mojoe

There are only two stories in the collection that feel a little further out:

"Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling" by David W. Goodman feels like a smart, polished successor to golden age space opera, it's set in a future where the solar system is colonized, but not thousands of years out.

Grant Collier's "The Best Version of Yourself" is also not set very far into the future, but it's a kind of post-human future so it might have far-future vibes for you. This specific story is actually available free online, so you don't have to purchase the anthology to read it: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/collier_07_24/

Are you referring to this?

"How will it use these memories, while simultaneously protecting its young charge, in THE LARK ASCENDING by ELEANNA CASTROIANNI?"

This is just a rhetorical device, I think it's called a 'hook question'. It's probably unclear due to the distracting colors and capitalization.

Hi, I'm the editor, I chose the stories. I read 391 short science fiction stories published last year (all the stories in the big science fiction magazines and a few smaller ones), and selected these sixteen.

None of the authors I reached out to refused to sell me reprint rights, so there was no bottleneck there.

I'm a software engineer who enjoys near-future concept-driven science fiction, so if that's not your thing then you might not agree with my choices. The stories I look for are the ones where I think "wow, this contains ideas that reflect something interesting about reality".

Publisher here, this link still works for a discounted DRM-free epub: https://thinkweirder.kit.com/products/think-weirder-volume-1...

email me at joe@thinkweirder.com and I'll get you a PDF!

Good question, original publishers (the magazines, in this case) set the terms for how long an exclusivity period they want to purchase for first print rights. It's usually a year, but many magazine contracts have a carve-out for "year's best" anthologies like mine.

I deal directly with the authors, not the original publishers. I pay a fixed rate for reprint rights, which is a one-time deal. This is mostly because pro rata royalties on an anthology are a pain to calculate (I've done this before), but also because it's unlikely for me to make back the money I spend on anthology creation, so if there were ever royalties they would be tiny in any case.

There's not much money in short fiction -- many authors tend to use it as a stepping stone to novels, or just as a hobby.

Exactly, in the long run it's the people who care the most who win, it's tautological

Some of you may remember me as the publisher of Compelling Science Fiction magazine (2016-2020).

I missed being involved in the science fiction community, so I decided to start a "Year's Best" anthology series dedicated to finding the best concept-driven, near-future short fiction published every year.

If you have a moment to check out the landing page please let me know your impressions, either in the comments or by answering this single multiple choice question: https://forms.gle/YWRqycjpVpoNgx2B9

Thanks for your help!

About 1400 people have played the game in the last few days so I believe most of the big bugs have been addressed, but please let me know if you see any issues and I'll fix!

Also I plan on continuing to make short science fiction games like this, so if you have general game-making advice for me I'd love to hear it.

I think in both this story and Le Guin's original the ambiguity is the point.

The scenario is one that has no "solution", and pattern-seeking readers then imprint the story with their own worldview (a prime example is the "accelerationist" reply to your comment).

I'm guessing this is the root cause of the 2023 Hugo nominations being weaker than I would have expected.

You said "As a developer", not "As a major developer".

"I should emphasize, the tragically elegant thing about "the point is to win" is that winning now is a real world goal that abased hearts do sometimes actually harbor, but it's perilous as a monogoal"

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that such "abased" hearts are the most common hearts at game night, followed closely by the hearts of those who are just looking to bond and impress each other with witty repartee

A browser extension to help me rate science fiction stories for compellingsciencefiction.com. It triggers an AWS Lambda-backed API to store my ratings and some story metadata, makes things way less tedious!

what a weird modern version of religious war

I've actually been looking at Milvus for storing embeddings, why do y'all have options for both Pulsar and Kafka inside Milvus? Seems like unnecessary choices for what we hoped would just be a plug and play vector database

I think what parent is saying is that in the US a disproportionate percentage of USPS budget is spent delivering mail to extremely rural areas (far from both cities and small towns).

thanks, this is a perfect encapsulation of what's happening, I'm surprised there are so many people here who don't understand the core issue here.

like the enormous corpus of source material powering every adult human brain?

>99% of my work relationships have ended "successfully" in the sense that even though we don't communicate anymore we still have mutual respect and would work with each other again, so I'm not sure what you mean by "no relationship ends successfully"

It's a great path if you have a little bit of an entrepreneurial streak too -- it's a big marketing challenge.

I've interacted with a huge number of authors over the years, and like most skills it seems like years of sustained practice is hard to beat. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the kind words! Reading 500+ submissions/month was a little too much for a hobby project, but I'm always hopeful that I'll figure out a sustainable way to restart publishing original stories.

I love AGI stories, if you write this please send it over! joe@compellingsciencefiction.com

I published a science fiction magazine for 5 years, and many of my friends are in the industry, so I'm familiar with the market. Trying to promote science and technology with science fiction short stories is like trying to promote a blockbuster movie with an off-broadway arthouse play. The existing audience for science fiction short stories is miniscule compared to the existing number of science and technology enthusiasts.

That being said, I love any new market for SF short stories, so I wish you the best of luck!

We use praw, it works great if you fill out Reddit's forms to register your user-agent as per their terms of service. We get data about all posts, but don't get the comments themselves, just the post metadata (titles, likes, number of comments, etc). Good luck!

That's my next post! I'll be looking at aggregates of semantic meaning of popular submissions.

I'm the co-creator of Morning Brief, and I'd be happy to answer questions about this

I'm the guy providing the service, let me know if you have any questions!

Hey, I've been in your position before, so I thought I'd try and give some insight about why I don't think this is getting traction. This was my user experience:

1. I went to the site, clicked 'proceed', then clicked 'live demo' 2. I saw a login screen, and right before I closed the page I saw some tiny credentials pop up on the bottom of the screen so I put them into the login form 3. I got to a screen where the CSS was all messed up, couldn't see most of the left nav bar, nothing to do, so I bounced. I was using Chrome 91 on Ubuntu.

I can't really comment on the usefulness of UML->web apps, since nobody I know writes UML. I'd just think about how your customers interact with your site a lot more.

Good luck!