Tim Pratt recently won the 2007 Hugo Award for best short story with Impossible Dreams. The story’s main character, Pete, is a huge movie buff that stumbles across a new video store in his neighborhood. He doesn’t seem to understand how he missed the store before, but ventures in and finds an odd selection of movies which he though had been canceled, or made by different directors with different actors. What follows is an interesting commentary on movies which either were never made, were lost, or simply done differently. This is a truly awesome story with an excellently planned ending. It was a pleasure to read from start to finish. From the writing it either the author is a huge movie buff or his writing is so good that you’d never even suggest he wasn’t passionate about movies. Visit the link above and read the full story at Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt
Related Post
Foundation by Isaac AsimovFoundation by Isaac Asimov
It is hard to write a review about one of the most famous science fiction novels of all time, but I will try to do it justice. Asimov originally started the Foundation saga as a series of short stories for Astounding Magazine back in the 1940s. For the novelisation Asimov added the section “The Psychohistorians” to precede the original 4 stories that were published in the magazine. For those reading along with me in chronological order, most of this first story is covered in Foundation and Chaos. (more…)
Neuromancer by William GibsonNeuromancer by William Gibson
William Gibson is credited with starting the cyberpunk genre when he wrote Neuromancer. I’ve had this book on my mental list of books to read for many years now, but hadn’t managed to squeeze it into my reading schedule until now. I’m a bit disappointed that it took me so long to get to, because it was a very enjoyable read.
The setting of Neuromancer is kind of a dirty futuristic world where the line between man and machine has been blurred. Almost everyone has some type of enhancement ranging from boosted reflexes to special chips that let another person experience all of someone else’s senses. Hackers are referred to as “Cowboys,” who jack into the matrix which is a graphical representation of the electronic world. This matrix is much different than that of the 1999 movie The Matrix in that it is not a copy of the real world. I can best describe as a hallucination that represents the underlying systems that are all connected together. Many of the information systems are protected by AI of varying degrees of complexity. (more…)
Isaac Asimov on the Greenhouse EffectIsaac Asimov on the Greenhouse Effect
I just got a Stumble to Pharyngula’s science blog that has a link to a YouTube video of Isaac Asimov. He is speaking about what he thought the top science story of 1988 was. I like running across videos of him speaking because it is nice to put a voice and face to my favorite author. The video goes out of sync about half way through unfortunately. Check it out!
Via Pharyngula