Fiction
- Written by: Stephanie E Barr
- Category: Fiction
Part I: Dragon's Breath
Part IIa: Shelter from the Storm
Omoto closed the door softly, then contemplated
closing the shop. It was not yet ten, but the rain made more visitors unlikely
and he felt very tired, very old. Too old. His tiny apartment upstairs
beckoned, with his books and his tablet and his bed much softer than the futon
Kyle slept on. Poor kid. Over the past forty-two years, many kids had slept on
it and the cots and futons that had come before that.
- Written by: Stephanie E Barr
- Category: Fiction
As Ryuuji Shimuzu left the last checkpoint at Santa Susana Field Laboratory, he turned onto the first of several circuitous roads that would eventually lead him to Highway 118. And Daiki.
Just as he turned his back on work, he turned his back on the frustrations inherent in being a safety professional in a world where people were unfailingly reckless and not just with their own safety. You'd think, after the fire in 1957 and the meltdowns in '59—both preventable with measures he had not convinced them to take—they would finally have listened to him. Might have saved the fuel in '64; damn sure would have kept it from happening again in '69. The radioactive fire in '71 was almost the last straw. Didn't these people learn anything?
- Written by: Stephanie E Barr
- Category: Fiction
He felt more than saw the light on the side of his face as he scrubbed the Torii. He heard Ryuuji's gasp below him, but he was already turning toward it, that impossible blossom of crimson and orange over the city like another sun. He felt fear, panic, disbelief, awe, enough that he lost his balance and sent them both toppling backwards on their slim ladder.
This was their world, every inch, from one corner to the other. They were as relaxed and secure on ‘the block’ as most other people in their living rooms. As kids, they had thrown water balloons from the rooftops on to unsuspecting little girls. They’d played ‘army’ in the alleys and backyards. ‘Hide and Seek’ in the dark hallways. This was their turf.
- Written by: Bent Lorentzen
- Category: Fiction
Foreword:
This story is fiction framed in ethnology.
First published by Altair Magazine of Australia, which no longer exists. The illustration was scanned from the magazine. Updated in 2010 to honor the Vancouver community, whose Canadian and First Nations societies evoked great beauty - a Navajo ideal; Navajo (Di’neh) being the ancient cultural cousins to the Nootka prior to an epic migration from the Vancouver region to the desert SW USA - with the totems and other symbols and artisans of human hope despite it all.
- Written by: Stephanie E Barr
- Category: Fiction
There were many adjectives one could use to describe Laney Sul, with her laser cut black hair and her even sharper black eyes, with her quick hands and even quicker brain. Patient was not one of them. With six standards of training off-world, she could curse volubly in the five languages she was fluent in—as opposed to the obligatory three for interstellar pilot certification—and she could curse in another four beyond that.
- Written by: Stephanie E Barr
- Category: Fiction
I hate hospitals. Most people do, I know, but with a family prone to cancer, hard drinking, hard smoking, and other forms of self-destruction, I'd spent far too many hours in hospital waiting rooms. Bad enough when it was an aunt or a cousin or my parents.
But it was Suzie, strong, beautiful, unfailingly healthy Suzie who was supposed to live another eighty years, who was under the knife not for cancer but for riding home with a drunken friend. It wasn't fair, I'd told myself through many an endless stretch in hospital waiting rooms. It wasn't fair. Suzie should have had the devil's own luck, not mine, not theirs. "Internal bleeding," they'd told me. "Broken ribs. Concussion." This couldn't be happening. She couldn't actually die, no, I couldn't think it or I'd lose my mind and pound the floor with my chapped hands, scream with my tired throat. Not Suzie. Not Suzie!
- Written by: Donald Wesling
- Category: Fiction
Science-Fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was my student at University of California, San Diego, in the late-70s and early-80s, both in an undergraduate class and as a doctoral candidate: I directed his dissertation on character systems in novelist Philip K. Dick, which he published with University Microfilms as a hardcover book a few years after his doctoral degree. Since his time at UCSD we've been in touch as correspondents and also friends, so when he comes back to the campus once or twice a year for conferences or meetings with students, we have breakfast at the La Valencia Hotel. When he was a student he went by Kim, but about the time he published his Mars Trilogy in the 90s he became Stan. There's another more recent trilogy on climate change, beginning with Forty Degrees of Frost (where one character teaches geology at UCSD), but the most recent novel is New York 2140 (Tor publications, 2017), a projection over a hundred years into the future of the current trends of sea-level rise. My letter to Stan, last summer, is my attempt to describe back to him where the novel admirably succeeds in its aims both artistic and political. Maybe because his writing is so intricate in style and so forcefully political, no director has yet optioned one of his novels for film. However, for me the New York novel is a major achievement, worthy of a grand epic film: urgent conflict, compelling characters, and panoramic visuals of the greatest of all cities in terrible distress.
Read more: To Kim Stanley Robinson on The Drowning of New York
- Written by: Stephanie E Barr
- Category: Fiction
As Meg flipped through the folder, prudently labeled "Estate documents," her fingers stopped automatically between a stock report and the deed for property in Florida, fingering a slim simple envelope with her own name scribbled on the front.
"Mo-o-om," Sandy said from the doorway, startling Meg. She had to fight a senseless urge to hide the envelope. "How long do we have to stay at Grandma's? It stinks."
- Written by: Stephanie E Barr
- Category: Fiction
Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, double stitch, double stitch. The slim worn needle worked, in and out, grab and pull, weaving a web of delicate pink yarn as soft as silk and as dainty as lace. The fingers were gnarled, no strangers to arthritis, the skin dark and the touch sure. In and out, grab and pull, chain, chain and turn.
