You know how they say some people have a face made for radio? Well, we both definitely have voices fit for print. Er, if that makes sense.

I’m looking for a couple of people (male and female) to narrate a few stories and poems from past and future issues of Basement Stories. Experience with this sort of thing isn’t necessary, though it would be great. I’m just looking for somebody with a good reading voice, who would be willing and able to record audio for us.

If you’d like to help us out, please email me at caroljkirkman@gmail.com. If you’ve got any audio samples of you reading that you could attach to the email, that would be immensely helpful.

They’re also bringing a robot called Robonaut-2 (or R2, for short) to, quoting NASA, “[provide] scientists and engineers on the ground and crews on the station an opportunity to test how humans and human-like robots can work shoulder-to-shoulder in microgravity.” Okay, that’s kind of awesome.  Their press kit goes on to say that this will “help NASA understand robotic capabilities for future deep space missions.”

STS-133 will be the last mission for Space Shuttle Discovery, and one of the last (if not, I think, the last) manned missions that NASA has planned for the future.  The crew of the Discovery is as follows:

Commander: Steven W. Lindsey

Pilot: Eric A. Boe

Mission Specialists: Timothy L. Kopra, Michael R. Barratt, Nicole P. Stott, and Alvin Drew

Every time there’s a shuttle launch, now, I tend to get more and more nostalgic and retrospective. I sometimes get the horrible feeling that an era is ending, with NASA, and I guess it is, but I don’t think that’s the way I should think of it. With any luck, this is actually the start of a new era for NASA, one in which progress is made towards having actual bases on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

I guess it’s better to look forward than to look back.  After all, isn’t that what NASA has always been about?  I mean, they’re testing the capabilities of robots to operate in deep space missions – that’s not only foward thinking, that’s just plain cool. God, I love science.

The launch is scheduled for 1:37 a.m. tomorrow (which is why we’re posting this now), and you can watch the launch on the Kennedy Space Center website.

For me, these are those stories.

A quick caveat: this is in no way intended to be a definitive list of the best short stories, just some of my personal favorites, and the ones that have been the most important to me.)

1. The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin

What’s it About?

A girl hitchhikes on a spaceship, not realizing that, because the fuel for each journey is precisely calculated, she won’t be allowed to reach her destination.

Why is it Important (to you)?

This is a sort of infamous story within the SF community, but when I read it I was eleven, twelve at the most. I was one of those supremely nerdy people who actually read their English textbooks, and occasionally I took mine home to read the different short stories in it. One of the short stories was “The Cold Equations”  It was one of my first clear experiences with Hard SF,  and the ending stuck with me for a long time, for years after I’d forgotten the title or author of the story. I stumbled across it in a “best of” anthology years and years after I’d first read it.  May have permanently molded my mind into liking science fiction stories with horribly depressing endings.

Where Can I Read It?

You can find it, online, here. If you’d rather read it in print, it’s in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, vol. 1, which is a great anthology all around.

2. There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

What’s it About?

Another classic of SF that I didn’t know was a classic when I read it. An automated house goes through its daily routine after its human inhabitants have already been killed in a nuclear explosion.

Why is it Important (to you)?

I think everyone who’s read it remembers this story. It’s a pretty poignant argument against nuclear war, written in a time where nuclear disaster seemed imminent. But, for me, it was another example of how powerful a story can be by just implying disaster. This and “The Cold Equations” made me want to read more short stories, and probably made me the insane short story consuming machine I am today.

Where Can I read it?

It’s included in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. If you haven’t read The Martian Chronicles yet, go find a copy and read it. We’ll wait.

3. Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt

What’s it About?

A movie buff finds a video store he’s never seen before, that leads to a different universe.

Why is it Important (to you)?

I watched Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons because of this story. I don’t want to over exaggerate and say that it changed the way I think about movies, but it certainly gave me more of an appreciation for the medium, for the malleability of the finished product based on an impossibly large amount of variables, for its ability to connect people across all sorts of lines. It’s still one of my favorites to listen to, and, to me, it’s a clear example of how to do Alternate Universes, and quiet science fiction, correctly.

Where Can I Read It?

The Escape Pod episode is free to listen to.

4. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

What’s it About?

A young boy watches a cult tv show with his friends while trying to cope with his parents’ impending divorce, while all the time receiving phone calls from

Why is it Important (to you)?

This is my favorite of Kelly Link’s stories, and it’s just so brilliant, on a meta-textual level. She starts out the story by saying that our protagonist is a character on the television show The Library, but by the time you’re two pages in, you’ve already forgotten that. For anyone who’s ever been torn away from people they love, or who’s ever been fannishly obsessed with a tv show, or who’s ever wished they could live in one of the worlds they’ve read about, this story makes a lot of sense. It’s so hard for me to describe why I love this story so much, but it’s clever without reminding us how clever it is, heartfelt without being sappy, and mysterious without being unreadably enigmatic. It erases the boundaries between fiction and reality until the distinction is meaningless.

Where Can I Read It?

In Kelly Link’s short story collection Magic for Beginners or her other short story collection Pretty Monsters.

5. All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein

What’s it About?

A bartender listens to a pulp writer’s life story late one night. And well, the rest? I’ll let you read for yourself.

Why is it Important (to me)?

As has already been established by this point, I like any story that can send chills up my spine or make me think I should call my mother and tell her I love her.  After I finished reading this story, late one night in college, I just stared at the ceiling for a long moment.It was one of those moments where you’re simultaneously thinking, “that was brilliant” and “I will never be that good” and “what the hell did I just read?” all at the same time.  I don’t usually like Heinlein much, but he’s a masterful storyteller, and he deftly pulls off something that most people would’ve botched.

Where Can I Read It?

Another Escape Pod episode! Thanks, Steve.

6. The House of the Seven Librarians by Ellen Klages

What’s it About?

A little girl is raised by librarians.

Why is it Important (to You?)

I have no real justification for this one. It’s not a particularly famous story, or an award-winning one. I just love it so much. I mean, come on! It’s a story about a little girl being raised by librarians, in an abandoned library. That’s beautiful. That’s just awesome. There’s something very, very comforting about this story, and I still read it when I’m in a bad mood. It’s a story you never really want to end.

Where Can I Read It?

Ellen Klages’s short story collection Portable Childhoods

What you can gather from this list, I guess, is that I’m not very original in my favorites. But I blame the fact that my house had tons of old fiction anthologies lying around that had all these dusty old Golden Age stories in them.

Issue #3 is up and ready to read! Click on the cover to go and get some Basement Stories goodness.

But some games have stories so great that they overcome my natural tendency to flinch every time something shoots at me, and my clumsiness with a controller.

Deadly Premonition is a game that’s already become sort of notorious for being flat out insane. A sort of low rent mash up of Heavy Rain and Twin Peaks, it follows the exploits of Agent Francis York Morgan (but call him York, everybody calls him York) as he tries to uncover the motivations behind a series of killings in the small town of Greenvale. The protagonist talks to his imaginary friend Zach, reads fortunes from his coffee, and has endless amounts of dialogue about old science fiction B-movies. The graphics are kind of horrible for a game that just came out a year ago, and the combat is beyond tedious, but the story is insanely fun, and at times the game is outrageous, almost campy. It has one of the weirdest boss fights you will probably ever play.

But the greatest thing about Deadly Premonition is that, despite the fact that it’s so silly, I found myself actually invested in the story. At the end, when several important characters are faced with the threat of death, I found myself actually saddened by the prospect, not something you can say about every game.

Very little can be said about Half Life that hasn’t been said again and again, but I really do love it. Unlike a lot of wish-fulfilment sort of video games, where you play a beefy space marine, it seems like Valve really knew how to strike at the heart of nerds everywhere by making their protagonist a scientist who works in a top secret science lab, and, though he’s completely untrained in combat, still manages to beat back an alien invasion with just a crowbar and a stolen handgun. I am so very jealous of Gordon Freeman’s beard.

Half Life 2 also wins major points in my book for including a non player character who’s not just tolerable, she’s downright loveable – Alyx Vance. When was the last time you played a video game and were actually excited to see an NPC?  Half Life 2 is like a greatest hits album for the whole medium of video games, including car chases. FPS sequences, a straight-up survival horror level (ugh, Ravenholm) and you even have control over other units for parts of the game.

The most interesting part of the whole Half Life series (and really, Valve’s work as a whole) is that the games manage to build up an interesting story without, ever once, actually using a proper cut scene. There’s the eight minute intro to the first game, but even during that you can still move around the train car. Control is never actually fully taken away from the player.

Silent Hill 2 is another famous game, and it’s my favorite. I don’t necessarily find it scary, in the adrenaline pumping way I find very large spiders and episodes of The Real Housewives of Orange County scary, but it’s creepy, that’s for sure. Especially since I happen to have the same first name as the protagonist – hearing people call your video game character by your actual name adds another level of weirdness.

The game follows James Sunderland, an ordinary guy who received a letter from his wife telling him to go to the town of Silent Hill.  His wife died three years ago, but James finds himself compelled to go to the town anyway, and finds the whole place deserted when he arrives.While wandering through the town, he encounters a woman – Maria – who looks exactly like his dead wife, deformed and lifeless monsters, and a little girl who insists that he didn’t love his wife as much as he thinks he did.

Silent Hill 2 is a journey through the mind of its protagonist, an examination of his greatest fears and desires, and the secrets he tries to hide from himself. James is a memorable and likeable character, even if he’s not the nicest of guys, and there are a number of sequences that are extremely memorable.  Every time I replay it, it’s still interesting and new.  Honestly, even if you don’t want to play the actual game, I’d recommend watching a Let’s Play or at least watching the cut scenes. Below is probably my favorite:

Also, it has an amazing soundtrack. Check out this song:

Awesome.

