science fiction – David Kubicek

October 4, 2023

The Last Bus: New Short Story Collection Published

by David Kubicek

I’ve just released a new collection of short stories–The Last Bus and Other Stories. These 26 stories span almost the length of my 50+-year writing career, from “The Park” in 1972 to “Spare Parts” and “An Evening Stroll” in 2021.

As in my first collection, The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories, The Last Bus is divided into sections for Science Fiction and Fantasy, Horror, and Literary/Mainstream. Also, as in my first collection, I’ve included commentary before and after each story giving some background about the story. Some of these stories have been previously published, but for most this is their first publication.

It’s always difficult to design a cover for a short story collection, especially when the collection contains stories ranging through several genres. The first reaction is to illustrate one of the stories. If it can be the title story, so much the better. I tried this, but the covers didn’t work. Since some of these stories contain ghosts and phantoms, I decided to go with a phantom face in the trees as sort of a general statement.

A few of the stories in this collection are:

Games Machines Play—A computer holds a college student hostage until he complies with a peculiar request.

An Evening Stroll—While walking in the fog one evening, a college professor inadvertently turns back the clock on his own life.

Spare Parts—On the eve of his wedding, something odd falls out of Mike Thayer’s ear, and he learns a shocking truth about himself.

Safety First—Not only is William Fawth’s car programmed to help him develop safe driving skills, but it has an attitude that grates on his nerves.

The Last Bus—Local businessman Wilson Brakhage offers tours of the wreckage of the worst tornado disaster in Nebraska’s history.

Blood—Are the cattle mutilations the work of a cougar, or is there a darker, supernatural force at work here?

Obsession—A visit to the doctor makes 29-year-old Chuck convinced that he’s growing old. Judi needs to snap him out of it before it destroys their marriage.

Keeper of the Shrine—A college student who works the night shift in a photofinishing plant learns a life lesson from a dead spider.

The Last Bus and Other Stories (ISBN: 9798861015325) is available as an eBook ($2.99) and a trade paperback ($12.95) from most online booksellers.

To read a story from the collection click here.

For information about my other books, check out my Books page.

May 21, 2023

12 Must-Read Science Fiction Short Stories

by David Kubicek

This is by no means a definitive list of the best science fiction short stories ever written, mainly because I haven’t read every science fiction story ever written, and I’m sure there are many, many of them that would be on this list, but I haven’t read them yet, so they’re not on this list. Also, I’m defining “short story” as anything that can be read in one sitting if one desires, so some of these “short” stories are pushing 15,000 to 20,000 words.

I’ve selected these stories because I first read them years ago, and they stuck with me. In my mind, staying power makes a story classic. Some of them I’ve read several times over the years, others just a couple of times or only once, but they all left an impression on me. The stories are not in any particular order, except for “The Cold Equations” and “Flowers for Algernon”, which are my favorite all-time science fiction shorts, in that order.

There are a couple of omissions that I should acknowledge. One is that there are no Robert A. Heinlein stories on my list. Heinlein was a decent storyteller, but a terrible writer, and it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever see him on one of my lists.

The other omission, which I regret, is that there are no women writers on this list. But that can’t be helped; it was the nature of the genre at the time I was beginning my SF journey. In those days there were few women writers in the genre, and of the ones who were writing, none of their stories that I read stood out for me. There is a time travel story, written by Barbara Bartholomew and published in Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction in the mid- or late 1970s, which I’d love to put on this list; however, I can’t remember its title, and I’ve been unable to find it through an online search. It’s a pity because I really liked that story.

Also, the links are for convenience to help you locate the stories. They are not affiliate links–I don’t get paid if you click on them. In fact, you don’t have to buy the books to read the stories as long as there is a library near you. I regret that used bookstores and libraries may be the only source of some of these stories because they appear to be out of print; however, I could not in good conscience exclude them for that reason. Fortunately, a few of these stories were collected in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I, which is available in print and digital.

