This is a guest post by Inez Ponce de Leon.

Science and fiction are both hard to write, which makes science fiction doubly harder. You need to present a situation as possible without alienating your audience. You need to sound credible. Your science needs to be sound. You need to have a great command of a language and you need to awaken your reader’s imagination. Oh, and yes, you have to do research.
continue reading "5 Major Research Sources for the Research Hungry Science Fiction Writer"

Hey everybody,

BestScienceFictionStories.com is excited to announce the addition of a new full-time blogger: Konstantine! Kostas (as he is known around here) is joining us from his home in Athens, Greece. He is no stranger to blogging or science fiction, just check out his cool web site, ShapeScapes, to find several good stories and reviews – including his recent review of the comic book The Metabarons.
continue reading "BSFS Gets Another Full Time Blogger!"

This is a guest post by Inez Ponce de Leon.

Time travel stories have almost run their course: whether you’re reading The Time Traveler’s Wife or a classic by Jules Verne, it seems that man’s obsession with time travel has gotten tiring, if not overused. However, once in a while, there comes a story that makes you actually think: what if time travel was truly possible? What would happen? Where would you go?
continue reading "Time, Again by Tim Maly"

Hi everyone. Today I have something fun and quite cool to share with you: a Bulgarian science fiction site! I know I know, the vast majority of you don’t speak Bulgarian, so why would I promote this site?
continue reading "A very cool Bulgarian SF site!"

This is a guest post by Jane Smith.

Something about science fiction seems to lend itself to narratives on an epic scale. You will be hard pressed to find a science fiction plot that spans less than a trilogy — and even when an author manages to contain the entire unwieldy mass of their story in one book, that book is typically so long that it might as well be three or more.

Given that science fiction often strives to be immersive, and that story arcs often involve considerable exposition, catching the readers up to speed, so to speak, it actually isn’t so surprising that science fiction series are sometimes made up over ten books. (Fantasy series are even guiltier of this, to be sure.)

But writers of science fiction short stories have a much smaller canvas to work with. Their worlds aren’t any smaller, and their ideas aren’t any less grand, but they are highly constrained by the space (pun intended) they have to craft an engaging story — how am I supposed to explain how the exhaustion of Earth’s resources and pollution of the atmosphere by nuclear radiation forced the population of earth to colonize Mars, where they find alien life-forms that threaten the continued survival of the human race in under 6,000 words?
continue reading "Finite Space: Shrinking Your Science Fiction Story to Fit the Short Story Mold"

This is a guest post by Maria Rainier.

One of the abiding joys of reading science fiction is being transported to another world, to the future, an alien planet, an alternate dimension, wherever the mind of the author takes us. Science fiction imagines new places and times that fascinate us and provide the setting for the drama that unfolds over the course of the narrative, making the experience seem real and vivid.
continue reading "Realism in Science Fiction: How to Make Your Story Believable"

One of our part-time reviewers, Martin Dugas, sent me some information about his latest short story “Romano, The Great Magician” so I am passing it on to you. He is offering the story as a free download during the next 3 days, so be sure to check it out.

“Romano, The Great Magician”, a 2012 flash fiction by Martin Dugas, is about a magician who attempts to time travel right before the eyes of his spectators.
continue reading "Romano, The Great Magician by Martin Dugas"

This is a guest post by Inez Ponce de Leon.

I love reading – and I love looking beyond how words are arranged, and how a plot is ordered. A story is so much more than its characters and its tale. There are symbols in it. There is a history behind it. There are people who will love it and people who will hate it.

I also like reading reviews because they give me a chance to know what I should sink my teeth into, and which stories I should avoid before I end up spitting it out. There are reviews that were spot on. There are reviews that were so off base that I wanted to hunt down both the author AND the reviewer.

In my years as both writer and reviewer, however, I’ve found that there are things that you should avoid when writing reviewers. Here are my top five peeves that might help you write a better short story review.
continue reading "How NOT to Review a Science Fiction Short Story"

Something fun today!

A little over a year ago I reviewed a flash fiction story called “Chameleon” by Colin Harvey. It was a great story and many people mentioned to me how much they liked it.