(Apologies if some of the videos don’t properly embed.)

Hopefully  this will give us a chance to widen the scope of our conversation, here, and will allow for some interesting posts. We’re going to alternate weeks, with James going first.

If there’s anything in particular you think we should talk about, let us know in the comments.

Megan Arkenberg (“Hieronymus”, #2) recently had her fantasy novelette “The Summer King” published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Read it (for FREE! ) here.

RJ Astruc (“Propagation”, #2) has a story in Electric Spec, “Johnny and Babushka,” which is pretty awesome. She’s also got a novella in Wilde Oats called Clockworld, and another story in Phantasmacore. The coolest thing? All three stories are available for free. As you might already know, she also recently had a novel published through Crossed Genres called A Festival of Skeletons.

Erich William Bergmeier (“The Last Man After the War”, #1) is in the newest issue of M-Brane SF.

Rajan Khanna (“Flowing Shapes”,  #1) not only had one of his stories printed in the great The Way of the Wizard anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, but also is having the same story podcasted at Podcastle, and has a story in GUD #6.

Samuel Mae (“Dust Particles”, #1) has stories upcoming in Electric Velocipede and Bards and Sages Quarterly.

Alexandra Seidel (“Wine”, #2) has poetry upcoming in Bull Spec #4, Jack O’ Spec: Tales of Halloween and Fantasy, and Paper Crow.

Lavie Tidhar (“Covenant”, #2) has a new book called  An Occupation of Angels
out from Apex Publications, and is in an upcoming anthology, Bewere the Night, edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

Eliza Victoria (“Incidental Light”, #2) has poetry in the latest issue of Stone Telling and The Houston Literary Review, as well as a story coming up in StoneQuarterly.

If you know of any more good news that we should hear about, let us know, and we’ll put it here.

If you’ve never seen one of these before, here’s how it works. Basically you buy books we’ve put on there (that’s not ours) and we get a percentage of the book price, which is awesome and means we can pay everybody on time for Issue #3. We’ve put some great books on there, including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects, N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and All Clear by Connie Willis.

If you don’t like our taste in literature, but are planning on buying something from Amazon around now anyway, please please consider clicking on one of the links in our affiliate store, and then going to whatever you want to buy from that page, as we’re paid for anything you buy after you click on any link on our store. If you are a college student getting ready to buy textbooks, especially expensive ones like big medical or math textbooks, and are buying them on Amazon, you would be our best friend forever if you go through our site first – the amount we would get would not be insignificant, to us or to our writers.

I’m planning on making a more permanent and good looking way to link the affiliate site very shortly, but wanted to throw this post up in the meantime. We’re going to try this out for a little while and see how it goes – Strange Horizons uses an affiliate store, and from what I’ve read about it, it seems it’s served them pretty well in the past, so we thought we’d give it a spin.

Okay, just one more link to the store. I promise.

As always, if you have any questions/comments/hopes/dreams,  let us know in the comments.

There’s going to be another Mars Rover, (or “Mars Space Laboratory”) this one called “Curiosity.”  It was named (and this is adorable) by a twelve year old girl, Clara Ma, who entered a contest to name the rover. Aww! Oh man, and she got to go to JPL? Now I’m just jealous.

And now she has Immortal Graffiti

It’s set to launch sometime in late November to late December this year, and will land on Mars in August 2012.

Curiosity is mainly going to be investigating whether conditions were favorable at any point on Mars for microbial life. It’s going to be able to take samples of rocks and sand, and process those samples for evidence of past life, which is amazing.

It’s going to have a bunch of other science-y tools on it, including some cameras capable of taking extremely close-up pictures of the environment, a x-ray spectrometer, a device that can characterize the radiation on the surface of Mars which is, I quote “necessary for planning human exploration of Mars,” (which means they’re at least thinking about going there!!!) and a laser/telescope combo thing that can analyze the chemical makeup of rocks and soil.

Radiation Assessment Detector

I don’t have much more to add, here. I’ll probably make another post about Curiosity closer to its launch date. This is just making me so happy, right now, knowing that we are, in fact, sending something to Mars in the immediate future, that tests and data are being gathered, even if an actual manned flight is thirty or forty years – or even longer – in the future. Progress is progress.

And is it wrong to say that this looks like it’s going to be the coolest rover yet? It’s going to be twice as big, I think, if I’m reading the information correctly, and it has all sorts of cool radiation reading doohickeys and friggin lasers. Seriously, there are artists renderings of the finished rover, and all of them seem to have at least one laser beam in them.

You can got to NASA’s page about the mission for more information. Curiosity also actually has a Twitter account. Hell yeah.

(All images are from NASA’s website.)

(Ed note – All unconventional grammar and colloquialisms in this post can be attributed to ‘space fever,’ i.e. the obsession of the inflicted with science that is somehow concerned with extra-planetary research. This disease has only one cure (the film “Armageddon,”) considered too cruel by many to be used on human subjects.)

Post anything you’d like us to talk about in particular in the comments.