MetaFilter posts tagged with stories and sciencefiction

Science fiction stories in six words.

orthogonality — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:57:49 -0800

Science fiction stories in six words. Some by well known scifi authors. Click "Previous Articles" for earlier stories. For me, A.S. Byatt's is most haunting. A sub-genre of "Six Word Stories".

Rosenbaum, The Plausible-Fabulist

ninebelow — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:13:41 -0800

Like others before him Benjamin Rosenbaum is making his debut short story collection, The Ant King And Other Stories, available from his publishers, Small Beer, as a free download. More than this though, he is holding a competition to find the best derivative work inspired by it. These include "translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like." Benjamin Rosenbaum is not a character from The Scarlett Pimpernel, a poet or a writer of children's books as 'Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum' makes clear.

Online SF Short Fiction

rainking — Sat, 25 Jan 2003 11:06:57 -0800

Online SF Short Fiction. It's good and it's free. Sci-Fiction is the biggest name in the online field, publishing many big name authors (This week's story is by Octavia E. Butler for instance) and winning several awards. (Also check out Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction while you're there). But there are more sources for good online SF: The Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons and Infinity Plus (reprints) for instance. And let's not forget that all the print magazines have put their Nebula nominees online (though Analog's stories are coming up as 404s). Let the reading commence!

Morphic — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 14:31:25 -0800

Parallel universes Alternate universes may exist besides our own in some ghostly manner. Various science-fiction series explore parallel universes, but what do serious physicists think? Hugh Everett III's doctoral thesis outlines a controversial theory in which the universe at every instant branches into countless parallel worlds. Physicist Andrei Linde's theory of self-reproducing universes implies that new universes are being created all the time through a budding process. Stephen Hawking's quantum cosmology also suggests the possibility of other universes connected by wormholes. Some scientists feel that the famous photon double slit experiments proves the existence of parallel universes in which a photon from one universe interacts with a photon from another. Black hole theory suggests that black holes may be portals to parallel universes.
Science-fiction stories about parallel universes always delight the mind. Two of my favorite SF novels on parallel universes are Heinlein's Job and Number of the Beast. Several others intrigue me, such as The Neoreality Series, Diaspora, and Parallelities. Science books on the subject include a famous book by David Deutsch.
Do you have any favorite books on parallel universes or parallel realities, fiction or nonfiction? What do you think? No doubt, scientists and science-fiction authors will continue to explore the concept in the decades to come.