Size / / /

Eighth in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.

Unfortunately, the city is real. You wouldn't have set the level of Natural Disasters to High, if you'd known. When the fires raged through town, real children died. You saw only pixels.

At least the game is relatively benign. You set the taxes, you build the highways. The citizens may fear and despise the alien intelligence that rules them, and wonder why. But they know it could be worse. They could be playing Doom.


Previous city (New(n) Pernch)

Next city (Jouiselle-aux-Chantes)

All published cities

 

Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum

Reader Comments


Benjamin Rosenbaum
Image © 2000 Lee Moyer.

Benjamin Rosenbaum lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and baby daughter, where in addition to scribbling fiction and poetry, he programs in Java (well) and plays rugby (not very well). He attended the Clarion West Writers' Workshop in 2001 (the Sarong-Wearing Clarion). His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Writer Online. His previous appearances in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, see his Web site.



Benjamin Rosenbaum recently became Swiss and thus like all Swiss people is on the board of a club. His children, Aviva and Noah, insist on logic puzzles, childrens' suffrage, and endless rehearsals of RENT. His stories have been translated into 24 languages, nominated for stuff, and collected.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
Issue 4 Mar 2024
Issue 26 Feb 2024
Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Load More
%d bloggers like this: