sci-fi Archives » Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey

Heisenberg Switch (part 1)

Ian Lahey — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 18:06:46 +0000

Luke was late for his shift. He’d forgotten to take out the trash the evening before so he ended up chasing the garbage truck this morning, only to be told the bag of empty bottles and beer cans he’d hoisted all the way to there was not due until the next day. Damn the differentiated garbage collection and the useless recycling fad. He’d read somewhere that only about ten percent of the stuff ever really got recycled.

This was the first time he was late, and the hospital policy was to let the first slight go unpunished. However he was now one mere slip away from the dreaded Reprimand. Nurses with two reprimands would get crappy shifts, with horrible hours, meaning a higher risk of not being on time, and from then on it would be a downwards spiral into Reprimand Hell.

He’d tossed the bag into his back yard, where he heard it land with the sound of crashing glass, and rushed to work. When he got back home in the late afternoon, he was too tired to think about it. He did think about it a few hours later, when it was getting dark. “Ah shit, glass is due tomorrow!” he suddenly groaned.

Grabbing a coat he went out back, where he discovered the bag had ruptured, scattering its contents all around. It looked like some form of modern art which, Luke was sure, any critic would be able to glance at and interpret it, quite correctly, as a futuristic Ode to Stupidity.

He grabbed a new bag, some gloves to protect his hands from the broken glass, and started picking up the mess. He came across what looked like a pamphlet at a certain point, and tossed it aside. “Paper on Mondays”, he mumbled. After dropping the bag in the container out front, he came back to deal with the rogue piece of paper. He took it inside and was about to crumple it and toss it into the paper bin when the bright lettering caught his attention.

“Bob’s Garbage Collection for People” it said in bright, friendly letters.

Apart from the unusual wording, the service promised to collect any material the customer wished to throw away, and guaranteed 100% recycling. Also, there would be no need to carry any bags out to the bin in the street, as the collection would be “on site”. On top of that, the service was free for the first year.

Without thinking twice, Luke signed the little opt-in form at the bottom of the pamphlet, and then realized that nowhere on the paper did it say where to send it. Not an e-mail, not a phone number.

“Well, that was a waste of time,” Luke muttered to himself. He crumpled the worthless pamphlet, tossed it in the bin, and did not dedicate further thought to the little startup which had thrown a spanner in its own campaign with bad design.

The next morning, he was up and ready. He even saluted the garbage collection truck when he came across it a few blocks away. The glass situation had been dealt with. Things were back in order.

Today was Friday. It was also Sandra’s turn, which is probably why he felt all buoyant. He liked her, despite the fact that he’d heard her once referring to him as “Mr. Compulsive”. She probably didn’t mean it in a bad sense. Anyway, he almost wished he were compulsive. He wouldn’t have gotten the wrong garbage type the day before. He just got a bit fixated, that’s all. He probably could have avoided being late by just putting the bag to the side and taking it out the following week. But bags hanging around the house were wrong. Just wrong. Silly fixation, he knew it. At least he was smart enough not to go on about it with his colleagues.

“Hello Sandra,” he said as he stopped by the desk to get the morning lists.

“Hi Luke. How’s your day coming along?”

“Oh, fine. Won’t be late again you know, now that I’ve picked up all the glass.”

“Uh…yeah, that’s good to know.”

Idiot.

He got back home as usual, but this time, before going into couch-slouch mode, he told himself he should check the back yard for any leftover pieces of glass while there was still light.

He opened the door and was greeted by a little fanfare.

“Congratulations!” a colorful LCD screen said. It seemed to be held mid-air by two drones. Below it, in the middle of the yard, small, gunmetal blue pole stood on an elevated metal platform of the same color. It had a ring of light around the tip which glowed green. It looked like a cross between a traffic light and Robocop.

The screen changed. “Please walk to the area of your green space where you wish to place the Collector.”

“Ah, yes, place the collector,” Luke repeated mechanically. “I’m sorry, what is this?”

The screen went black for a second, then it flashed again. “Bob’s Garbage Collection for People! Congratulations!” The fanfare played again.

“Oh, that thing!” Luke was genuinely surprised. “How did you…nevermind. So happy you’re here.” He walked over to a corner of his yard. The drones rotated the screen so it continued to face him. “Here,” he said.

The entire platform rose by a couple of inches and started moving towards him. He quickly got out of the way and put his head to ground level to see if it too could levitate like the screen. Instead, he saw hundreds of little mechanical feet.

“And all of this is free?” he chuckled to himself.

The screen flashed back at him. “Affirmative. It was agreed that no transactions would take place for the first year. All material is to be collected for free.”

Well, this customer service was next-level, that’s for sure.

“Collector installed. Now fully functional. Enjoy,” the screen informed him and began to rise.

“Wait! What materials? On which days?”

The screen paused for a while, then came down, patiently. “Any material. Any day.”

“…Even mixed?”

“Affirmative.”

“But how does it work?”

Another short pause. “You put things you don’t need on the platform. We take them away,” came the answer.

“Hmm, that so. That so…” Luke put his hands to his sides, pretending a high-level conversation had just taken place. “Very well. Thank you.”

Without further messages, the screen was lifted by the drones and disappeared into the clouds.

