second time they’ll go back to being dead. And if he doesn’t touch them a second time within one minute then someone else will die — to make […]
{4.5/5} “Felicitas turned to her friend. Adriana stared straight ahead. Felicitas felt sorry for Adriana because she knew Adriana hadn’t changed, didn’t look at things the way she now did. And it was the same all over the yard. Some now had the spark of life. Others, like Adriana, were still dead, their eyes leaden. […]
{4/5} “I know I promised I wouldn’t waste my intellect on kryptonite robots and elaborate super-death traps… But three months ago, I looked in the mirror at those nasty little spiderwebs of lines around my eyes, and I realized something… I’m getting older and… and he isn’t… So, if I want to die happy, it’s […]
{3.5/5} “You can’t find out everything from books, you know.” Brendan lives in a monastery where his uncle Cellach is the abbot. Uncle Cellach is focussed on building a wall around the monastery, to keep the Vikings out. The other monks, as well as Brendan, are more interested in illuminating manuscripts. When Aidan arrives with the […]
{3.5/5} “But research is an art, not a science, because anyone who knows what they’re doing can find the crumbs, the wheres, whats, and whos. The art is in the whys: the ability to read between the crumbs, not to mix metaphors. For every event, there is a cause and effect. For every crime, a […]
{4.5/5} “Do we have time to get to a motel or do we need to do it right here?” In a world where everyone tells the truth, Mark writes screenplays — of course, they’re all based on history. Unfortunately he was stuck with the 1300s and no one wants to see a movie about the […]
{4/5} “The closer you look the less you see.” A magician, an escape artist, a mentalist, and a pickpocket from across the country are all invited to New York at a certain date and time — they all show up. It turns out that some of them already know each other. A year later the […]
{4.5/5} “He tried to shunt aside his own fear so that he could see Jerrison’s face contort, see him recoil from some invisible blow or explosion, see him, the president of the United States, be the first person holding that office in decades to walk in a soldier’s shoes, share a soldier’s burden, and feel […]
Ted Chiang is one of my favourite short story writers. He’s not very prolific (a story every year or two) but his collection Stories of Your Life and Others is amazing and so are the stories he’s written since then. He’s got a new story available on the Subterranean Press web site, and it’s brilliant: […]