Writers of the Future, Volume 40

Writers of the Future , Volume 40 is this year’s collection of sci-fi and fantasy stories from emerging authors, illustrated by emerging artists. I’ve been reading and reviewing these since WotF 31. This year’s collection includes a loyal virtual-cat companion, some not-so-imaginary friends, and a robot companion who might be a remorseless planet-killing AI.  This annual anthology always includes new talent in scifi and fantasy, as well as articles from established names in this genre.

Last year’s collection, Writers of the Future 39, had a specfic feel for me. There are definitely elements of speculative fiction in this year’s collection, but for me the focus was on friendships and loyalty, across all different worlds and times. The Edge of Where My Light is Cast, by Sky McKinnon, tells the story of a virtual-reality cat searching for her missing person. If your own kitty friend waits at the door for you or screams piteously if you take too long in the shower, you’ll be touched by this one.

Life and Death and Love in the Bayou, by Stephannie Tallent, is more supernatural than scifi. It’s horror-adjacent, not strictly horror though there’s a bit more blood and injury than I usually enjoy. The real horror comes from an abusive boyfriend, not the old power of the bayou. Fans of the bayou vibes, vengeance, and blood payment in this one should read The Quarter Storm, by Veronica G Henry, too.

Ok, so I almost skipped Five Days Until Sunset, by Lance Robinson, because I picked up religious overtones at the start. I usually deeply dislike fantasy that invents a new belief system, for the usual reasons, and faith in scifi can be iffy too, but here we have a solid specfic future, in which faith is used to highlight a moving story about how humans cope with change.

Settlers awaken from deep sleep on seed ships to colonize a new planet, but find that nothing is as as they expected. Earlier arrivals have left messages and released Earth animals and seeds, but there’s no sign of the other expected human colonists. I enjoyed this story a lot because the characters didn’t find themselves in a completely harsh, unlivable hellscape, but it was crucially different than their expectations, and they were all facing a shared and unexpected setback. The would-be colonists must defeat infighting, disappointment and misinformation, not murderous aliens or acid oceans or whatevs, which helped make a great story of cooperation and risk, set in with a wild space landscape. The hard scifi explanations for conditions in a distant galaxy, combined with   the relatable anxieties and disappointed expectations made a compelling story.  Possibly my favorite from this year’s Writers of the Future collection.

Butter Side Down, by Kal M, was also an amazing story. It’s told as investigative transcripts, which isn’t always my style. I’ve almost never read an epistolary novel without secretly wishing I was just reading the story… But I was pulled in by this intriguing account of a lone human member of a spaceship crew on trial for maybe saving a murderous AI. I mean, it becomes pretty clear that Joe did rescue a planet-destroyer, but wasn’t just a dumb human doing silly reckless human things? Doesn’t he have a pattern of dramatic rescues of crew acquaintances? It’s a really wonderful short story of reckless compassion and optimism.

Another surprising friendship can be found in The Imagalisk, by Galen Westlake. An old man, facing dementia and confusion, moves into a care home full of others with memory problems. Here, he re-meets his childhood imaginary friends, and discovers that almost all the residents have invisible childhood companions returned to them for the last season of their lives. A greedy staff member wants to find and sell off the source of this special power, and the seniors try to hold off their mental confusion and physical weakness long enough fight for their friends. Another moving story of unusual friendships in this year’s Writers of the Future.

Posted in Books | Leave a comment

Merge Coffee

Merge Coffee is a cute lite merging game with a coffeeshop theme, from CulinarySchools.org. This is a low-pressure match and merging game, with a calm coffee shop feeling.

In  Merge Coffee, players have a 7X7 grid on which to place coffee beans, cups of coffee, fancy drinks and pastries. The goal is just to match and merge identical items to upgrade them into higher-level creations. Light roast beans become darker roast beans etc.

Placement is key to a high score, as chaining multiple merges leads to bonus points, and  to that satisfying board-clearing. But some items are specials that lead to items appearing all over the board, so there’s no stress about perfect placement. Bags of coffee beans create random beans in random spots, a coffeemaker creates drinks, and a toaster oven creates bakery treats.

Coffee items have little level numbers associated with the cute coffeeshop art, but players need to place them on the board to see the level number. So there’s an overall theme of light roasts become dark roasts, and coffee drinks merging to become fancier coffee drinks, but on my first playthough, it wasn’t immediately intuitive which items merged into which new ones. This added to the unlock fun, but it took me a few plays to  get good chains going.

On the side of the grid are 3 customers, waiting for their coffee orders. I was worried this wouldn’t be a chill game, when I saw a mechanic focused on customers waiting for their coffee shop orders. I was looking for a chill game, and I don’t find time-management restaurant sims relaxing at all!  Angry customers are not relaxing! But the customers in Coffee Merge won’t turn red and storm out if you take too long to fix their drinks. They’re relaxed and calm too, in this chill little game, so making their lattes and cappuccinos is really about getting more points.

With every successful merge, you’re rewarded with a higher score, and as the game goes on, you can unlock more elaborate drinks and treats. Coffee Merge has fun coffee aesthetics, with enough placement choices to make it interesting and stress-free.

CulinarySchools.org also has other cute food-themed games, like BBQ Roast that I played and reviewed a few months ago, Candy Fiesta, a match-3 I posted about on my book blog, and a cute candy version of 2048. (I also played and reviewed 2048, and the evil Fibonacci version, a while ago)

 

Posted in Boston | Leave a comment

Timelines of “The Day Tripper”

I have to warn you that James Goodhand’s new novel The Day Tripper has a pretty rough start. At the beginning, manic pixie dream med student Holly is just too perfect to take seriously and her man-child boyfriend Alex isn’t particularly pleasant or relatable either. What I’m saying is, read this one on a delayed train so you have no choice but to power through the rough start, because it’s worth the slog later on.

The morning after a perfect date with Holly and an awful barfight, 19-year-old Alex wakes up, and it’s 15 years later. Each day, he pops into and out of time, waking up at a different point in his life. This is still recognizably his life, he has the same features and same possessions, but his adult life is clearly a wreck. This could have been a bit stronger if Alex had been a more developed character in the beginning, I felt more curiosity than concern for him as he wakes up in a sad bedsit, in a terrible marriage, in prison, homeless in his car, etc. Each morning, Alex discovers another depressing aspect of his future life, and even though the details are quite sketchy at first, it becomes depressingly clear that he brought this on himself.

Teen Alex loves a night a out, but aging Alex is a fullblown alcoholic. When he finds himself in different times, sometimes he wakes up almost entirely focused on getting his next drink. Sometimes Alex knows he should call Holly, change his job, tidy his apartment, but he’s just gonna have one drink first… which quickly becomes another… The author expresses the path of least resistance so well, which works here on a scifi level as the timestream rejects changes, and on a moving and relatable level for any reader who’s tried to change their life.

There aren’t a lot of characters in this novel, instead most of the story comes from seeing the same characters on different paths, at different times.  There’s a scene when Alex is in the hospital with covid, made all the more dramatic because he’s popped in from a pre-pandemic point and has no idea what’s happening, and he recognizes Holly as a masked doctor. This Holly remembers him as an old boyfriend, not a tragic love or a horrible ex, and it’s enough for Alex to see she’s alive in this timeline.  We also see a young boy, Jazz, and all the ways his life could unfold in different timelines.

There’s eventually kind of a vague explanation of the rules, but like the best timey-wimey novels, the author doesn’t waste a lot of story time on explanation. The focus is on Alex, his growth and his choices within his ability.  Alex is eventually able to unlock the sources of his trauma, but there’s no easy time-travel reset here, he doesn’t have the ability to delete the awful events in his life, just to find a way to carry them.

Some first-novel wobbles, but overall, worth reading.  Pairs well with Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, for using time travel to get just a little more good time with a beloved, aging parent, and Mark Laurence’s Limited Wish for time-travel around marrying the right girl and Cambridge.

