SFFreader

“Allamagoosa” is a short story by Eric Frank Russell that holds the distinction of winning the first Hugo ever awarded for Short Story (1955). The story is an enjoyable satire of military bureaucracy. The captain and crew of the spaceship Bustler have to account for every single item they had been provided when […]

I’m a big Roger Zelazny fan, but I hadn’t read “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” before now. No one writes quite like him, but if I had to compare him to a current author, I’d pick Neil Gaiman, since gods and myth find major roles in writings by both of them. […]

Ah, Tor Doubles. Gotta love ‘em.
In the future, things have changed a bit. Wars have occurred, resulting in a fragmented America. “No Truce With Kings” starts in a military compound in the Pacific Northwest, where skirmishes still happen. In fact, the compound has been attacked in the past from every direction […]

“None So Blind” is a joy to read. It’s very short, and the central SF idea in it (that unlocking the brain’s real power triggers the next step in human evolution) is something we’ve seen before. But this story’s charm is in its presentation. It is like a poem - a kind […]

The Kirinyaga series consists of ten stories which were originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Fantasy and Science Fiction magazines between 1988 and 1996. Nearly every story garnered a Hugo nomination, with two of them winning the award: “Kirinyaga” (Short Story, 1989) and “The Manamouki” (Novelette, 1991). “The Manamouki” is on the […]

Vernor Vinge is one of the best active practitioners of true Hard SF. He’s won four Hugo Awards, for the novels Marooned in Realtime (2003) and A Deepness in the Sky, and for the novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High” (2002) and “The Cookie Monster” (2004).
“The Cookie Monster” is one of many modern SF […]

A journalist from Earth named Tam Olyn is dispatched to cover a brewing battle on a planet called St. Marie. Olyn, however, is far from unbiased. Because of a previous incident involving some troops from a group called the “Friendlies”, he is not at all fond of them. The Friendlies make up […]

I so thoroughly enjoyed A Game of Thrones, the first volume of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, that I eagerly read “Sandkings” the first time I came across it. I found the novelette to have the same clear, readable prose style as his novel. Another time through, I enjoyed it all the more.
In […]

“A Boy and His Dog” is a novella set in a post-apocalyptic future. Vic, a 16 year-old “solo”, has teamed with a dog named Blood. They forage together, they watch movies together, and they talk quite a bit, thanks to the telepathic connection they share. Their main preoccupations are survival and sex, […]