Alternate worlds: in which art is valued

Jane completes her education and decides she wants to be an artist. She practices her craft, while working part time, until she's managed to create something good enough to present to the artists collective, as her petition for entry. They see it's value and her potential, and accept her. From then on her food and …

Alternate worlds: in which a deadly disease also makes the infected extremely beautiful

Jane is infected with a disease that will kill her in a matter of weeks. It is incurable, no matter how hard the medical world has tried, and it kills in all cases, shriveling the internal organs into useless husks, and putting all the energy gained from this atrophy into reconstructing the afflicted's outward appearance. …

Alternate Worlds: in which everyone has to live through every second twice

Two seconds forward, one second back. You move the slice of pizza toward  your mouth, and right before you bite it moves back a bit and you've got to do it again. You bite, chew, start to swallow, then have to swallow again. Would your brain adjust to this kind of existence, or would every …

Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem

The end of this novel went in a different direction than I expected. I was drawn into it right away and was excited by the story and the ideas and the potential, but it feels like in the end it left much unexplored. There was a lot of attention focused on the technical details, research, …

Alternate worlds: in which I can write 60 wpm

Not type, but write. Amazing prose, polished, complete, top quality words. In this word, I would write a novel per week... and that would three 8 hour days of solid typing. Every idea I had would be a story, every whim a plot. The books would pile so high that I'd have nothing to do …