Posted in Boston | Leave a comment

She’s Everything. He’s Just Doug. – The Atlantic

She’s Everything. He’s Just Doug. – The Atlantic

Three decades after Hillary Rodham agonized over taking her husband’s name, absolutely no one seems to care that Kamala Harris isn’t an Emhoff. Underneath all the sound and fury, an idea that was once considered radical has slipped into silent acceptance.

I love this part of the article because I didn’t change my name when I got married… I kept my last name from my father, Doug.

Posted in Boston | Leave a comment

Time Travel, Aging, Artificial Intelligence

Current me, bringing news of the future to myself in, say, the mid ’90s: I have terrible news for you, Past Self. When you get older, you’ll lose some detail vision.

Past me, a sweet summer child: Oh no! Am I going to be blind? Am I going to need even bigger glasses?

Future news: Nah, it’s fine, they’re making thinner lenses all the time. Plus progressives will come out so by the time you need bifocals, you won’t even have a line across your eyes. You’ll be able to read just fine, but you won’t be able to count the fingers in a group photo.

Past me: That’s fine. Why would anyone care about counting–

Future news: As you get older, there will be more and more self-checkouts where you swipe your card yourself to pay.

Past me: That doesn’t sound so bad…

Future news: Each brand is just slightly different and they’re always a solid, dark color so none of your tricks will work, and it’ll be hard to see exactly where and which angle to swipe your card, so every time you try to pay, it takes you just a little bit longer than everyone else, and a cashier sighs at you.

Past me: That’s really annoying.

Future news: And in the future, AI art exists so whenever you see literally any image, you can never tell if the details are a bit hard to make out, just like the details on literally every thing in the real world, or if the entire thing’s fake. The entire internet is AI fakeout images now, and there’s no way to tell. Ever.

Posted in Boston | Leave a comment

Goals

What if someday I made a cool indie game, that would be amazing! What if then I finished it and released it, and then I had a game out in the world? What if I did it again and I had multiple games finished and for sale? What if I somehow had a big enough place to store and organize the stock of all my games? What if I had enough local shows to need banners and tablecloths and business cards? And what if I had enough mail orders to need packing and mailing supplies? And what if I got enough sales on Amazon to need special Bezos barcode stickers?

What if I spent my whole freaking day organizing boxes of game stuff and putting things them in other boxes…

Posted in Boston | Leave a comment

Contain Multitudes, Y’all

It’s a typical day at school, where I’m observing a junior teacher and helping her with her ESL lesson plans. I’m giving her some suggestions, some conversation prompts, some easily-modified printables for activities, and other general resources that I happened to have in my GDrive.

“Your activities are so interactive!” she said, “They’re like games for English!”

“That’s probably because I design card games when I’m not teaching.”

Posted in Boston | Leave a comment

Boring and Stupid

When we bought a fixer-upper,  we knew it would require work, and so it was kind of funny when one day in the fall, the closet collapsed and all my clothes fell down. I  packed up everything that I wasn’t actively wearing. Just for a few weeks, you know, until we put up new shelves. But see, the closet looked like a wreck after the shelf was pulled out of the wall, so I took down all the weird bits of shelf, spackled over the holes and repainted the closet. It was boring and stupid.

Then I measured the closet and worked out what size closet bar would fit in a weird trapezoidal closet. I thought my husband would be able to do it, I kind of thought this was a gender-linked ability. When every other guy I know was taught how to use studfinders (step one, point it at yourself and say “got one!” step two, laugh hysterically, step three, hang up shelves), my husband must have cut class that day. So we tried to hire someone and there was another delay and another delay and this whole thing is getting too stupid and boring.

On the subject of boring and stupid, the windows are scheduled for repair too, but for additional boring reasons, that’s delayed too! So if I don’t want to freeze like a Dickensian orphan this winter, I needed to do something about the icy cold drafts. So we bought some kind of plastic that you stick over the windows to seal them. You stick it on and then tape it and then seal it with heat from a hairdryer.

So, ok, I do OWN a hairdryer, but remember how everything that’s non-essential is in an unlabeled, temporary box since I don’t have a closet now? And I CAN blow dry my hair, but I also can sleep 20 more minutes, so right into the unlabeled nonessential boxes it went. In my defense, when I shoved it in a box somewhere, I didn’t know that one could fix windows with a hairdryer.

