Search Results for: fiction

What the Smartphone Is Doing to Fiction

“There’s nothing worse for plots than cellphones. Once your characters have one, there’s no reason for them to get lost or stranded. Or miss each other at the top of the Empire State Building. If you want anything like that to happen, you either have to explain upfront what happened to the phones or you have to make at least one character some sort of manic pixie Luddite who doesn’t carry one.”

Rainbow Rowell and other authors discuss the effect of technology on their work (New York Times). Read more on tech in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: nseika, Flickr

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Reading List: 6 Stories for the Science-Fiction Newbie

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Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She also happens to love science fiction, so she put together a #longreads list for sci-fi newbies.

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Have you heard? Science fiction is “in”—nerds at the movies, nerds everywhere. This is thrilling if you are familiar with the genre, but what if you never got into sci-fi in the first place? Where would you start?

Since its inception (ha), speculative fiction has worked as social commentary, satire, and a creative answer to the question “What if?” Here are my personal picks to get you started.

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1. Nightfall, Isaac Asimov (1941)

No sci-fi list is complete without Asimov, and not only due to his creation of the Laws of Robotics. If you like this story, I would suggest moving straight on to his “robopsychologist” Susan Calvin stories.

2. The Veldt, Ray Bradbury (1950)

Bradbury, of Martian Chronicles fame and beyond, writes here about the danger of integrating technology too far into human developmental psychology.

3. Bloodchild, Octavia Butler (1995)

A look at the symbiotic relationship between aliens and humans. If you’ve seen any horror movie featuring extraterrestrials, you’ve pretty much seen them all, but sci-fi stories like this one explore more “alien” ideas than the simple “monster from space” trope.

4. Robot, by Helena Bell (2012)

Robots! Here’s a short and wicked story from Bell, a contemporary sci-fi writer who touches on slavery, mortality, and the horror of a slow decline in life.

5. The Country of the Blind, H.G. Wells (1904)

Wells (War of the Worlds, Time Machine) is the oldest pick on my list, and this story imagines just what its title implies.

6. Understand, by Ted Chiang (1991)

Chiang addresses PTSD, advancements in medical science, and the horror of not trusting your own mind. This story is probably one of the best “straight” sci-fi examples on this list—the clear “What if?” develops steadily, and pushes the reader along to its surprising conclusion. Entire novels have been written in this style—Max Barry’s Machine Man is my personal favorite.

Bonus Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Suggestions

I also recommend this list for more great reading material, and if you want to start with something cyberpunky, look out for Neal Stephenson or William Gibson—they’re mostly novelists, and definitely worth your time.

(cover via umbc.edu)

Reading List: 6 Stories for the Science-Fiction Newbie

Longreads Pick

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She also happens to love science fiction, so she put together a #longreads list for sci-fi newbies.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 20, 2013

Your Latest Fiction Picks: Lorrie Moore, Tor.com and Taddle Creek

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In case you’ve missed them, here’s a quick list of some of the most recent #longreads #fiction picks from the community:

1. “The Side Sleeper” (Emily Schultz, Taddle Creek)

2. “We Have Always Lived On Mars”(Cecil Castellucci, Tor.com)

3. “Paper Losses”(Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker, 2006)

4. “Burning Bright” (Ron Rash, Ecotone Journal, 2008)

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction

Longreads Pick

How Quentin Tarantino created the film that launched his career and redefined movies in the 1990s:

“Just seven years earlier, in 1986, Tarantino was a 23-year-old part-time actor and high-school dropout, broke, without an apartment of his own, showering rarely. With no agent, he sent out scripts that never got past low-level readers. ‘Too vile, too vulgar, too violent’ was the usual reaction, he later said. According to Quentin Tarantino, by Wensley Clarkson, his constant use of the f-word in his script True Romance caused one studio rep to write to Cathryn Jaymes, his early manager:

“Dear Fucking Cathryn,

“How dare you send me this fucking piece of shit. You must be out of your fucking mind. You want to know how I feel about it? Here’s your fucking piece of shit back. Fuck you.”

Author: Mark Seal
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Feb 13, 2013
Length: 35 minutes (8,936 words)

When Science Meets Fiction

Longreads Pick

Examining how science is used in science fiction and popular TV shows:

“Of course, there are plenty of groan-worthy gaffes in the Buffyverse, too, as there are in just about any form of popular entertainment that dares to inject a bit of science. That’s why nerd-gassing is such a popular and time-honored pastime among the geekerati. I went to see J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot with five PhD physicists, and the post-movie nerdgassing reached Olympic proportions. Their unanimous conclusion: ‘Red matter’ didn’t have to happen.

