Archive for Short Stories

Thoughts about three old sf stories

Here are some thoughts about three old sf stories. (These thoughts include spoilers.) The stories aren’t particularly connected to each other except by appearing in the same anthology. Story 1: “Environment,” by Chester S. Geier (1944) The two male human protagonists, who are the only characters in the story, constantly say each other’s names when […]

Additions to my website

A couple months ago, I noticed that for the past six years, a big part of my WordPress website (the section labeled “Hodgepodge”) had consisted of a placeholder page containing a paragraph of lorem ipsum text. Ever since then, I’ve been transferring everything over from my old static pages to WordPress. I’ve now finished doing […]

Asimov and the female robot

I recently skimmed Asimov’s 1969 story “Feminine Intuition,” the second-to-last-written of the Susan Calvin robot stories. (Written about 12 years after the previous one.) The first three-quarters of the story is full of eye-roll-inducing stuff like this: “[…] call it ‘intuitive.’” “An intuitive robot,” someone muttered. “A girl robot?” A smile made its way about […]

Copying a story

Interesting situation with a recent crowdfunded anthology: The editors had sent out the ebook version of the anthology and were preparing to print the printed version, when a reader let them know that one of the stories in the book was a close copy of something published on Tumblr in 2017, specifically the first part […]

Le Guin chronological bibliography, revisited

A while back, I posted a chronological list of Le Guin’s major books, mostly put together by my friend Chaos. But lately, I’ve been wanting an expansion of that list that includes the original publication dates of short stories and essays. So here’s a fuller chronological list, ordered by publication year (and alphabetically within a year), […]