Think Weirder: The Year's Best SciFi Ideas

133 pointsposted 3 months ago
by mooreds
(thinkweirder.com)

82 Comments

ortusdux

3 months ago

Reminds me of The Best American Nonrequired Reading series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_American_Nonrequired_...

Ironically, the 5th ed was required reading in my ENG 101 course. It included a collection of Onion headlines. I will never forget "CIA realizes they have been using black highlighters all these years."

soupfordummies

3 months ago

Oh man, I used to love this series. Weird that this comment just jogged my memory that I dreamed last night they brought it back.

shinymarmot

3 months ago

Bought a copy - unfortunately that site only has a link to an Amazon DRM version. Link to purchase a DRM free epub is available here: https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/think-weirder-is-...

shinymarmot

3 months ago

Ha - immediately taken down. It's fine to not want folks to use the discount anymore, but please provide an option besides renting from Amazon.

mojoe

3 months ago

Publisher here, this link still works for a discounted DRM-free epub: https://thinkweirder.kit.com/products/think-weirder-volume-1...

shinymarmot

3 months ago

Ah sorry, I checked the second time from Firefox with tracking protection on, which just returns a blank page. Works fine on Chrome/Safari.

criddell

3 months ago

Why include DRM in your Amazon ebook? I know Tor's books are DRM-free on Amazon and it would be nice to see more publishers do the same.

mojoe

3 months ago

I did not. It should be DRM-free on Amazon as well!

hn_acc1

3 months ago

Cool. In for one.

Loughla

3 months ago

Perfect. Thanks!

scrollop

3 months ago

Is this in epub?

Doesn't say.

EDIT: Confirmed it is epub (bought it).

385 p

user

3 months ago

[deleted]

throwanem

3 months ago

Good to see a couple stories here I first read in Clarkesworld! If you're a fan of the old-school SF magazine as form, there's no better place to go lately, in my view, and Neil's editorial taste is excellent - if you like this anthology, you'll enjoy the magazine, also. Take a look!

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/

mojoe

3 months ago

Thank you for posting a link to Neil's magazine! I think he's the best short-form editor working in SFF today.

shawn_w

3 months ago

I occasionally encounter a story in Clarkesworld that I don't click with and skip over, but most of them range from like to love (I really hope The Apologists¹ from this month's issue wins some awards).

Even though he makes each issue free to read online, I've been buying it Kobo every month for around a year now to help support the magazine. Too bad the platform doesn't seem to support subscriptions so I don't have to manually buy each issue.

[1] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/thompson_11_25/

TheCoelacanth

3 months ago

IMO, if you like every single story that a magazine publishes, the editor is playing it too safe and not doing their job properly.

The biggest advantage of short fiction magazines over longer form is that it's a lower stakes way to try out new ideas and ways of telling stories and to expose readers to new authors.

Doing that means taking some risks and publishing some stories that won't always land with readers.

davnicwil

3 months ago

I bought a copy on launch and working my way through. There's some really excellent stuff in here, fiction is a great way to analyse and get thinking about how the near-ish future could look, and that's what the theme of this collection is.

dylan604

3 months ago

That's what makes Black Mirror so compelling. It's not flights of fancy with things like FTL traveling through space. It's taking slight twists to the darker side of where our tech leaders are taking us. At least someone is thinking these things through to the end even if our teach leaders are only thinking through to the $$$$. Too bad these stories are never enough to slow things down and used as "oooh, let's not let our tech come to that".

asacrowflies

3 months ago

Yeah a lot like older sci Fi works I think we won't take the warnings. Glad we aren't completely blind to it tho. Remind me of the "1984 was not a manual" memes

jandrese

3 months ago

The meme about the Torment Nexus continues to be worryingly relevant in the modern world.

fragmede

3 months ago

OH that's the fantasy that people like watching that show under! I hate that show's premise because reality is depressing enough, my mind easily conjures up shit going wrong, and (as an adult) I don't need a TV show giving me more nightmare fuel. Plus, that one episode where we all wear glasses that let you delete people by not seeing them seems like a instruction manual to tech giants working on AR glasses. Apple airpod noise cancellation already does this for audio, Apple Vision or Meta glasses doing that for visual pollution seems not that far behind. It would be nice to walk around the neighborhood and not see any billboards. Not seeing people that wrote wrong things on Twitter seems like it's just a GitHub repo away.

dylan604

3 months ago

Meta would never block ads. If anything, they would detect things like billboards and have the AR system replace them with ads bought through Meta's ad system. But blocking them completely so the user has an ad free life experience? Never.

fragmede

3 months ago

Meta wouldn't just not block ads, they'd use the eye tracking system in the apple goggles to charge advertisers for time you spent actually looking at the ads, and then also the ad countdown timer would only count down while you were actually watching the ad. Look away from the ad and the ad stops playing! (See? No black mirror necessary for my brain to dredge out some dystopian ass shit)

ad_hockey

3 months ago

That actually does happen in Black Mirror, in the episode Fifteen Million Merits. There's a sort of deafening siren that goes off if the characters look away from the ad without paying to skip it.

