China Mountain Zhang
{4.5/5} “I am impure, a mongrel. I am an imposter. And there is more that he doesn’t know. When I tell him what I am, he will look foolish because he has mistaken me for Chinese, he will lose face. We will pretend that nothing was ever said. Then when this job is finished he […]
Impossible Things
{4.5/5} “All it took was somebody walking past and stepping in a puddle, and the worm’s whole life was changed. Do you think things happen like that? That one little action can change your whole life forever?” Impossible Things was published in 1993. It’s a collection of short stories, mostly science fiction, by Connie Willis. […]
Dandelion Wine
{4/5} “So, with the subtlest of incidents, he knew that this day was going to be different. It would be different also, because, as his father explained, driving Douglas and his ten-year-old brother Tom out of town toward the country, there were some days compounded completely of odor, nothing but the world blowing in one […]
Wonder
{4.5/5} “Although we seemed to exist in different universes, I came to understand that to be an illusion. I am as much a part of the Milky Way Galaxy as she is; the electrons and photons of which I am made, although intangible to both her and me, are real… Despite these disparities of space […]
Watch
{4.5/5} “Back on the African savannah, those who mistook every bit of movement in the grass for a hungry lion were more likely to survive than those who dismissed each movement as nothing to worry about. If you always assume that it’s a lion, and nine times out of ten you’re wrong, at least you’re […]
Wake
{4.5/5} “Anyway, check it: I’ve got this transceiver attached to my optic nerve, just behind my left eye. When it’s turned on, it’ll grab the signals my retina is putting out and transmit them to this little external computer pack I’m supposed to carry around, like, forever; I called it my eyePod, and at least […]
Mort
{4.5/5} “There had been a noise like someone making no noise at all. Forget peas and mattresses — sheer natural selection had established over the years that the royal families that survived longest were those whose members could distinguish an assassin in the dark by the noise he was clever enough not to make, because, […]
What the Dog Saw
{5/5} “If we let personality… bias the hiring process today, then all we will have done is replace the old-boy network, where you hired your nephew, with the new-boy network, where you hire whoever impressed you the most when you shook his hand. Social progress, unless we’re careful, can merely be the means by which […]
Dying Inside
{4/5} “I never could send my thoughts into anybody else’s head. Even when the power was strongest in me, I couldn’t transmit. I could only receive… So right there I was condemned to be society’s ugliest toad, the eavesdropper, the voyeur.” Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg, published in 1972 What if you could read people’s […]
Still Forms on Foxfield
{4.5/5} “Communication is the first right. Life is communication. What is death but the irrevocable absence of communication? … Freedom, too, is communication. How can anyone be a prisoner when she can contact any person in the world at any time? ” Still Forms on Foxfield by Joan Slonczewski, published in 1980 It’s not often […]