The Never-ending FAQ: teetering on the brink of July

The hot and sultry days of high summer have at last arrived. 

These are the days when I really identify with this little froggy friend of mine, who I found soaking up the sun the other morning. I thought it was just taking a brief nap after a hard night’s work of catching bugs, but no, it stayed on the armrest of that chair all day, from dawn to dusk. If I’d been thinking I’d have taken a series of photos, to show how it stayed in exactly same spot but slowly rotated its position and kept changing colors all through the day. At first I thought it was turning to keep its face to the sun. Then I began to think that perhaps it was just getting bored with the view and feeling the need to look at something different every once in a while.

Whatever its motivations, I never got to ask. Once the sun set it quietly vanished, no doubt off for another thrilling night of catching bugs and avoiding being caught by owls. What an exciting life for such a little frog!

And now, on to the comments and questions.

Karl Dandenell looked at one of the related photos I’d posted on my Facebook page and made the observation, “Nice greenspace!”

Yes, it is—for now. In four months it will be brownspace, and a month after that it will be whitespace, until sometime in April of next year. This is why I choose to live in Minnesota. I lived in Southern California for a while, and found it… Relaxing. Laid-back. Downright enervating and completely the opposite of motivating. Living in a place where the seasons change—aggressively!—is a constant reminder that time keeps moving forward, and my time is finite, so I’d best get back to work.

And you should read either “The River of Time Joins the Sea” or “Finding Spring,” or preferably, both. You’ll find them here.

 

Another friend who recently moved up here from the deep south asked, “How can you stand the heat and humidity? Why don’t you shut the windows and turn on the A/C?”

I think the answer is that I spend half the year with the hatches battened down and the furnace running non-stop, so trying to keep the heat out for our few brief weeks of summer seems… ungrateful.

But speaking of trying to keep the heat out: in Dubai they’re building the world’s first fully enclosed domed city.

 

First thought: “Wow! How science fiction is that? That is straight off the cover of an old issue of Galaxy!”

Second thought: “Wait a minute. Won’t that great big dome act like a giant lens?” This idea immediately evoked memories of the sights and smells of all the ants I incinerated with a magnifying glass when I was a child, which led to my third thought: “To keep it cool inside that dome they’ll need to pump all the excess heat out. Where will it go?”

The answer, obviously, is out into the external environment, to become someone else’s problem.

This won’t be just a domed city. It will be a giant global warming generator.

Which brings us around to Galaxy Science Fiction again, and today’s free science fiction story idea. 

The founding editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold, was a World War II veteran whose combat experience left him with PTSD and profound agoraphobia. For years he was unable even to leave his apartment. Quite a few savvy SF writers at the time figured out that they stood a better chance of selling their story to Gold if they worked in an agoraphobia angle, hence the abundance of domed cities, underground cities, and “the whole world is just one big weather-controlled city” stories that appeared in print SF in the 1950s and 1960s and lingered on in media SF for decades afterward. (Think Logan’s Run, Zardoz, or any number of original Star Trek episodes.)

One common feature of these sorts of stories was that to the p.o.v. characters, the world outside the dome was typically a terrifying place, full of hideous monsters and savages in ridiculous costumes, and the people inside the dome needed to be on constant guard lest the savages get in and destroy civilization. (Think of Zardoz again, and the bloodbath that ensued once the Brutals finally breached the barrier.)

But…

But what if the Brutals are the good guys? What if what they’re trying to do is not to destroy civilization, but just to get those smug a-holes inside the dome to stop dumping their garbage and pollutants into the outside world and shut down their giant city-sized heat pump? (A.k.a., the global warming generator.)

Hmm. I think there’s a story in this. I think it could even be a really good story. What this story might be is up to you.

Speaking of current news and free SF story ideas: a manufacturer in China, Starpery, has announced that their new lineup of robotic sex dolls will incorporate AI large language models.

“The new generation of sex dolls, powered by AI models and equipped with sensors, can react with both movements and speech,” boasted Lee, “significantly enhancing user experience by focusing on emotional connection rather than just basic conversational abilities.”

Emotional connection? Oh, boy. Just what the world needs. A sexbot that can say, “Honey, we need to talk.” But this does beg the question:

Q: If a man can’t tell whether his sexbot’s orgasms are real or faked, does this constitute a form of Turing Test?

A: No. It just means he’s a typical man.

Moving right along, then…

Q: We’ve had a lot of questions come in lately regarding The Pete Wood Challenge: what the rules are, how to find out when a new challenge is issued, how to submit an entry, etc., etc.

A: The most important thing to know about The Pete Wood Challenge is that Pete Wood runs it, and has been running it since it debuted in May 2021 with “Would you like fries with that?” Pete is the sole judge, jury, and project manager; we here at Stupefying Stories just publish the results, whenever Pete delivers them. Even I do not see a challenge until after the results are in.

One rule Pete established right from the start is that you must be a member of the CODEX online writing group to participate. That’s where Pete posts his challenges and receives the results. At present he has two challenges open for entries, but all I can tell you about them is that they’re out on CODEX. If you want more information, look there, or ask Pete.

We’ve actually had quite a lot of behind-the-scenes discussion here lately about the future of The Pete Wood Challenge. Not to put too fine a point on it, looking at the three-year history of the thing, there has been a notable drop-off in reader interest. The earliest challenge stories drew hundreds of readers. Some even drew thousands. 

Lately, Pete Wood Challenge stories have been lucky to draw a hundred readers each. Many haven’t even racked up fifty reads. To express it in the arcane secret language of P&L that only publishers, accountants, and Matt Krizan understand: publishing Pete Wood Challenge stories costs us more to do and draws in fewer readers per story than publishing SHOWCASE stories does.

This was not completely unexpected. We saw a similar participation fall-off when we were running The Friday Challenge. At first a lot of writers were eager to participate, and the readership numbers followed. Then, as the same small group of writers continued to win challenge after challenge, first the participation by other writers dropped off, and then the readership.

There is no doubt a solution to this problem, but what it is escapes me. I was all set to pull the plug on the challenge, but Pete, being an attorney who specializes in appeals, convinced me to give him more time to find an answer. If you have any ideas as to how to improve the Pete Wood Challenge—besides, “pay out more prize money,” that one’s a non-starter—please share them, either with me or with Pete. Because frankly, I’m stumped.

Q: Speaking of SHOWCASE…

A: I’m glad you asked. After a good bit of organizational confusion, SHOWCASE resumes publishing on Monday, July 1st. We will be publishing three new stories weekly in July, August, and September, and our summer schedule looks like this:

Monday - a new story
Tuesday - The Odin Chronicles
Wednesday - The Never-ending FAQ
Thursday - another new story
Friday - yet another new story
Saturday - The Odin Chronicles
Sunday - The Week in Review

So be sure to come back here Monday, July 1st, for “How to Return an Overdue Book to the Summer Library,” by Carol Scheina.

Categories: The Never-ending FAQ