In which we've developed VR that interfaces with your brain. It starts to be unsafe after playing it for eight hours straight, which is why you get kicked out after thirty minutes. Except if you're an admin and can make it not do that, in which case you're at risk of brain damage and your sister has to come talk you out of staying in the game.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence and some other miscellaneous stuff.
Tags for this one: 4-star, modern setting, rated E10+, science fiction
This was good until it was abruptly depressing. Did Ray Bradbury ever write anything that didn't have dystopia and/or |nuclear war| somewhere in it?
Much of the science in this is a bit dated (humans can't survive without a spacesuit on Mars, and crewed Mars rockets aren't exactly easy to build) but it's still a good read.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence and (I think) some bad language. It's too disjointed to make one cohesive narrative, though you could do something like release each mini-story as its own chapter or DLC for the main game.
3 stars. The ending was too melancholy for my taste.
Tags for this one: 3-star, rated T, science fiction, space
This one would have been good if it had played the scary straight. It ought to have been creepypasta material instead of sadpasta material. But instead of a ghost dog that's insane and attacking people, we get a ghost dog that's trying to lead people to the resting place of a kid who got lost looking for it and froze to death. I'd have spoiler tagged that, but I saw it coming by like chapter 3, so why bother.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for dangerous situations (characters get stuck in a blizzard). It's not even spooky.
2 stars. Just lame.
Tags for this one: 2-star, horror [at least I think it was supposed to be], junior fiction, lame, modern setting, rated E10+
(Endnote: It's been a while since I did one of these, hasn't it.)
Pretty sure Ray Bradbury's book Dandelion Wine had no dystopia or nuclear war in it. Instead, it was about leaving childhood behind, and so doggone depressing I have been trying to scrub it out of my brain ever since.
ReplyDeleteOh, he wrote a book about vampires that was funny! From the Dust Returned.
But he lived and wrote a lot of his stuff during the Cold War, when we were worried about nuclear war turning our world into a dystopia, so... that's where and what and why his books are the way they are.
That does make sense.
DeleteP.S. Also now I kind of want to read From the Dust Returned.
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