“Some people are in favor of this kind of sci-fi handwaving, as detailed in this post by Steven Padnick at Tor.com. I think Padnick is right in principle (science fiction should stretch the imagination and look beyond what is currently possible, and you don’t want to bog down your story with lengthy technical explanations) and wrong in the specific example of red matter, which is so ridiculous that it actually pulls the viewer out of the story — something no self-respecting creator of a fictional world wants to do.”

Published: Jan 27, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,481 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Elliott Holt's Favorite New Yorker Fiction

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Elliott Holt‘s first novel, You Are One of Them, will be published by The Penguin Press in June 2013

One of my two favorite short stories published in 2012 is “Member/Guest” by David Gilbert, which appeared in The New Yorker the week of November 12, but since that story is not available online without a subscription, I present five other amazing stories published by The New Yorker this year. I’ve been a subscriber to the magazine for as long as I can remember, but I’m glad to see more of the fiction available online for free. Some of those free stories are by masters of the form—including George Saunders, Antonya Nelson, and Alice Munro*, who wrote my other favorite story of the year, “Amundsen.” When I open The New Yorker to find a new Munro story, my heart skips a beat. It’s like having an old friend show up for an unexpected visit.

1. “Amundsen,” by Alice Munro in The New Yorker

2. “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” by George Saunders

3. “Literally,” by Antonya Nelson

4. “The Proxy Marriage,” by Maile Meloy

5. “Fischer vs. Spassky,” by Lara Vapnyar

*no one who knows me should be surprised to see an Alice Munro story among my picks

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Photo credit: Rebecca Zeller

Longreads Best of 2012: Elliott Holt’s Favorite New Yorker Fiction

Longreads Pick

Elliott Holt‘s first novel, You Are One of Them, will be published by The Penguin Press in June 2013.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 20, 2012

Instafiction's Jeremy Bushnell: My Top Fiction Longreads of 2011

Jeremy P. Bushnell is the editor-in-chief of Instafiction.org, which links to a quality short story each weekday.  He stockpiles many other links at his blog, Raccoon.  He’s also on Twitter

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Backbone,” David Foster Wallace (The New Yorker)

During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace made massive contributions to the worlds of fiction and nonfiction alike, and I still miss his presence in the world acutely. The Pale King was a towering book of my summer, and although it didn’t quite yield the pleasures that a truly finished work might have, many of its fragments and episodes had the power of great short stories.  See, for instance, this chapter, published as a standalone piece in The New Yorker.

Zone One,” Colson Whitehead (excerpt, Esquire)

Whitehead’s Zone One is a great 2011 novel about government, bureaucracy, urban space, and human population.  Oh yeah, it has zombies in it, too.  Esquire gave us the first 20 pages—detailing a four-zombie attack on the book’s protagonist—right before Halloween, but it’s just as good a read now, at year’s end.

Female Explosion Syndrome” Jessica Forcier (New Delta Review)

Women all over the globe begin spontaneously combusting.  Men don’t.  Feminist?  Fabulist?  All of the above?  Either way, this one stuck with us.  Thanks to New Delta Reviewfor publishing it.

The Empty Room,” Jonathan Lethem (Paris Review)

Lethem hasn’t put out a short story collection since 2006’s How We Got Insipid, but he’s still writing short fiction, and this year he placed a memorable tale of domestic collapse with the Paris Review.  The setup: Upon moving his family into a sprawling farmhouse, a father makes a decision: one room will remain empty. “The empty room is like a living organ in our family’s house,” he claims, although in actuality it becomes the hollow core around which the family implodes.   

Becoming Deer,” Rachel Levy (PANK Magazine)

This fall, in the Chicago Reader, our Associate Editor Jamie Yates praised this story (from PANK Magazine) as a story that straddles the line between “the realistic and the mythical” and derives strength from each. You could also say it does the same with the line between the human and the animal. All this line-crossing makes the story into a kind of tangled skein, humming with tension. Taut, terse, and eerie: the best of a certain kind of experimental work. 

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We also featured tons of good stuff this year that didn’t make its first appearance in 2011, so if you’re looking for more good fiction from the past, check out our Instafiction “Editor’s Picks” tag.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

clampants tumblepants: My Top Longreads of 2011 (Non-fiction)

clampants tumblepants: My Top Longreads of 2011 (Non-fiction)