6.17 / Science and Fiction Issue
Science and Fiction: From the Special Issue Editors
Let’s face it: Science fiction gets a bad rap. Just utter the words and people’s eyes glaze over as they imagine literature built on formulaic plot twists, over-explanatory dialogue, and two-dimensional character archetypes piloting space shuttles to distant galaxies. As “serious writers,” we’re meant to avoid sci-fi like it was [...]
Let’s Bring Abraham Lincoln Back to Life
I was watching television when Charlie came up from the basement and announced that he’d done it this time all right, that he’d brought Abraham Lincoln back to life. I held up my spoon—careful not to overturn the ice cream perched precariously on its tip—in a rousing salute. On the [...]
Suits
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They give me a suit with long white fur and a set of fake teeth that are so big I can’t talk with them in my mouth. Before I put the suit on, I have to take off my bra and underpants and struggle into this tiny [...]
Android
Android
they will know what Freud
wanted to know
so
they can totalitarian
you with robotic
brain cells.
They will put microchips
into a crow
first,
later into you,
a few
and then many.
Android,
bionic
as you are,
if you complain about
freedom of conscience,
science,
they will say
lunatic.
A Sliver of Sky
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We have been sitting watching it for eight hours now, that thin sliver of sky. Grandfather has wrapped himself in old sacks, the dusty canvas sends out little puffs of chaff every time a raindrop hits it. His hat is pulled down low over his face, and [...]
In the End, When She Looked For Novelties of Fact, She Found None or Are You There Galileo, It’s Me, Jane
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When pressed, Jane will not admit that she is obsessed with Princeton’s former M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science, Thomas Kuhn, author of the seminal work Structure of Scientific Revolutions. She will only admit publicly that she thinks, were the circumstances different, they [...]
An Extraordinary Adventure that Befell Camilo Roldán in a Trailer
for Constance Penley
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EXT – NEW MEXICO – NIGHT
Green pieces blown into reflective angles, the Milky Way is a tree, innumerable signal mirrors.
I stumble out of my trailer into the parsimony of cacti surrounding my house and themselves with barbs. Tequila breath and bong hits watching Star Trek [...]
Experimental Breeds: Bears, Clothed in Rumpled Hoods, Pipe “Rapunzel” to the Sleeping Pigs
Generation 1
Generation 1: Rumpelstiltskin X Rapunzel
Her hair was lovely, part gold, part silk. It grew quickly, several meters per day. When harvested, it created shimmering fabrics, coveted by the well-to-do, and fetching fantastic prices.
Her eyes, however, were dark and ancient. Her face, like that of a woodland dwarf’s, was [...]
Two Poems
Man Dies While Building an Opera House
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The crane tips. Slowly at first,
as if time might triumph over gravity,
as if the pointing and oh-my-god-s
of the workers could form a hand to damper
cacophony’s mouth of cable and steel.
But the crane quickens, slips the man like a drop of [...]
Two Poems
ROBOTIC COMPATIBILITY
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You are not like the others before.
Your connections are not bent, your filaments
Are clean, your nand gates snap shut with conviction.
I’ve been attached to a dozen other units
And never before have my registers been so
Electrified with the thought of working
Input to output, output to input,
With any [...]
Two Poems
Swollen Empty
When the meltdown came, it smelled
red. Smoke the color of thunder.
The sirens are teaching me. This is how to panic
before you’ve met truth. Miscarry a summer.
The blood clots. My sisters and I tangle
like weeds in the heat. We’re getting bad
at the business of belief. Our stomachs swollen
empty. I [...]
A Play in Three Acts
Dramatis Personae:
Tornado: Ageless and naked.
Attorney: smallish, hunchback, forehead shines like the water of a smooth lake, wears a suit pulled tight, buttons like rivets about to give, speaks out of the right side of his mouth.
Police Interrogator: wears a fake mustache, trench coat, etcetera.
Police Investigator: combat boots, traditional police [...]
Robot Creation Myths
Robot Creation Myth 1
Facts:
Our data storage contains no record of our creation.
Our data storage contains the words creator and creation.
We conclude that a creator entered the words creator and creation into our data storage.
Question:
What is the nature of this creator?
Creation Hypothesis 1:
First, we looked, and we saw. We knew what was in our data storage. [...]
The Fifty-Foot Woman
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Five Feet Eleven Inches
Karen noticed the thinning hair on the top of Sam’s head, and the image captured her attention to the point that she couldn’t focus on what he was saying. She’d never seen him from that angle before. When Sam left the kitchen, Karen stood [...]
The Heaven on Earth Campaign
A beautiful girl at my gym has SCIENCE, all caps, in black, childish script,
tattooed between her hip bones. Someone else there is becoming female,
male-chested and still shaving her beard, her long silky blonde hair leads
the way like a vision. Einstein called quantum entanglement “spooky,”
that linking across space which keeps us [...]
Sonic
TOKYO, 12/21/2010 — Japanese scientists said Tuesday they had produced a mouse that tweets like a bird in a genetically engineered “evolution” which they hope will shed light on the origins of human language.
We were only trying for a cure, or even a disease. Our funding guaranteed us six more [...]
I Hope We Have a Hammock One Day
Really, truly, I do. Have I told you? My father cut down the twin pines today. The tall, thick pines that were supposed to support our hammock. One fell over the south barbed wire fence, but it didn’t matter because the south fence (all the lengths of it) needed to [...]