[surprisetalk]

Andy Weir's The Egg is another excellent short story:

[1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

If you're looking for more short stories, I highly recommend the following:

• Ted Chiang's Exhalation

• Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others

• Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie

• Borges's Ficciones

• Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book?

• Smullyan's Lady or the Tiger?

• Douglas Adams's God's Debris

Remember to support local booksellers when possible :)

[2] https://bookshop.org

[js2]

They're Made Out of Meat (21 submissions) and The Egg (33 submissions) seem to be the most frequently submitted short stories to this site:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=galactanet.com

[zeristor]

I’ve seen They’re Made Out of Meat, posted several times.

But this is the first time I’ve seen The Egg, thanks for that.

[ficklepickle]

I present my fav "The Machine Stops" by EM Forster with 41

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=the+machine+stops

[B1FF_PSUVM]

> submitted short stories to this site

Now that you reminded me, I submitted a story that Russ Cox mentioned at the end of his post discussed a month ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020792

It's "Coding Machines" by Lawrence Kesteloot, January 2009, and it has a lot to do with Cox's piece, Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler

[timetraveller26]

The Egg is one of my life long favorite histories. kurzgesagt did a video animation of it a few years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

[amelius]

Reminds me of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

[utopcell]

Adding to this Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" [1].

[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

[gcanyon]

Ted Chiang is a genius, and pretty much everything he writes is magnificent. "Exhalation" is ridiculously good. "Understand" is probably my favorite.

[ndsipa_pomu]

"The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" is an excellent short that is entirely available online - for those who don't yet appreciate his talent

https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

Edit: I was actually thinking of "The Great Silence" (aka the parrot one) which is a bit shorter but also available online. (The last line always gets to me)

https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...

[edanm]

I love Ted Chiang, and "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" is maybe my favorite of his stories. Certainly the one I think about most often.

[causality0]

I generally like Chiang's work and its derivatives but that was... kind of terrible. It felt like you told a government PSA writer to do sci-fi, except it isn't really sci-fi. It's an essay which posits that parrots are sapient and our failure to recognize it means we won't recognize alien sapience, and also wiping out parrots is bad. It's an if/then statement that stops at the if.

[notnaut]

The entire overarching genre is often called speculative fiction, so your description of it is sort of accurate. Writing would be in a sorry state if the only stuff that got put out had to answer its own questions.

[causality0]

But it's not speculative at all. There are only like three sentences of any substance in the whole thing. A parrot who is more an idea than a character speaks to the reader claiming that a parrot understanding shapes and colors means that parrots are sapient, and humans not recognizing that means we won't recognize sapient alien life, P.S. humans are killing all the parrots. There is no story. The essay being from the perspective of a parrot instead of a person talking about parrots has no consequences and doesn't change the work at all. The whole thing is incredibly facile.

We Puerto Rican parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them. Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out.

That's the only fictive part of the entire work.

It's just so lazy to change the premise of something without that change having any meaningful impact. What makes the statement by the parrot different from if it were from a human? Nothing whatsoever, and that's why this is a bad "story".

[kolinko]

Exhalation is also done as a best audiobook I've listened to - with author's comments (read by himself) interjected between the stories.

[x86x87]

Strongly agree. I have yet to run into a story written by Ted that I do not find amazing and through provoking.

[nmca]

If you enjoy darker/harder sci-fi "Axiomatic" is a great collection by Greg Egan.

[caskstrength]

Early Egan is excellent. Permutation City is one of my favorite novels.

[MaxBarraclough]

I recommend The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.

https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...

[munchler]

God's Debris is by Scott Adams, not Douglas.

[surprisetalk]

Thank you! What a silly slip of the fingers

Although, now that Douglas Adams has been brought up, I think I should also recommend his lesser-known book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which I believe has some connection to Dr. Who.

[fknorangesite]

And its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

And the very strange not-for-everybody-but-definitely-for-me TV adaptation.

[loxias]

> And the very strange not-for-everybody-but-definitely-for-me TV adaptation.

Hah!! There's _two_ of us! ;-)

Okay, now I might actually try to make "that really cool jacket" from S2. (you know what I mean)

[mcv]

I really love that TV version. One of my favourite things on Netflix.

And I didn't think they could possibly follow up that first season with something equally weird without becoming repetitive, but they managed it.

[neaden]

Yes, the first Dirk Gentley novel was based off a cancelled Dr. Who project called Shada, which I believe was recently released as an animated special.

[AnimalMuppet]

Douglas Adams actually wrote a few Dr. Who episodes.

[sandworm101]

Most everything in modern sci-fi is connected to either Hitchhikers or the doctor. Writers put jokes and references to them in nearly everything.

[jtagen]

Jesus. This story is like a train. You know it's coming, then it hits you.

[dmitshur]

There's a short story along these lines I remember reading somewhere, but I could never find it again. It describes the experience of someone whose brain is separated from their body but kept connected to it via a remote connection. Over time there are various experiments or different situations, like going into a cave to experience higher latency, maybe controlling multiple bodies at once, replacing the biological brain with an equivalent simulated one, and some others. I wish I could remember more of the details...

Any chance it's one of the ones you mentioned above, or another someone recognizes? I was able to find that the phrase "brain in a vat" refers to this genre as a whole, but haven't yet found the particular version that I faintly recall reading.

[colordrops]

Check out the short story The Jaunt by Stephen King. Serious existential terror.

[agravier]

Also Lena by qntm: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

[crazy3lf]

I like qtmn's short stories so much I bought the book Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories!

[1]: https://qntm.org/fiction

[phlakaton]

Add to that "Thang" by Martin Gardner (yes, that Martin Gardner, you Scientific American old-timers). I read it in an Isaac Asimov-curated short story collection once upon a time and it remains one of my favorite short-shorts.

[satori99]

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, is the short story that always comes to my mind when I think about this type of thing.

[soufron]

Ahah just read The Egg after reading your comment... great advice! Loved it! Thank you!

[edanm]

So wonderful to see Smullyan recommended here!

Though I have to add, as a huge fan of Ted Chiang, that you missed one of his best short stories, and certainly his shortest story - it's about a page long and will probably take less than five minutes to read, iirc:

"What's Expected of Us": https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a

[grammers]

Nice, thanks for sharing!