1. The Cold Equations, by Tom Godwin: This is a difficult story to describe without giving away too much information. It is about the interaction of a teenage stowaway and the pilot of an Emergency Cargo Ship delivering medicine to a group of researchers. The ship has enough fuel to take one person to its destination, but not two. The story revolves around the pilot’s efforts to save the stowaway’s life–she stowed away to see her brother, who is one of the researchers–rather than order her into the airlock and ejecting her into space as regulations require. You can find this story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

2. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes: This novelette is about Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded young man who becomes a genius after undergoing an experimental operation. The problem is that the improvement is only temporary. Keyes expanded this story into a novel, which goes into more detail, but the novelette is short and sweet. You can find this story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

3. The Star, by Arthur C. Clarke: This is perhaps Clarke’s most famous story. It was pretty controversial when it was originally published in the mid-1950s. Many critics called it blasphemous. Rejected by all of the major SF magazines, “The Star” finally found a home at a new, low-paying magazine. But Clarke had the last laugh. “The Star” won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1955.

4. It’s a Good Life, by Jerome Bixby: This story is about a young boy who holds a town hostage because he has the ability to do things with his mind–control the weather, make a rat eat itself, and do things to people who do or think things that he doesn’t like. It was chillingly adapted for the Twilight Zone in the early 1960’s. The novelette is just as chilling but offers a little more depth than the adaptation. Loss of depth is a common problem when stories are adapted to film. You can find this story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

5. What’s it Like Out There?, by Edmond Hamilton: Hamilton is a vastly underrated writer, partly because he wrote lots of space opera novels during the pulp era to make enough money to keep the lights on, but he has written many imaginative and thought-provoking stories like this one. He wrote “What’s it Like Out There” in the early 1930s but couldn’t sell it because the editors thought it was too bleak. Twenty years later the revised story, although still bleak, finally made it into print. It contrasts the public’s romanticized idea about space travel with the harsh realty experienced by a crewman recently returned from Mars.

6. The Pedestrian, by Ray Bradbury: This short little gem is about the consequences of taking a walk in the evening in a future world where everyone stays home and watches TV, and going out at night is considered aberrant behavior. This story is included in Bradbury’s collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.

7. There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury: This story about a “smart house” that has continued serving its occupants long after the occupants, and the rest of the world, have perished in an atomic war can be found in Bradbury’s Mars story collection/novel The Martian Chronicles.

8. The Little Black Bag, by C.M. Kornbluth: This story concerns a 25th-Century medical bag that is accidentally sent back in time to the mid-20th Century. By the 25th-Century, morons make up the majority of the population, and the few remaining smart people are their keepers. So the medical instruments must be simple so the moron doctors can use them–you just set the dials to diagnose and treat an illness. When the bag is accidently sent back in time, it falls into the hands of disgraced Dr. Full, who has been a wino for the past 20 years, ever since he lost his license to practice. Dr. Full wants to use the bag to do good, but his partner has dollar signs in her eyes. This story was also dramatized by Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, substantially rewritten, but both the prose and the film versions are worth checking out. You can find this story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

9. Microscopic God, by Theodore Sturgeon: A story about an eccentric inventor and recluse named Kidder–the owner and sole inhabitant on an island off the Atlantic coast–who creates a race of microscopic people who mirror human beings but have shorter lives and evolve faster than humans. This rapid evolution gives them the ability to invent technology much more quickly than full sized humans–this ability comes in handy when an evil banker attempts to use one of Kidder’s inventions (or, rather, the microscopic people’s invention) to conquer the world. I loved this story when I first read it in high school, and it has held up well over the years. You can find it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

10. Allamagoosa, by Eric Frank Russell: This humorous story knocked me out of my chair the first time I read it. Apparently, it appealed to a lot of science fiction fans, who gave it a Hugo Award in 1955. It seems to be quite scarce now, but you may be able to find a copy of it in one of the early Hugo Award Winners books at the library or a used bookstore. It is also in the sadly out-of-print collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell. The story centers around what turns out to be a typo and the hilarity that ensues when the spaceship Captain, preparing his ship for an inspection by an Admiral, tries to cover up the fact that he has no idea what an Offog is. But the thing that really makes this story great is that it centers around the nuts and bolts and the bureaucracy of operating a spaceship, which one doesn’t often see in SF stories.

11. Dear Devil, by Eric Frank Russel: This novelette is about how a Martian poet named Fander, stranded on Earth long after an atomic war did unfortunate things to the planet, helps the Terran civilization start to rebuild itself. It can be found in the sadly out-of-print collections The Best of Eric Frank Russel and Creatures From Beyond, edited by Terry Carr. Put this on your list when searching for used books online or at your local used bookstore.

