OGWiseman Recommends!
One absolute classic and a startling new multimedia story for your enjoyment.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope your holiday has been delicious and connected and safe. This year has produced all kinds of amazing changes in my life, and starting this project was one of the big ones. I’m so thankful to my entire readership, and just for having found the gift of writing and creating in my life.
This week has been a fruitful one for me in terms of reading interesting new things recommended to me by others.
First, I read one of my (now) favorite short stories of all time, recommended to me by a friend and reader of this newsletter. It’s a classic by Isaac Asimov, which is apparently extremely famous but I had somehow never come across in all my years of reading sci fi. It’s called “The Last Question”, and the full text is available here:
chrome-extension://gphandlahdpffmccakmbngmbjnjiiahp/https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
(That link is a little wonky, so if it doesn’t work, just google “The last question asimov” and it’ll be the first result.)
I won’t say too much about it so as not to spoil anything. I’ll just say that the story clocks in at 4600 words, and packs so much into that number that it’s humbling. I try to keep my stories under 5000 words, so it’s really just hammered home the fact that I have no excuse for my stories not being weighty enough.
Second, a friend called my attention to a project being done at SB Nation that is a bit hard to describe, except to say that it’s about sports and entertainment in a far-future world, and it’s definitely a story but told with pictures and video as a native part of the format. Here’s the link to the first chapter:
https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/chapter-1
(If this one doesn’t work google “sbnation 17776 football chapter 1”.)
At the end of each chapter is a link to continue to the next chapter. It’s quite long, and I’m not all the way through it yet, but so far it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve experienced in a long time, and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who is patient enough to just enter the story on its own terms and experience the weirdness.
Hope you all have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with another original story!