dylan604

3 months ago

> (See? No black mirror necessary for my brain to dredge out some dystopian ass shit)

oops. you poor poor fella. haven't we pretty much gotten to the point that if you've thought about it, someone else has also already thought it and released it? at least, that's my core belief in any thing clever I think I might have just thought.

fragmede

3 months ago

I'm not saying it in a "look at me I'm so smaht" sort of way, I'm saying that as an explanation as to why I don't want to watch black mirror

pbhjpbhj

3 months ago

Maybe one could hack it to block out adverts? There would be a sudden impulse towards "moral conscience" meaning the feature had to be removed.

Creating a World without adverts might be a route to utopia.

fragmede

3 months ago

You're absolutely right! let me get back to you after these messages from Coca cola!

I'm not an absolutist. How would you find out about new products in a world without advertising? There are ads I could do without, sure, but some do perform a useful function.

pbhjpbhj

3 months ago

Information and adverts are different.

I feel HN is probably not conducive to an extended conversation about where the line lies. But, ...

I'd loved to have an extended database of well structured factual information about products.

BrenBarn

3 months ago

Very cool. I often wish for the ability to do something like this but with slightly friendlier GUI tools. In particular I long for a visual tool that has all the power and convenience of a spreadsheet, but supports other backends (like an SQL db or some directory-tree structure like in this post), with well-defined mechanisms for smoothly translating between them. I've looked at a few of the "database management" tools like DBeaver but it's hard to find anything that's as fluid as a spreadsheet.

Semaphor

3 months ago

Included in kindle unlimited, I think that's the most expensive KU book I've seen at 8.68€ normal price

robocat

3 months ago

A shame the front image is so irrationally greebled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble

SciFi art continues its strange stylistic journey.

Makes me want to look through my old SciFi art books.

Edit: The Greeble article refers to the art term diapering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diapering

user

3 months ago

[deleted]

octaane

3 months ago

I agree, but just a heads up: the front images for most scifi novels these days (and for the past few decades) have largely been out of the hands of the writer. The publishing house pretty much unilaterally decides on the cover for marketing reasons.

robocat

3 months ago

Author said they paid for the cover art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879213 (of course that doesn't mean they chose it).

I actually like the art - but I'm somewhat eclectic.

mojoe

3 months ago

Just confirming that yes, I chose the art. It's hard to please everyone with a project like this, I'm glad you like it!

dylan604

3 months ago

What's up with the ? after the author's name in the little blurbs about each story? Is the author of something being published really in question?

mojoe

3 months ago

Are you referring to this?

"How will it use these memories, while simultaneously protecting its young charge, in THE LARK ASCENDING by ELEANNA CASTROIANNI?"

This is just a rhetorical device, I think it's called a 'hook question'. It's probably unclear due to the distracting colors and capitalization.

Animats

3 months ago

Never heard of any of those authors. Is this the year's best ideas, or just the ones for which an unknown aggregator could get republication rights?

mojoe

3 months ago

Hi, I'm the editor, I chose the stories. I read 391 short science fiction stories published last year (all the stories in the big science fiction magazines and a few smaller ones), and selected these sixteen.

None of the authors I reached out to refused to sell me reprint rights, so there was no bottleneck there.

I'm a software engineer who enjoys near-future concept-driven science fiction, so if that's not your thing then you might not agree with my choices. The stories I look for are the ones where I think "wow, this contains ideas that reflect something interesting about reality".

babelfish

3 months ago

Out of curiosity, how do reprint rights work? I assume you give each author some percentage of the proceeds of the book?

I purchased the DRM-free epub :-)

mojoe

3 months ago

Thanks!

I pay a fixed rate up-front for reprint rights, which is a one-time deal. This is mostly because pro rata royalties on an anthology are a pain (I've done this before, it involves sending out lots of tiny single-digit-dollar checks), but also because it's unlikely for me to make back the money I spend on anthology creation (science fiction short stories are a tiny market).

This is a hobby project for me, I'm obsessed with trying to get more people to read science fiction short stories. I spent about $6k creating the anthology (to pay for cover art, reprint rights, proof prints, etc), and I'll probably recoup about half of what I spent? We'll see, I'm currently testing various marketing strategies.

crooked-v

3 months ago

I don't meant to be insulting about it, but I'm a little surprised you would pay for new cover art, but not for a more professional design for the cover in general. The current design seems very obviously 'amateur' to me in a way that I automatically associate with vanity press or other low-quality works, and I think it would have been more beneficial to pay more attention to the layout and typography even if that meant just using stock art.