12. The Bicentennial Man, by Isaac Asimov: This story, about a robot’s quest to be legally declared a human being was made into a film starring Robin Williams. You can find it in The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories–unfortunately out of print—in a library or used bookstore or possibly in another collection of Asimov stories.

For information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

October 1, 2022

New Promotional Tool For Authors

by David Kubicek

There is a new free promotional tool for authors called Shepherd. This is how it works:

You recommend five books similar in theme to your book.
You write a short, personalized recommendation for each book.
Above your recommendation is printed a short bio and photo of the author (the photo is optional).
Also above your recommendations is a short description of the book you are promoting.
You supply the author photo and cover photo of your book; Shepherd will pull the cover photos of the books you recommend off Amazon.
Shepherd will link to your book on Amazon and Bookshop.

Here is the email I got from Ben at Shepherd when my page for In Human Form went live on September 26:

Last month we had 152,000+ visitors! A new record!
We launched a new recommendation system in August that will help even more readers find your list!
We will add genre and age pages toward the end of 2022. The new pages will allow readers to browse genres like historical fiction or children’s books. We will also add filters so readers can search for things like:
- Show me all books about World War 2 that are historical fiction.
- Show me all the science-fiction books about cyborgs published in the last two years.
- Show me all the children’s books about robots for kids age 8.

Check out my page: The Best Science Fiction About Outsiders and check out Shepherd to see if it is for you.

Learn more about David Kubicek’s books.

September 24, 2022

Subliminal Messages in Rock Music

by David Kubicek

(Dedicated to my brother John)

Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, a religious group claimed that subliminal messages in rock music were converting unsuspecting kids to satanism. All you had to do, they said, was play the songs backwards to reveal the satanic commands.

My brother John and I were skeptical, but we thought it would be great fun to play some popular songs backwards just to see if anything turned up. Call it a scientific experiment, if you will.

Back in those technology-challenged days, playing a song backwards was a chore. Our process consisted of recording the songs on a cassette tape, opening up the cassette, flipping the tape over, and reassembling the cassette. The result was that when we played the tape, we would hear the songs backwards.

We checked out three singers/bands. It took us an entire Saturday from early morning to late into the evening because after we’d prepared the songs to be played backwards, we had to listen to them closely to ferret out any potentially satanic messages.

We started with Kenny Rogers, who was really more country than rock, and came up empty. Then we tried Billy Joel, who was a little more of a rocker, but still we got nothing.

John said, “Kenny Rogers and Billy Joel just don’t look like they’d be in league with the Devil.” He pulled out another album, showed me a picture of the band and said, “If anyone is putting satanic messages in their music, it’s these guys.”

The band was Queen, and we struck paydirt. I’m not saying that this is proof positive that Queen embedded satanic phrases in their music, but some of the words sounded ominous to us.

We found several satanic-sounding phrases, but since so many years have passed, I’ve forgotten most of them. Two of them, however, were so memorable that they remained with me through the years.

In “Bohemian Rhapsody” we found the chant, repeated several times: “One now one, one now one…” Perhaps that could mean, “we are one with the devil?” In another song we found: “I….want your heart.” A romantic might think of that as a lovesick guy pining for his true love’s heart. But, given our fascination with the macabre, we went another way and interpreted it as a guy expressing his desire to cut out someone’s still-beating heart and offer it as a sacrifice to the Evil One.

On a side note, John introduced me that day to the Queen song ’39, which I love because it is a science fiction song based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. That’s something you usually don’t hear in connection with a rock band. ’39 tells the story of a band of volunteers who sail in a (space) ship across the milky seas (the Milky Way Galaxy) looking for a new world because the Earth is “old and gray.” They return after one year has passed for them, but 100 years have passed on Earth. On top of all that, it is a tragic love story. It’s pretty cool; give it a listen.

For information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

June 4, 2022February 23, 2023

Ten Must-Read Science Fiction Novels

by David Kubicek

It seems like everyone and his brother are doing “best” lists of novels, so I decided to get in on the act. Here is my list of ten must-read science fiction novels. I haven’t read every science fiction novel that has ever been written, but of the ones I have read, these are my favorites. Perhaps someday I’ll do my list of the next ten and later the ten after that until I, this blog, or time itself come to an end, whichever comes first.

