Barry: 2877 books

What Christmas Means to Me: Nine stories and Three EssaysThe Christmas Season – Why don’t we value Grinch and Scrooge for themselves instead of the presents they bring? A lighthearted look at materialism and the media.The Christmas Tree Embargo – What if Canada cut off trees to the United States?...

The machine was given three commands: Keep Amy alive, safe, and happy. The first two were easy enough, but the third meant understanding humans far better than they did themselves. When most of their crew is killed by an explosion on the ship, Mason fights to stay alive long enough to program an artificial...

Why does a man head out into the woods, leaving everything behind him: home, friends, old life, clothes, even his name? No trauma triggers the decision; it's not preceded by dialogue or even observed by others.It soon becomes clear that the "why" doesn't matter, though there are intriguing...

Genetic code is modifiable through cheap and dubious online kits, and the VR technology of the rich allows them to visit even the most dangerous slums. Lying in bed in secure buildings, and using hologram projectors that allow them to be both present and invulnerable, they stalk the dismal streets...

The second book in the Series, Working for Ray takes up the story of the man from In Light of Ray who has lost or thrown away everything in his search for a meaningful life. Only gradually does he begin to realize that he’d been looking in the wrong places for the wrong answers. Adopting a child...

The year is 2045 and over fifty thousand people live on Mars, with more arriving all the time. In this anniversary of the planet’s first landing, the Mars Historical Society has chosen to return to the travails of its most famous colonist. Twenty-five years after Jack Errores wrote his dispatches...

Lotus had everything: a breathable atmosphere, a vibrant ocean ecology, minerals. It was ideal, until the colonists discovered that they were losing their memories. Even as language slipped away from them, as their fingers unwittingly traced letters and images, the people of Shiptown hastily reengineered...

Working After the Collapse is a series of interlaced stories set in the different provinces and territories of Canada in a vaguely futuristic time when the worst implications of Peak Oil have come to pass. Different characters for each story tell of the collapse of society from their own perspective....

A cave girl trapped in modern times, Malu has lived a peaceful existence in the forest of Flores, Indonesia. When Hantus capture her, they little realize that the existence of a living Homo Erectus in the modern world will disrupt forever the lives of dozens of people. Even those who gape into her...

Biblical stories offer possibilities not found in typical prose; even magic realism cannot supplant the evocative nature of the true fantasy. They are the only fantastic stories hanging on the rusty hook of metaphor that people insist really happened. Thus, they have a grave and exhilarating rhetorical...

The Bio Park is the ultimate playground. A fully functioning ecological system almost a mile underground--later converted to an amusement park--it took years to build and hundreds of millions to develop. Unfortunately, it is losing money, so Linked Corporation has decided to seal the thirty foot doors...

Isolates and Survivors began as a collection of stories about hardy, tenacious people and how they overcome their grueling circumstances. It quickly ballooned as I became aware that I was drawn to the notion of self-reliance and the ability to endure. I respect those who maintain themselves even while...

We use the expression scattered skills a lot of the time when talking about disability, and I have come to embrace that idea. Some people are good at math. I am not. I have a good spatial sense. Others do not. I have begun to think about this spectrum of human skills, all the way from Kim Peek to...

When discussing morality, people typically focus on the big questions and ignore the decisions we make at nearly every moment of our lives. We are not often asked to choose between a baby’s life and an animal, whether to cheat on a loved one or betray a friend, but we are constantly bombarded by...