Kathryn Cramer lives in Westport, NY. She is an editor of the Hieroglyph project sponsored by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. Her story, "Am I Free to Go?" was published by Tor.com in December 2012.
She co-edited the Year's Best Fantasy and Year's Best SF series with David G. Hartwell. Her most recent historical anthologies include The Space Opera Renaissance and The Hard SF Renaissance, both co-edited with Hartwell. Their previous hard SF anthology was The Ascent of Wonder (1994).
She is working on a film adaptation of her story "You, in Emulation" with director Edward Cornell.
last year, amy(other amy) tipped me off to this cool thing she was doing: the short story advent calendar, where you sign up to this thingie here and you get a free story each day.
i dropped the ball and by the time i came to my senses, it had already sold out, so for december project, i'm going rogue and just reading a free online story a day of my choosing. this foolhardy endeavor is going to screw up my already-deep-in-the-weeds review backlog, so i don't think i will be reviewing each individual story "properly." i might just do a picture review or - if i am feeling wicked motivated, i will draw something, but i can't be treating each short story like a real book and spending half my day examining and dissecting it, so we'll just see what shape this project takes as we go.
and if you know of any particularly good short stories available free online, let me know! i'm no good at finding them myself unless they're on the tor.com site, and i only have enough at this stage of the game to fill half my calendar. <--- that part is no longer true, but i am still interested in getting suggestions!
DECEMBER 30
Would you rather have the cops haul you out of bed, or the robbers? The answer to this riddle is that the cops are supposed to haul the robbers out of bed and leave me out of it.
this is a very low three stars, but it might be my own fault for trying to read something on the longish side when i was so hungry and sleepy. because i am both things very much right now. this was disjointed in a way that never came together for me - that never made me understand the point of its fragmentation, although the parts i understood i enjoyed. mostly. i'm not sure what is paranoia, what is real, what the parts of the story that seem extraneous are meant to convey...
but a lot of that is probably my body trying to eat its own organs. your turn now.
Really interesting. Though it is nothing like it, somehow, I kept thinking of Margaret Atwoods, "The Handmaids Tale". Perhaps because though the heroine is purposeful she is out of control. Her actions are dictated by her circumstances, her sense of what is wrong with her world propels her to actions.
A suburban housewife and hacker lives on the edge of a police-dominated society that that simultaneously harasses her as she harasses it. Who is the power and who is the prisoner? The protagonist or Officer Friendly the faceless and interchangeable instrument of corporate power?
Some of the ideas here are really compelling with regard to technology and power. The characters are strong, the ending was less strong to me. Feels like the potential source or a larger work about a dystopian new future.
What my ratings mean: 5 – I felt this book was an exemplar in its genre/field. That does not mean I agree with everything it says (or the moral of the story). It is likely to be a book that will change my thinking about a topic. 4 – A very impressive book for its genre/field. It probably didn’t change me or my thinking though. 3 – An enjoyable way to spend the time reading it. 2 – This was a pain to read. It was probably difficult to finish. 1 – Life’s too short and/or I’m not smart enough to get the point of this book.
I have absolutely no idea what this was about. There were some interesting concepts, but they were just side notes not what the story was actually about. The phrase "The line between utopia and dystopia...is, often, who you are. Or who your neighbors think you are." hooked me, but the story went downhill from there. I don't think it's a bad story; it's just not for me.