All of these books are currently in print, and I have linked to Amazon out of convenience; however, I don’t get paid when you click through, so whether you find these books at another bookseller, a used bookstore, or a library, I don’t care. Just find them and read them.

Here are my picks for the top 10 in the approximate order I would rank them:

1) Rite of Passage (1968), by Alexei Panshin

Although there may be some wiggle room as to the order of these novels, Rite of Passage is definitely first. First published in 1968, Rite of Passage, is a coming-of-age story, but it is not a young adult novel. More than a century after Earth has been destroyed, humanity is scattered through the galaxy. Many people live on asteroid-sized ships, and many others are descended from colonists who were seeded on planets. Most ship people look down on the colonists and vice versa. Because space is limited on the ships, every person who turns 14 must be dropped on one of the planets in a ritual called Trial. If they can survive for a month, they are picked up and return to the ships as adults. The story follows Mia Havero from the age of 12 to 14 as she, along with others in her group, prepares for and then experiences Trial. This novel won the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula award and nearly won the Hugo award (it lost by a few votes to John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar). This was also Alexei Panshin’s first novel, expanded from a novelette called “Down to the Worlds of Men” which was published in a science fiction magazine in 1963 and later adapted (and expanded) to become part three of the novel. It is first on my list because of the depth of its characterizations and its message–what my science fiction teacher in college called the “deeper, inner, secret meaning”. The first time I read the novel, it hooked me in the first page and a half; that had never happened with another novel before, and it hasn’t happened since.

2) The Martian Chronicles (1950), by Ray Bradbury

This is the story of Earth’s colonization of Mars, how the Earth people destroyed the existing Martian civilization, and how the Earth settlements quickly fell into decay after they were abandoned. It is an allegory for atrocities we have committed on one another on Earth. The Martian Chronicles is a collection of Bradbury’s Mars stories arranged in a way, and with specially written bridge passages, to give the collection its larger, more cohesive theme.

3) Fahrenheit 451 (1953), by Ray Bradbury

This book is often simplistically called a story about the horrors of burning books, destroying knowledge, etc. But it is more than that. Bradbury abhorred book burning so he used it as a structure to tell a story about the desensitization of society.

4) Kindred (1976), by Octavia E. Butler

A young black woman of the 1970s finds herself transported to a slave-owning Maryland farm in the early Nineteenth Century. She is “called” by her distant white ancestor whenever he is in trouble, starting when he is five years old. Although she is gone from the present for only a short time, her stays in the past stretch into months.

5) The Time Machine (1895), by H.G. Wells

I’m a fan of time travel stories, especially time travel stories to the distant future. H.G. Wells’ story about a future where humanity has devolved into two distinct species–the vicious Morlocks who feed off the gentle Eloi–is at the top of the list.

6) The Handmaid’s Tale(1985), by Margaret Atwood

Most dystopian stories are set in the distant future after the society has been screwed up. The Handmaid’s Tale captures the screwing. It is a near-future story that shows the society transition from a democratic to a totalitarian state seemingly overnight, and we see how June’s life and identity are stripped away by the new order. In the new order she is no longer June. She is Offred because she belongs to Fred, one of the new society’s head honchos. This story is very significant now because our society is going through the same changes, although not quite as quickly and decisively.

7) 1984 (1949), by George Orwell

People didn’t listen to Ray Bradbury. They didn’t listen to Rod Serling. They didn’t listen to Margaret Atwood. And they didn’t listen to George Orwell. 1984 is Orwell’s portrait of a fascist society (based on Stalin’s Russia) that disturbingly bears some resemblance to where our own society is headed. Winston, Orwell’s main character, works for the Ministry of Truth, which makes sure history is consistent by going back into all of the news stories and videos and making sure they support what the current version of the truth is. For instance, Winston knows he’s in for a long weekend when Big Brother declares that the society is not waging war against one enemy (which they had been at war with for years) but is actually at war with a different enemy and has been for years. Winston and his coworkers will have to work overtime to make sure previously printed or aired news coverage doesn’t contradict this “truth”. Does anyone remember alternative facts?

8) Flowers for Algernon (1966), by Daniel Keyes

Flowers for Algernon was a novelette first published in a science fiction magazine in 1958 and anthologized in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I. Keyes later expanded it into a novel, which was made into a film, which won Cliff Robertson a best actor academy award. It follows Charlie Gordon, a young man with an I.Q. of 70 at the beginning of the story, who, after undergoing an experimental operation, becomes a genius.

