Folding Beijing is a novella written by a Chinese sci-fi writer Hao Jingfang. The English translation by Ken Liu was published in 2015 in Uncanny Magazine and won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. It is described as "a Beijing with different spaces and classes, a city that folds up like Transformers but with [...]
Ken Liu’s “Mono No Aware” is so steeped in cultural nuance that if one is to understand the significance of East Asian culture including the game of Go, calligraphic practice of character writing, or the intangible but undeniable differences between individualistic and collectivistic societies, the story is only a diminutive form of its true meaning. [...]
Welcome my son Welcome to the Machine What did you dream? It's alright we told you what to dream (Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine) The Machine Stops is a short-story written by British writer E.M. Forster 1909. It recounts the fall of a society living nursed in “the Machine”, a global mechanical system built [...]
Ray Bradbury’s short story There Will Come Soft Rains is utterly devoid of humankind. The entire focus of the piece is an empty smart house of the future, its last day of operations, and its fiery destruction. Although the story never states it explicitly, the reason for the absence of humans is due to some [...]
The inspiration for the book The End of Eternity is interesting. At that time, Asimov was teaching at Boston University, and by chance he found a magazine in the library, and when he looked through it, he noticed that an advertisement from the 1920s actually printed an image of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear [...]
The “City of Ember” is a novel that was published in 2003 by Jeanne DuPrau. The story follows a girl by the name of Lina Mayfleet who lives in an underground city, Ember, with her grandmother and little sister. Ember was built as a post-apocalyptic city with enough resources for its residents to survive for [...]
“All Summer in a Day” is a short story written by Ray Bradbury, where the characters live on the sunless planet Venus, where it rains all day, every day. The sun only comes around every seven years, and Margot, the main character seems to be the only one who vividly remembers the sun. Her remembrance [...]
In the future, we will live in a nano-world. Technology so tiny it is, by almost any reasonable measure, invisible. But rather than craft a story in the spirit of a swashbuckling adventure of Luke Skywalker, author Neal Stephenson paints a neo-victorian world and tells the story of a young girl, Nell as the story's [...]
The Robot and the Moth The Robot and the Moth is a short story that was a result of culmination of science-fiction, hyperbole, and philosophy that was written by Vyataute Zilinskaite in 1978, Lithuania. During the Soviet era (1940s), most of Lithuania was controlled by the Red Army, but post-war Vilnius (1953-1988) experienced more Lithuanization [...]
Human, Identity, and the Material World In Automated Valor, August Cole illustrates the changing role of empirical knowledge in relation to the future of warfare and citizenship. The dialogue and warfare imagery within the Commonwealth’s Legion combat team, during an attack from the Chinese infantry, highlights the necessity of verbal, visual and haptic communication as [...]
