While chatting with my father about a sci-fi book he’s reading, I remembered this short bit of free fiction from John Scalzi. Now I share it with you, too.
When the yogurt took over, we all made the same jokes – “Finally, our rulers will have culture,” “Our society has curdled,” “Our government is now the cream of the crop,” and so on. But when we weren’t laughing about the absurdity of it all, we looked into each others’ eyes with the same unasked question – how did we ever get to the point where we were, in fact, ruled by a dairy product?
Our menagerie is about to expand. Not only have three adorable little bunny rabbits taken to frequenting the front yard, but we finally decided on a cat. We went with the slightly older, shy, fluffy and adorable option. We’ll pick him up this weekend so no pics yet, but here’s what he looked like as a kitten.
I asked DALL-E to make you an image of “a white cat with black spots and three rabbits in a garden, layered paper style” and got this.
I believe I mentioned that we are just about ready for a new cat. (Honestly, can I even call myself a writer if I don’t have a cat?) The problem is, how to choose?
We’ve started the search at our local rescue, the one we turned to when we realized that the local strays were breeding up a storm and both they and their progeny needed to be trapped. Now we’re on the other side of that equation, which feels good. Still, there are so many options, each a door into a different version of the future. (It’s kind of fun when you think of it like that.)
Do we go for a kitten, engineered by evolution to be cute (nice) but without any idea what sort of personality they’ll develop as they get older (feels a bit risky)?
Do we go for a more sedate, cuddly cat with a couple of years under its collar, both to know what we’re getting and to skip the crazy kitten “It’s four a.m. and you have toes! I will eatz them!” phase?
Or somewhere in between?
Friday we met a pair of kittens relatively fresh from the trap and still a bit skittish. Yesterday we met the shy adult cuddler. Tonight we meet the in-betweeners.
This is why I don’t visit the animal section in pet stores; I want to help them all.
It’s a lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon and (full transparency here) I find myself sorely lacking in motivation. Since we’ve had a mini “aliens on Earth” theme thisweek, let’s round it out with a short story from Fireside.
“. . . what I like doing best is Nothing.” “How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time. “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and then you go and do it.”
…while Hefner was indeed a man who collected and commodified women and called it “feminism,” it doesn’t change the fact that the joke about reading Playboy for the articles isn’t really a joke. The magazine has published some fantastic interviews, essays, and—most importantly for our purposes here—fiction over the years, the latter thanks in part to expert fiction editor Alice K. Turner…
Since its inception, Playboy has published work by Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Shirley Jackson, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, John Updike, John Cheever, P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur C. Clarke, John Irving, Roald Dahl, Frank Herbert, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Annie Proulx, and many other greats.
Almost all of the stories on this list are available to read online (via sites that will not get you in trouble at work, bonus). So enjoy the classic fiction, folks, while appreciating the venues we now have for sci-fi and other fiction.
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