M.G. Herron
Science Fiction Author in Austin, TX
“You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don’t let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.”
– Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
Copyright is a double-edged sword. On the first edge, it’s amazing that after a certain amount of time, and under certain circumstances, every book, every story, every beautiful creature of the imagination that was ever created will enter the public domain, from which point they will be forever free for all to enjoy at no cost.
Dancing on the other edge of the blade, when it comes to classic SF stories from now defunct genre magazines, even when the stories are out of copyright they are often hard to find, expensive to obtain (in terms of time or money), and rarely available in a modern digital reading experience (phone, tablet, ereader, etc.)
With one exception.
One of the beautiful things about a delusion is that no matter how mad someone gets at it … he can’t do it any harm. Therefore a delusion can be a fine thing for prodding angry belligerents…
I stumbled across the Highlander tv series from 1992 on Amazon Prime. Title sequence music by QUEEN and starring that ponytail wearing dude Adrian Paul and his lovely lady Alexandra Vandernoot.
Man, that opening scene is cheesy, but something about it sucks me in. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE. Immortals waging a secret war for immortality with their swords… The battle of good against evil…
And the truest part is…
Science said it could not be, but there it was.
And whoosh—look out—here it is again!
“The Holes Around Mars” is a classic science fiction short story by Jerome Bixby.
I’ve long been a fan of classic science fiction novels. There’s something ineffable about a book that sticks with generation after generation of new readers. It’s the closest thing we have to time travel, and the stories that have aged well are worth remembering, and even revisiting from time to time.
This guest post from Emmanual Nataf, co-founder of author services marketplace Reedsy, reviews six of the most impactful science fiction novels of the 20th century from a 2019 point of view.
She’d paid good money to see the inevitable …and then had to work to make it happen! A sci-fi short story by Ray Bradbury.
He was a vendor of dreams, purveying worlds beyond imagination to others. Yet his doom was this: He could not see what he must learn of his own!
Red and Slim found the two strange little animals the morning after they heard the thunder sounds. They knew that they could never show their new pets to their parents. “Youth” is a short story by Isaac Asimov in the public domain.
All Dave Miller wanted to do was commit suicide in peace. He tried, but the things that happened after he’d pulled the trigger were all wrong. Like everyone standing around like statues. No St. Peter, no pearly gate, no pitchforks or halos. He might just as well have saved the bullet!