Well, last week one of my readers, Sam Lemberg, wrote in to let me know that he had created a video based on the short story:
continue reading "Chameleon: A Story and a Video"

This is a guest post by Inez Ponce de Leon

I love me a good science fiction story. After all, I worked in a science lab for a decade. My own novelist brain tells me that every corner of that lab has a story to tell. I’ve worked with DNA, organic chemicals, and industrial poisons. No, it wasn’t fun, but it sure beat just reading books!
continue reading "Oh Really Now?! The Common Traps Science Fiction Short Story Writers Often Fall Into"

This is a guest post by Angelita Williams

There’s a (not so secret) secret to writing great short science fiction that new writers should know about: less is more. When writing science fiction, you don’t necessarily have to possess the intellectual ambition to create an alternate universe or dream up a new alien race. Particularly if you’re writing a sci-fi short story, you won’t have the time to flesh out lengthy exposition about the emergence of a mutant race or how an army of robots came to establish dominance over the earth. Short fiction doesn’t grant the luxury of major plot development.
continue reading "How to write compelling sci-fi short stories"

Description of Story:

This is an unusual and odd little tale that brings to mind the colorful poetics of Ray Bradbury and echoes of the imagery in early Arthur C Clarke works.

It’s set on a world that rotates so quickly the nights and days last only four hours each. The odd little place contains cities called Dreamlands, orange sands and silver waterways with twin moons constantly racing low overhead. And of course, there’s the Diamond Rain.
continue reading "Diamond Rain by Steve Buick"

Description:

Dawn Theocratis has been stuck for years. Her career is paused, her heart is stone and her dreams no longer breathe. Enter Bredmeyer Deed, co-worker.
continue reading "The Deceptive Smiles of Bredmeyer Deed by Susan Scutti"

Description:

Ellie Simmons lost the love of her life, her husband Daniel. And now, two years later, baby Daniel is born — a clone of the man she lost.
continue reading "The Baby by Karen A. Wyle"

This is a guest post by Rick Buchan.

The Nature Of Man. Since the days of Pinocchio, inanimate devices seem mesmerized by Man and obsessed with trying to discover the answer to what it is and what it means to be human.

This quirky yet wonderful novelette, written by Roger Zelazny in 1966, illustrates the frustratingly perplex struggle to correlate genius with folly, strength with frailty, and all the promise and pratfalls of what it means to be Man! (*)
continue reading "For a Breath I Tarry by Roger Zelazny"

3 classic authors of short science fiction

When people think of science fiction, they usually imagine huge tomes with equally intimidating page counts and plot lines. Few people outside the sci-fi fan base consider the countless thought provoking sci-fi short stories produced every year by prominent and newfound writers. Below are three classic sci-fi authors with an impressive short story catalogue worth investigating.

continue reading "3 Classic Authors of Short Science Fiction"

This is a guest post by Rick Buchan.

Time Travel. What a compelling, uniquely seductive science fiction theme! The chance to correct a wrong, witness an historical event first hand, or simply escape to a better time when the world made sense; you know – the “good old days”.
continue reading "The Hertford Manuscript by Richard Cowper"

In the style of Mr Men and Thomas the Tank Engine (with a bit of Douglas Adam’s style reality) comes Alien Characters, a monthly series of science fiction short story ebooks for Kindle for children aged 6-10.
continue reading "Alien Characters by Neil A. Hogan"

There are a number of notable science fiction writing competitions open for the new year so whether you have a new story to tell, want to polish up something you wrote back in high school (or even if you’re actually in high school), or simply want to challenge yourself to try something new, start getting your manuscripts ready! It doesn’t take a master’s degree in writing to get your science fiction writing recognized and even published through sci-fi competitions. These open contests for writers with varying experience and ability can provide that gateway of opportunity for talented sci-fi storytellers.
continue reading "Science Fiction Competitions"

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES

Wow!  It’s been 4 years since Rusty let me know he was starting this website, and I started spending countless hours at work reading the science fiction short stories he reviewed.  (I’m sure none of you have ever done that…)  Happy 4th Anniversary BSFS!
continue reading "4th Anniversary Special: Cin’s Top 10 List"