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mjfisher

Seems a good time to link to the well-loved short sci-fi story "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson:

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

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I haven't read or thought of this in a long time. It's a really good short story. Thank you for sharing!

Some of my other short story favorites:

- The Egg, http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

- MMAcevedo, https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

- Last Contact, https://zestfullyblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/last-contact-by-s...

Wow. Loved the story you're responding about. Read it a few times since first hearing about it a long while back. Kinda surprised tho that your list hasn't got one single thing I'd read before. Thank you for the excellent list.

The Egg is by Andy Weir who also wrote the Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary. I recommend the first and third of these, Artemis is just okay in my opinion.

He also wrote the (now finished) webcomic Casey and Andy. I don't think I've ever shown it to an engineer who didn't instantly love it.

Nitpick: the title of the qntm story is "Lena", not "MMAcevedo" - the latter is the title of the fictional Wikipedia article that is the framing device :)

I did an 80 short stories by 80 different authors post a while back. I've been meaning to get it up to 100.

https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/10/80-authors-80-science-...

This inspires me to post Eight O’clock in the Morning

https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o%E2%...

Nice, thank you! I've read The Egg before, but working my way through the others now as I have the opportunity.

Have you come across The Last Question? Another favourite:

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

Since "Lena" ("MMAcevedo") and "They're Made Out of Meat" from this subthread are on my "fiction recommendations" list, let me share the list: https://dbohdan.com/fiction-recs.

I highly recommend "Basilisk collection" by Blackle Mori (https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/), a fascinating short story written as a fictional Wikipedia page, like "Lena". It is about a partial hash inversion anomaly. Really! I would call its genre "hard computer science fiction". It was a delight to stumble upon after I followed a link to https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/.

Also one of my favorites: "The Things", the story of John Carpenters "The Thing", from the perspective of the superorganism itself: The Thing

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

This is such a magnificent read. The Thing is one of my favorites (in all forms, though Carpenter’s version is my #1) and this only elevated the experience

At the risk of furthering the "me too, like some brain-dead AOLer"...

... it's a favorite to "me too".

Just incredibly funny, I love the tone of incredulity... so ... relatable. Can't wait until we have to cope with some kind of "dark matter tendril 'metaspecies'" ...

"What do you mean they're made out of undetectable non-particles that don't exist in 'standard model'^2?"

"I mean, our new overlords can detect and interact with us, but we cannot detect or interact with them directly. And, they don't like being called 'they', sir..."

Haha, the future is bright my friends, let me tell you! (And this isn't close to when "the sun" runs out of its fuel... speaking of bright...)

Are you familiar with Schlock Mercenary? It is a web comic (that has concluded) which features dark matter entities in a later story arc. There isn't much in the way of direct character interaction except through warfare because there is a tech that baryonic matter civilizations find very convenient that makes space uninhabitable for the dark matter creatures, and conversely those creatures can cause stars to blow up. Very interesting stuff, starts out much smaller scale than all that though.

In a short film form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

Is that Ben Bailey?

Yep, Ben 'Cash Cab' Bailey, with character actor Tom Noonan: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479764/

Radio version (my favourite of the various forms):

https://www.wnyc.org/story/168264-theyre-made-out-of-meat/

Another great short "That Alien Message" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...

Always loved existential futuristic short stories.

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