Paper was due on Monday, so Luke was currently out of any one bag which would be full enough to be eligible, but the screen said it would collect any material so Luke grabbed all the half-full bins of paper, plastic and other stuff, and was able to produce one decently sized load.

He approached the collector platform and deposited the bag on it. The ring on top of the pole turned red.

Luke waited a little, expecting some other drone to come and lift the bag away or something like that, but it never happened.

He shrugged and went back inside. A few minutes later he ran back outside, holding a small bag he’d forgotten under the sink.

The light was green, the platform was clear.

CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO

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The post Heisenberg Switch (part 1) appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

So you wanna write Sci-Fi?

Ian Lahey — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:13:01 +0000

Science! Spaceships robots and time-travel! That’s what science fiction is all about, right? One of the top 5 best selling genres in the world, and all you need is your imagination! You can write about life on a colony ship to Alpha Centauri and explain what it’s like to be teleported onto a planet, and nobody’s gonna ask you if you’ve tried those things out before writing about them. It’s not like that other genre which is currently #1 in sales: Sibling Incest Bondage Erotica.

It turns out that today’s Sci-Fi readers have an uncanny ability to determine when a sci-fi writer is writing science fiction that just doesn’t wash.
I’m not referring to accurately predicting the future, some of the best science fiction from the past century has proven itself to be quite off-mark, if not entirely wonky. In the last few years, a lot of the Fi has relocated to the Sci, and very few forecasts have survived the migration. Sure, Robert A. Heinlein may have predicted Google, but a lot of his other predictions for the year 2000 have fallen quite short. We found no life on Mars, haven’t defeated cancer yet and interplanetary transport is still far off. And although Philip K. Dick’s crawling mega-cities in his blockbuster “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” do strike our fancy, it still has paper newspapers as main media, and people smoking indoors. SF readers don’t mind this, and most won’t even notice. They don’t go to the genre to have their fortunes read to them, it’s not horoscopes they crave, it’s scientific speculation.

Now it’s true that the genre does split up into two main subgenres, hardcore and softcore…no, wait, that’s erotica. Hard and soft science fiction.
Hard science fiction delves more completely into the scientific details and technical specifications which make up its futuristic hypothesis. Soft science fiction will deal more with the plot, while not explicitly going into the mechanics of how the protagonist’s sister’s atoms got reassembled inside a temporary alternative timeline which, when seen from outside, looks suspiciously like a bondage knot.

I kn egfplain…

That said, even soft science fiction needs to be plausible, which means authors can’t just make shit up. Some of the most memorable SF authors, like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, were also scientists and scientific divulgers. And although readers are not scientists, at least not all of them, they’re still known for being damn good at spotting incoherent and unsubstantial science.

It turns out that SF authors are the ones who need to do the most research, and the hardest kind of research too, because nobody knows what it’s like to travel through time or wake from cryogenic sleep. You need to piece that information together starting from existing scientific theories and available tech. Lucky for you, apart from a pre-existing article on time travel which I wrote some time ago (heh), I also went and did some more research for you. Here are two interesting links to start building your future scenarios:

Wanna write about space travel? How hard can it be, it’s not that it’s rocket science, right? Well that’s precisely what it is! But this website gives you a nice, simplified breakdown of the fundamental physics involved in launching stuff into space: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php

One of the worst things you can do is use a scientific term improperly. They’ll be onto you in a matter of seconds. Nasa itself comes to the rescue with this quick list of the most common terms used in SF literature: https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/SFTerms.html?fbclid=IwAR2QWLuGKdZS9XOUxCvKC-T67iTz0eAj8R4jKvVDlaiVGLW1m-m7I9Vx0Yc

There you go, you’re off to write your first Sci-Fi bestseller, and you didn’t even have to ask your sister to help you out. Not that she’d help you…

…she’s all tied up at the moment.

The post So you wanna write Sci-Fi? appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

The Top 15 Sci-Fi EBooks of All Time

Ian Lahey — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 06:11:52 +0000

The Top 15 Sci-Fi EBooks of All Time by the FunFiction Group

Science fiction is where it’s at, or at least where it will be. Some science fiction has long since passed us by, being set in years which we have, in the meantime, breezed ahead of, too busy looking at Instagram to notice, so in that case, I suppose it’s science fiction that’s where it has been. Anyway, some predictions were way off the mark, while others proved to be uncannily accurate.

But there are some timeless and memorable books which have gone beyond that. They have forever altered the future by inspiring or even warning us of its possible outcomes. Here it is, curated by a Facebook group of people who love fiction, especially sci-fi and fantasy.

1: The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

Well, we are a FUNfiction group, aren’t we? And HHG2G is just a ton of fun under all aspects, all the way to its very own existence, because it is a four-book trilogy. No, five. Actually Amazon says there are six books in this trilogy.
Reality itself shifts as it is warped by the sheer funniness of this book. But that is not the only reason why it is up there at Number One, no siree. The Guide has imprinted itself into society, to the point that many, if not all, now are relieved to know that the number 42 is indeed the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, and that a towel is the single most useful item to have, and we even celebrate it on May 25th: National Towel Day.

(By the way, if you like funny sci-fi, you may want to check out my novel: “To Cipher and to Sing“

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