Mara Okafor had eleven minutes before her Provision score reset, and she was going to spend every one of them somewhere she wasn't supposed to be. The maintenance shaft beneath Sector 12 smelled like ozone and old rain. She dropped the last three feet onto the access grate, boots silent on the metal, and checked … Continue reading The Ledger Will Burn
Dystopian Fiction
Question of the Week #501
Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle! This one comes courtesy of Gregory Stock's The Book of Questions, and it's the kind of question that sounds like science fiction until you realize how much of the underlying technology already exists. Here it is. Would you want every person in … Continue reading Question of the Week #501
The Influence of Classic Literature on Science Fiction Films
I have a confession that might surprise exactly no one who reads this blog regularly. Long before I ever sat in a dark theater watching a spaceship glide across a screen, I was a kid with my nose buried in books that had absolutely no business being as good as they were. And the older … Continue reading The Influence of Classic Literature on Science Fiction Films
The Assigned
The letter arrived, as it always did, on the morning of a child's eighteenth birthday... printed on government-issue cream cardstock, sealed with the blue wax emblem of the Bureau of Productive Placement, and slid under the front door at precisely 6:00 a.m. by a courier who never knocked and was never seen. Nora Calloway found … Continue reading The Assigned
The Confusing Middle 