Anyway, this is all so boring and stupid, but I sealed up the windows really well. It’s perfectly sealed, no leaks or drafts at all. I did a second layer, too, just to be absolutely sure, and I’m so proud of myself.

I enjoyed being warm for a good 48 hours before our dishwasher started smoking, with a terrible smell of burned plastic, and all my windows are perfectly sealed shut.

Posted in Boston | Leave a comment

LFL Finds

Found this in the Little Free Library by the beach near us.

Harold: That’s perfect for you!

Me: Yeah! Wait… how do you know that? Do you know this Roman mystery series*? Do you know what a Vestal is?

Harold: I mean, I know what ancient columns look like.

*I’m a dedicated SPQR and Marcus Corvinus fan, but have only read a couple Gordianus books.

Posted in Boston | Leave a comment

Lies & Weddings ARC

Lies and Weddings, by Kevin Kwan, contains the same kind of frothy lifestyle fun as the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy. Basically everyone in this novel is constantly wearing something beautiful and constantly eating something delicious. There’s social climbing, secret relationships, deep love, manipulation, huge financial secrets, and inner discoveries, with nods to classic British novels. It’s a manners novel, and a comedy, and an inheritance drama, all at once.

The three adult Gresham siblings are fabulously wealthy and privileged children of an English earl and a Hong Kong fashionista.  Augusta, Rufus and Beatrice have had everything, but now their mother’s constant out-of-control spending on her designer projects and their father’s secret borrowing might be bringing that to an end. So, they’ve got the title and the estate (mostly) and the famous names and connections, but the actual cash is gone. Well, I mean, they still have way more money than you or I do, of course. Rich People Problems, you know.

But their mother has a solution — the three children children can marry money. Her oldest, Augie, is already marrying a European title, with the social and financial benefits on their way to her, and her other two children can get moving on seducing some cash. It’s a classic plot, with Lady Gresham as a wealthier and much more stylish Mrs. Bennet. Rufus, the middle child and only son is in love with the girl next door, in a romance with serious Doctor Thorn vibes. But Lady Gresham is determined that only an insanely wealthy heiress will do for her perfect (newly cash-strapped) son, and sets her plans in motion. Of course, I loved all the matchmaking machinations and all the hyperwealthy characters, but personally, I absoluting loved meeting Martha Dung, a venture-capital genius and an amazing addition to the British inheritance drama.

The girl next door, Eden Tong, is a doctor and daughter of a doctor. The Greshams are, naturally, so wildly rich that a mere doctor isn’t on their level. She’s basically the daughter of the servants. Eden has — of course — a  perfect heart of gold, working as a busy NHS doctor, with concerns for the working classes.  (Yes, it’s a bit much but that’s kind of the book’s vibe.) Eden was perfect and pretty and understanding through the whole book. I simultaneously understood completely why Rufus loved her, and I didn’t understand why she wanted to be friends with Augie and Bea at all.

In all the frothy lifestyle fun and tea-spilling drama of Lies and Weddings, though, there’s a thoughtful element, too. A few times, Eden is mistaken for the maid or for an assistant, and although no one specifically says they assumed she was staff because she’s Chinese, it’s still there. There are sharp observations about class and expectations throughout the novel.

Lies and Weddings is such a fun read, with page-turning pacing. First, there’s an ultrarich, ultra-dramatic teaser scene, but the novel basically opens with a glamorous wedding, where the Greshams’ oldest daughter is marrying a title and the wealth behind it. The book also closes with a glamorous wedding, and without spoilers, there’s a nice symmetry between the two weddings, the two brides, two grooms, the money,  the expectations, etc. In between, the whole novel skims between gossipy intrigue and a British inheritance drama, straight out of reading list of classic British manners novels that Corinna Ko-Tung recommends to social-climbing Kitty Pong.  Huge wealth, huge losses, secret paternity, and a mysterious pregnancy test are all key to the plot, with plenty of time for beautiful settings, tempting food and high fashion, in that fantastic Kevin Kwan way.

Posted in Books, Boston | Tagged | Leave a comment