Saturday, August 16, 2025

Science Fiction: Why Tomorrow Factory By Rich Larson Is Lots Of Fun


 (Drivebycuriosity) - Rich Larson belongs to the up and coming writers in the science fiction genre. His short collection "Tomorrow Factory", published 2018, is lots of fun ( amazon). The collected 23 stories span a considerable bandwidth and are all crispy, quirky & cool. 

I have two favorites:

Innumerable Glimmering Lights" follows octopus-like intelligent beings who live in an ocean below miles of ice. One of them is ambitious and wants to find out what is beyond the ice - causing a lot of trouble. Lawson invented a plausible ecologic & social system of smart submarine beings who have their own ways to communicate - a master piece inspired by evolution, biology & chemistry. 

The Ghost Ship Anastasia: The crew of a spaceship tries to recover a very bizarre spaceship, leading to strange experiences - a horror story

 
I also enjoyed: 

"You make Pattaya": A funny con story about a farang and a local hooker set in Thailand`s sex capital 

"Circuits": An AI is piloting a train circling a wasted planet - again and again 

"Every so often": A Time travel story

"An Evening with Severyn Grimes":  A billionaire gets abducted by a group of radical terrorists. A slick near-future thriller  

"Datafall" In the past a whole village was excited when a circus came to town. In this story the population of a peninsula is excited because they get - for a very short time - access to the internet and the cloud. I remember when I got my internet access in the late 90s - what a change!   

"The Sky didn`t load today": Surreal cyper-punk 

"Atrophy": Another horror story - set in a radioactive contaminated world 

I am convinced that the rest caters many readers with different tastes. 


 

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