Paper Basket Anticipation

By Bear Amade

Six "old fashioned" speculative fiction short stories: no supernatural battle climax!

- A countryman wants to live in a city of tommorrow. If he wants to be a citizen he needs to start some kind of business. Cats are the solution to his problems.

- What is going to happen with the Nobel Prize for Physics?
Well stay tuned: this scenario will certainly come true!

- Imagine the US with the metric system and a National Health Service! (Ok this one is farfetched!)
The real problem is how to deal with all the senior citizens: we need robots to care for them ... but they are not fond of robots.

- Problems with the banking rules for a limited but growing economy on a Mars colony.
Watch for the police chiefSuperIntendent Toorpikaï and the eclectic members of the Ares Constabulary: financial criminals beware!

- Everybody is a contractor and is judged by clients' evaluations, is that efficient?
(you'll probably think it's not fiction ... and you may be right!)

- An alternative version to 1001 nights!
Not science-fiction but stories from the past may explain today's events in the city of Basrah.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bear Amade
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9782955789209

Bear Amade

Member of the French baby-boom generation (1948), Gascon by birth and culture (you know these guys in the 3 musketeers!), raised in Morocco. Has been teaching mathematics, building houses (as an architect), implementing programming languages and tools (as a software engineer). Usually write technical books on programming but has been indulging in Science-Fiction for a long time ... He lives in Paris (France), plays the flügelhorn in various brassbands (though he does not know a thing about music!) and is an avid practitioner of mountain unicycling. Apparently stuck in the sixties because he is unable to read science-fiction written after 1980 (except some Jack Vance books)... Does not want to use tools like #!%Word: types everything using VIM! (and would like editors to consider docbook format submissions)

Book preview

Paper Basket Anticipation

Paper Basket Anticipation

Bear AMADE

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Published by Bear Amade at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Bernard Amade

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Why old fashioned SF stories?

Well to cut a long story short…

During the sixties and early seventies I was a Science-Fiction fan … but as I grew older I lost interest in the genre.

Many times I have tried to keep up … to no avail!

I recently bought a big book of SF novels (you know something like this year’s 40 SF best stories) and was sad: these novels were often brilliantly written by real professionals …but I could buy just one of these stories.

The notion of buying a story is hard to define (and is really a matter of taste). After all many twists in SF stories can be improbable though they can lead to interesting scenarios. You may not believe about faster than light travel and, after all, enjoy a story that uses the trick! I usually don’t like fantasy … but really enjoy fantasy written by Jack Vance!

So…

I am not a professional writer and, most importantly, I am not a native speaker of English (I am French).

I tried to write short SF stories in English for a funny reason: I wrote a SF book in French and, suffering from an acute George McFly syndrome, I wasn’t courageous enough to submit it to editors. So I thought I could learn the trade by writing short stories and, since there are many more SF magazines published in English, I should try to submit stories in English.

In fact this has been a complete failure: all magazines I could find just didn’t buy my stories. So I should stick to french (I recently started to publish stories in french).

Your advice is important: the writing style is probably not professional enough but do you buy the scenario (before this novels end up in the paper basket)?

I confess that one of these stories (Unfunded) has a weak twist but for other stories I am ready to bet that the scenario is highly probable (do not bet too much: in fact two are just thinly disguised facts that did really happen!)

Thanks for reading

(former software engineer, present time unicyclist and dreamer)

(Many thanks to the authors of the VIM and ASCIIDOC tools with which I write text and generate EPUB documents!)

All stories © Bernard AMADE

ISBN: 978-2-9557892-0-9 ######

Letter to Moma

Dear Mum.

Well you know how bad I wanted to live in one of those granaries. Upon my arrival I had the luck to find a place at Alveola formosa heptentrion (city dwellers do love long names for their whereabouts).

The first things that struck me were the smell (I don’t even notice it now!) and the solicitude of my neighbors. One wanted to cook for me, the other wash my linen, one even wanted to iron it (how old fashioned!). Well, in one hour I was offered all sort of services for every physical or metaphysical need you could imagine.

To live in such a place you’ve got to accept the rules and keep the things going. It struck me that I didn’t possess sufficient money or talents to buy, barter and keep the social intercourse to an acceptable level.

Being a student I imagined that I could set up some sort of information query service. Vadim the hugger argued that I wouldn’t probably get a big practice since you can get as much information as you want through cybsurf or gossip in the usual places (by which he meant