thierstein.net
Home Reviews Shorts Search

As it's come up on one of my feeds, here I have an absolute classic for you:

Fredric Brown's 1954 short story Solipsist

Whilst he wrote novels, too, I always consider Fredric as one of the grand masters of the short - sometimes very short - story, frequently with an surprising twist to it that can turn an entire story on its head and forces the reader to start again. This is not one of those, but the twist is a classic.

For those not familiar with the term, Wikipedia provides the following definition for Solipsism:


 from Latin solus, meaning 'alone', and ipse, meaning 'self', is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.

 

 

Ian Sales – Adrift on the Sea of Rains

 

Peter Watts - Blindsight

 

Doris Lessing - Shikasta

 

Doris Lessing – The Sirian Experiments

 

Thomas Pynchon - Slow Learner

 

Sydney Padua - The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

 

Ken MacLeod - Cosmonaut Keep

 

Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow

 

Tricia Sullivan – Occupy Me

 

Iain Sinclair - Radon Daughters

 

Liz Williams - Empire of Bones

 

S.P. Somtow – I Wake from a Dream of a Drowned Star City


Andy Weir - The Martian

 

Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

 

Aliette de Bodard – In the Vanishers’ Palace

thierstein.net, Powered by Mambo!; free resources by SiteGround