No essay this month. Instead, I share a new piece of short fiction that does better than the essay ever did. It explores the legal idea of personhood and what possibilities are unlocked when we apply it a little more broadly.

As always, suggestions, comments are welcome. If you want to get in touch, learn more, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the month. This month we talk about how we become attached to technology and Analee Newitz's new novel Autonomous. And there's a little piece of original flash fiction up front.

Show links:

• Highlights of the Cassini mission. from NASA.
• Autonomous: A Novel by Analee Newitz
• The Imaginary World podcast is a fascinating interview show about all kinds of worldbuilding.
• From Siri With Love the story of an autistic child and how his digital assistant became his best friend. (Also part of collected memoirs that just came out.)
• Short story Islands in the Dark by Sarah Goldman over at the Escape Pod podcast. (Audio and text are at the link.)
• Where we bury spacecraft over at Business Insider.

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the month. This week we talk about searching for answers in the wake of worldwide disaster and local tragedy, and N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy.

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Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the week. This week I visit some of the same craters that the Apollo astronauts walked on fifty years ago, and we talk about making up some history just so we can mess it up later.

Show links:

• Cinder Lakes Training Field (PDF) where the Apollo astronauts trained.
• S. (aka Ship of Theseus) by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams
• Linkdump:
  • Steal The Stars Tor Labs weekly dramatic podcast
  • The Economist explains algorithms
  • Robot Priests leading funerals in Japan at the Guardian.
  • Ten best SF stories you can read for free at The Chicago Review of Books
• Support:
  • Nevada Museum of Art, launching a satellite for the sake of art. (Kickstarter)
  • Escape Pod, weekly genre podcasts. (Patreon)
  • Story Hospital weekly, quality writing advice from a talented editor.

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the week. This week think about what makes up a journey, and Kij Johnson's novel The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.

Show links:

• Should robots be given copyright protection?
• Advice for journalists writing about (and readers reading about) artificial intelligence.
• Uncanny Magazine's Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction 
• Supported creators:
  • Clarkesworld Magazine and Podcast.
  • Fireside Fiction
  • Author Yoon Ha Lee
  • A print from Yuko Shimizu
  • Space T-shirt from Julieah Kaliski

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the week. This week we talk about the crazy ideas that have propelled us forward, even if we didn't know we could reach them.

Show links:

• Elon Musk's presentation Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species (pdf) (Available until July 5, 2017)
• Ordinary rockets sometimes land on farmhouses.
• Linkdump:
  • Sylvain Neuvel's Waking Gods, the sequel to Sleeping Giants.
  • Curtis Chen's Kangaroo Too, the sequel to Waypoint Kangaroo.
  • The XPrize foundation put a bunch of SF authors on a plane and sent them 20 years into the future. Here's what they saw

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the week. This week we talk about why they brought a pistol along when going on the first spacewalk, and The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

Show links:

• Two Sides of the Moon by Astronaut Dave Scott and Cosmonaut Alexi Leonov
• (Excerpt about the first spacewalk 

at Air & Space Magazine

• Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland
• Podcast: Big Picture Science on Science Fiction.
• Linkdump:
  • Neural networks to name Guinea Pigs
  • The History of 16th-Century Narcoleptic Walruses
  • Carbon Capture plant growing veggies in Switzerland.

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Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the week. This week we talk about those books that you found (or maybe they found you) at just the right time and place. Also

Show links:

• Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat
• ... and Make Room! Make Room!
• Curtis Chen's Waypoint Kangaroo
• ... and it's sequel Kangroo Two
• Some reading on the Bag of Holding trope
• Linkdump:
  • Clarkesworld Magazine's My Dear, Like the Sky and Stars and Sun by Julia K. Patt (Audio version)
  • (If you like Clarkesworld's stuff, Subscribe or join their Pateron.
  • The motorcycle NASA wanted to send to the moon.
  • Bad news for the Flatwork Space Program.

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

Reader's Room ponders the week's most thought-provoking speculative fiction and nonfiction. This week we talk about the transformative power of stories, Neil Gaiman's ability to use stories to evoke gods, and how great it is to pass a book forward.

Show links:

• Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology (and American Gods)
• Linkdump:
  • Tang Fei's The Person Who Saw Cestus (text and podcast at link.)
  • Radical Ocean Futures
  • The X-Prize Foundation's advisory council of science fiction authors

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

Reader's Room ponders the week's most thought-provoking speculative fiction and nonfiction. This week we talk about the so-called rules of writing, when to break them, and Sylvain Neuvel's novel Sleeping Giants.

Show links:

• Regarding Your Future With The Futures Planning Consortium Short fiction over at Fireside
• Sylvain Neuvel's Sleeping Giants
• Podcast:
  • The Heart’s Cartography by Susan Jane Bigelow
• Linkdump:
  • Arms you can wear under your regular arms
  • Octavia Bulter's Patternist Books super cheap this week.
  • Rocket Mail Exactly what it sounds like.

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com