Cast: Eric Balfour & Donald Faison.

Can you recommend any other Sci-fi TV series?

Thanks

Gradients of Prosperity

About the company:

The combined proper time of the solutions we implement and support exceeds tens of millions of years. We apply a personalized approach to each client, drawing on our extensive experience and specific initial conditions, ranging from individual societies or states on a single planet to interstellar confederations or corporatocracies. If the maximum technological level in the target spacetime region does not exceed the potential for star formation from gas giants, we are confident that we will find the most effective solution for you, enabling sustainable economic stratification (with a decile coefficient greater than 20) in less than 10 years of the target region's proper time. Our long-term programs will significantly increase this figure, making the stratification process virtually irreversible. Our toolkit comprises thousands of proven methods, among which the most accessible for any spacetime region containing intelligent life is the manipulation of cultural, moral, and religious values, followed by the formation of such values ​​that meet the client's interests and enable the successful implementation of a wide range of tasks, whether it be the reduction of an individual state to a raw materials appendage or the launching of controlled wars on a planetary scale.

Job openings in your spacetime region:

Viceroy-dictator (bestial type):

Income level:

discussed individually with the successful candidate;

Experience:

not required (but understanding of comprador capitalism is welcome);

What you will be doing:

• to create the image of an advanced state and maintain the illusion of democratic processes (regular holding of luxury economic forums and direct participation in them, regular elections of “their own” and oneself, “pocket” courts, decorative parliaments and controlled media holdings, etc.);
• if necessary, you will not violate the constitution, but rewrite it;
• you will not eliminate opposition elites, but cleanse the homeland of filth, fulfilling the “will of the people”;

Personal qualities:

boundless greed and craving for luxury, unhealthy ambition and the desire to be (or at least seem) first, lack of moral barriers;

It will be an advantage:

the presence of envy and hostility, or better yet, resentment towards outstanding contemporaries;

Contact:

We are a company of unequal opportunities, so we hear and accept only the most persistent and daring desires...

ANDYS| 2025| a sci-fi short my friend directed, edited and did the vfx for.

Sun City, 2029. There is unrest amongst the youth as robots begin to invade the minimum wage workforce.

Made by a local crew and shot in El Paso, TX and Las Cruces, NM, inspired by our frustrations with our modern dystopia.

We mostly used an old go pro strapped to a helmet, except for the end which was shot on a black magic pocket 4k and it was editted using a mix of davinci and blender.

The Awakened Scavenger

“A lost android awakens to follow old orders. The creation of synthetic life was never suspended.”

https://youtu.be/3b9sleCZwg0

I’m looking for a book that collects several short stories to use as a literature teacher. I own books from Penguin Classics that come with several short stories (like Poe’s work) and I’m looking for something similar in science fiction. Any recommendations?

Edit: they’re 15. English learners in a foreign country. Stories around 10 pages or less would be great.

Really enjoyed my July reads! 8 books and 3 short stories.

I read Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang last June and loved it so much, I spent most of July with the Brainship series-- all about physically disabled, mentally gifted people who become the "brains" of either ships or space stations. The Ship Who Sang was published in the 1960s, while the rest of the series came along in the 1990s onwards. Anne McCaffrey co-authored some sequels, while others were written solely by her co-authors.

Brainship 1.3 and 1.4: Honeymoon and The Ship That Returned are two short stories written by Anne McCaffrey as epilogues to The Ship Who Sang. Short and sweet. Wish I could read more about Helva, though her story has wrapped up beautifully.

Brainship 2: PartnerShip by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball. A young woman from a wealthy family has just started her career as a brainship, and her first passengers are a group of wealthy youngsters who seem to be budding criminals. This one was an exciting adventure about solving crime, while also exploring privilege, morality, and justice ("black and white vs. gray") as well as redemption (reformation of criminals) and healing from past trauma.

Brainship 3: The Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey. A girl who is suddenly disabled due to a mysterious new disease becomes a brainship, and searches for a cure to prevent others from falling victim to the same disease. I enjoyed it, it was fun, romantic, sweet, and exciting.

Brainship 4: The City Who Fought by Anne McCaffrey and S.M. Stirling. The man who serves as the brain of a space station finds his wargaming hobby skills useful when the station is attacked by ruthless pirates. Very action-packed, but there's also a lot of romance, including exploration of non-conventional relationship themes like asexuality and polyamory. It was kinda funny that the villains were straight up evil, but some of them were also hot apparently, as begrudgingly admitted by at least one of the main female characters.

Brainship 7: The Ship Avenged by S.M. Stirling. This is a sequel to The City Who Fought, but I accidentally read it before that one, so on my first read I found it dragging. I re-read it after finishing The City Who Fought, and it was so much better! This is the only book in the series whose protagonist is a regular, non-ship human-- she was the genius kid in The City Who Fought, and in this book she's a young woman who ends up fighting that same group of pirates. The City Who Fought was more about war, while this one's more about heists and espionage. There's also romance and redemption.

Brainship 5: The Ship Who Won by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye. I like the premise of this brain-and-brawn pair: their mission is to "search the galaxy for intelligent beings, to travel where no shellperson and her brawn have gone before"... and they spend the long weeks in space travel playing an immersive RPG. The book's a fun homage to both Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons. I wasn't a fan of the main characters in this story, and I wasn't interested in the human wizards either, but I did enjoy the plot twist.

Brainship 6: The Ship Errant by Jody Lynn Nye. This is the sequel to The Ship Who Won, and I enjoyed it so much more! I like the main characters better here-- I feel they made better choices and were just better people overall. I got very invested in the magical frogs, and the diplomatic and bureacratic shenanigans were hilarious-- at one point, a protagonist quips that their mission is "to encounter strange new holdups and fascinating new ways to tie red tape where no frog has gone before".

(At this point, I was really sad that I had finished the Brainship series and there wasn't any more of it to read. But I checked the Brainship series list while writing these reviews, and it turns out there's one more book that just came out this year! Brainship 8: The Ship Who Dared by Mercedes Lackey is next on my reading list.)

Kitty Cat Kill Sat by Argus. A 400-year-old cat mans a space station, shooting monsters, to protect life on Earth. She's so lonely, and so tired of having only flavorless ration bars to eat. I really loved this book. It was epic and heartwarming and I cried at the end. It's very sci-fi but also very introspective and relational. A lot about mental health, found family, different types of consciousness/sentience. It was cozy but also emotional and action-packed.

After reading Kitty Cat Kill Sat I had to go back and re-read one of my favorite sci-fi short stories, by my favorite sci-fi author, Cordwainer Smith. The Game Of Rat And Dragon is about telepathic cats on tiny fighter crafts battling existential horrors in deep space. It's as cute and bizarre as it sounds. The cats fly around on tiny "football-sized" spacecraft.

Shadow of Earth by Phyllis Eisenstein. The heroine gets trapped in an alternate Earth where the Spanish conquered America, and the Catholic Church's global dominance meant that the industrial revolution never happened. Lol! I get the "anti-progress" Catholic stereotype but disagree with the idea that technological progress is fully dependent on America. Anyway, not much sci-fi in this, actually, it's more of a "surviving as a woman in a primitive tech world without women's rights and plumbing" adventure. I liked the strong female protagonist, and the stories about her relationships with men.

- July 2026