9) The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), by Audrey Niffenegger

This is a short respite from some of the terrible things that happen in other novels on this list. It is a love story between Clare Abshire and Henry DeTamble who has a genetic disorder that causes him to take sudden, uncontrolled journeys in time. One serious drawback is that he can’t take anything with him, so his first order of business on arriving in a new time period is to find clothes.

10) Parable of the Sower (1993), by Octavia E. Butler

This may not technically a post-apocalyptic novel, but things are pretty bad. Set 31 years in the author’s future (the story starts in 2024), Butler did a pretty good job of predicting where current trends in American society would lead, but the timeline is a little short–in 50 to 75 years, if we don’t get our act together, I can see our society reaching this state of decadence. There is something about Butler’s stories that makes for easy reading. I don’t know if it’s her style, the way she told a story, or her characters–it’s probably all three. I would say that it’s a pleasure to read her stories, but “pleasure” seems to be the wrong word here because she wrote (at least in the two books on this list) about some seriously awful things that people do to people.

For information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

January 20, 2022January 17, 2023

Science Fiction and Predicting the Future

By David Kubicek

Most science fiction writers will tell you that they don’t try to predict the future; the futures they create are there to serve their characters and their stories.

Many SF writers, however, do get some things right about the future. Ray Bradbury, for example, describes interactive TV in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451–it’s a clunky, primitive version of today’s interactive TV, but interactive TV it is, nonetheless.

SF writers miss other things completely. For instance, SF writers have always predicted the dominance of computers in their future worlds, but I don’t know of any who predicted the digital revolution–in the original Star Trek series, for instance, inhabitants of that distant future must still insert cartridges to read a book or synthesize food.

I’ve had brushes with predicting things that came true or are coming true as I write this. In an unpublished 1985 novel, I predicted the internet for public use. I didn’t have to take such a big leap for that. The internet had been used by the military for years; I just envisioned the next logical step (and to be perfectly honest, I may have read an article about what was coming). It was a clunky version of the internet compared to what we have today, but it was still the internet.

In that same unpublished novel, 20 years before Kindle, I predicted e-readers and e-books. In one way it was a clunky version of e-reading technology. The e-reader didn’t have a hard drive for storing books; books were on discs the size of hearing aid batteries that you inserted into the reader. You didn’t have to push a button or sensor to turn the page, however. With my e-readers, the words scrolled up the screen as you read; they automatically adjusted to your reading speed, and if you paused or looked away, the scrolling would stop and wait for your attention to return to the page. Another cool thing about my e-readers was that they collapsed into a cylinder about the size of a pen that you could carry in your pocket.

About that time, I wrote a novelette called A Friend of the Family, which was first published in Space and Time magazine in 1987. This story was set in a dystopian future world where practicing medicine was illegal. Health care providers were Healers who relied on such rituals as chanting, bleeding their patients, and binding their patients’ chest tightly with strips of cloth to squeeze out demons.

In 2012 I published the story as a stand-alone book in both digital and paperback (it is currently available in my collections Prospect Street, The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories, and as a paperback). The week of its release, A Friend of the Family broke into the top 30 of two Amazon best seller lists, peaking at #26 on the Science Fiction List and #21 on the Literary Fiction List. The premise of medicine having been replaced by magic was a device I used to explore relationships between my characters, but my vision is well on the way to coming true.

A perfect example is the nonsense being spread by antivaxxers who are sowing distrust about the COVID-19 vaccines. They are calling for the criminal investigation, of Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of our foremost authorities on infectious diseases, simply because he gave sound health care advice about COVID. They are championing all sorts of oddball remedies, such as Ivermectin (a horse de-wormer), drinking dirt from a landfill, and drinking urine.

One fellow who espouses urine therapy has said that people who take the COVID vaccine are foolish. Well, with all due respect to that fellow, we vaccinated folks aren’t the ones who are drinking our own piss.

But COVID is not the only target of anti-medical nonsense. One practitioner has claimed that alien DNA and having dream sex with witches and demons causes all sorts of maladies.

These are not just isolated incidents; these movements have a lot more followers than they should have in a civilized society with easy access to education. The world depicted in A Friend of the Family seems to be coming true a lot more quickly than I’d expected.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.