KingFelix

3 months ago

This is really amazing, I was daydreaming recently and thought how cool it would be to create something like that. I am glad that you've taken the initiative to get it going. Looks awesome will check it out, love Greg Bear too, just recommended Blood Music to a good friend.

twentyfiveoh1

3 months ago

I would love to hear more about your point of view. I love science fiction but short stories always feel off the mark to me. Either fluff that shouldn't have been written, or something so good it's bitter-sweet that you read it and nothing more will come of it. Where did your obsession and love for the format come from?

yencabulator

2 months ago

This is a big part of the appeal of short stories, to me. Either the story is brilliant, or I can skip to the next one quickly; churning through a 400-page book in the hopes of it getting better later is much worse. Or even worse, hearing rumors that it gets better in book #3 of a 5-book series. I hate how current-day publishers feel the need to tell authors to bloat their books because that's what sells. When an author ends up with 1.4 books worth of material, the good answer is to tighten it up, not split it into two books.

Then again, I most love really short stories. It's a challenge I enjoy, to do as much worldbuilding as possible in as few words as I can, while still having a plot and even more to the point telling a story that's bigger inside the reader's imagination that it is on paper.

For example, here's something I wrote way back when, that Joe Stech (the editor/publisher here) published in 2016. 747 words is not even a short story!

https://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/seedsofwar.html

mojoe

3 months ago

I think your feeling is probably the most common one, which is why short science fiction readers are a vanishingly small percentage of the population. One of the reasons novels are much more popular than short fiction (orders of magnitude more popular) is because once you find a world you enjoy you can sit in it for a while. With short fiction as soon as you build up the world in your head it's done and you have to move on to the next one.

I like jumping from world to world more than the average person -- I'm happy getting that new, novel idea and then jumping to the next thing. I understand I'm atypical, but I think there's probably a higher percentage of people like me on HN than there are in the overall population.

twentyfiveoh1

3 months ago

I picked it up :) Your passion for it and the care you put into it makes me want to read it.

mojoe

3 months ago

Thank you, I hope you enjoy it!

financetechbro

3 months ago

You should checkout the short stories by JG Ballard. He does a great job with the medium

robocat

3 months ago

Do you have a link to how we can donate to you or a project you are part of?

I likely won't get the book (space issues).

mojoe

3 months ago

Thank you for offering, but I don't have any channel for donations -- I'm grateful that my software work enables me do projects like this without worrying too much about the funding part.

atlasunshrugged

3 months ago

This is really amazing, thank you for taking the time and spending the resources to share these stories!

micheles

3 months ago

I like far-future concept-driven science fiction, is there something for me too?

mojoe

3 months ago

There are only two stories in the collection that feel a little further out:

"Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling" by David W. Goodman feels like a smart, polished successor to golden age space opera, it's set in a future where the solar system is colonized, but not thousands of years out.

Grant Collier's "The Best Version of Yourself" is also not set very far into the future, but it's a kind of post-human future so it might have far-future vibes for you. This specific story is actually available free online, so you don't have to purchase the anthology to read it: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/collier_07_24/

adaml_623

3 months ago

That would be in, "The Year 3000's Best SciFi Ideas"

jgon

3 months ago

One of the short stories in this collection "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, won the BSFA award for short fiction, the Locus award for Best Short Story, the Nebula award for Best Short Story, and was nominated for a Hugo for Best Short Story. So I think that should pretty firmly answer your question on the relative quality of the works included.

attentive

3 months ago

I guess the reason it won all those awards is the same reason I dislike it as much. It's more of a political pamphlet than a sci-fi. Definitely far from "Best SciFi Ideas".

IvyMike

3 months ago

I'm so happy that you get to discover Greg Egan. If you can find a copy of Axiomatic, start there.

Scarblac

3 months ago

Greg Egan at least is well known in hard science fiction and frequently mentioned on HN.

howdyhowdy123

3 months ago

Not even Greg Egan? He's pretty popular.

user

3 months ago

[deleted]

HardwareLust

3 months ago

Looks great, early reviews are excellent! Wish-listed for sure.

pelagicAustral

3 months ago

Sadly, no PDF version available... meh...

mojoe

3 months ago

email me at joe@thinkweirder.com and I'll get you a PDF!

raincole

3 months ago

I know this site is full of ads, but isn't this a little bit too much? It's just a link to buy a book on Amazon. At least pretend to have hacker spirit, wrap it as "how I use {insert open source book layout software} to make a book" and sell DRM-free epub or something. Where is the usual HN hatred towards DRM, Amazon and copyright...

mojoe

3 months ago

I'm the editor, and I actually used LaTeX to typeset the book and wrote my own Python software to keep track of all the story metadata while I was evaluating stories over the course of the last year, I should write a post about that :)

dang

3 months ago

Please do! and email us at hn@ycombinator.com if you submit it to Hacker News.

oraphalous

3 months ago

I bought the book - looks good! Would be keen to know which magazines they were originally published in. I feel you should include those references in the book (forgive me if I've missed them.)

mojoe

3 months ago

All of the source references are in the section called "Permissions" at the end of the book, this is a common way that anthologies do references but I understand it is easy to miss!

user

3 months ago

[deleted]