Terraform, November 12th & 19th, 2015
“Re: re: Microwave in the break room doing weird things to fabric of spacetime” by Charles Yu (November 12th)
“We Made a Twitter Bot That Predicts the Future” by Brian Merchant, Claire Evans & Ranjit Bhatnagar (November 19th)
Reviewed by Dave Truesdale
Charles Yu‘s short-short, “Re: re: Microwave in the break room doing weird things to fabric of spacetime” is told via a series of emails to office employees, beginning with a plea not to use the lower microwave in the break room since someone accidentally put the power on high and left a burrito inside for twenty minutes, and what remains is indescribable. Of course, people don’t get the memo and the microwave continues to do strange things to the food each time it is used. Soon, the radiation has altered the atomic structure of the contents and has opened a time warp which produces a time travel paradox re the original microwave user. Worth a brief smile.
“We Made a Twitter Bot That Predicts the Future” by Brian Merchant, Claire Evans & Ranjit Bhatnagar is literally an online experiment using a computer program to reassemble twitter tweets into various “what if” scenarios than any sort of short fiction. Frankly, the best way to explain this is to simply provide the link. There’s more explanation of what the experiment is trying to do than examples of its results, but here you go.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/twitter-bot-predicts-these-futures
Dave Truesdale has edited Tangent and now Tangent Online since 1993. It has been nominated for the Hugo Award five times, and the World Fantasy Award once. A former editor of the Bulletin of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he also served as a World Fantasy Award judge in 1998, and for several years wrote an original online column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Now retired, he keeps close company with his SF/F library, the coffeepot, and old movie channels on TV. He lives in Kansas City, MO.