To Stir the Soup

Top 10 Reasons Why the Sun is Overrated We have all been taught how important and glorious the Sun is, about how all life originates from this great ball of flame, and how it brings warmth and light upon this sacred land of opportunities and adventure, and how we owe all mere lives to the all-almighty orb of unspeakable holiness... Well, it is about time we wake up from this dream of lies and face the concrete-hard ice-cold facts, cause the Sun is nothing but being more overrated than Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey (seriously, I genuinely cannot physically grasp how someone could sit through that 2 hours of pure distilled ennui without falling asleep). So throw yourself onto the sofa, take a deep breath, and let me knock some sense up your intestines, cause we gonna explore the top 10 reasons why the Sun ain't as awesome as you have been brainwashed to believe. This post is sponsored by The Moon Gang. 1. It only comes out at day time I hate to state the obvious, but in case you a...

Story title: The Mausoleum's Children Author: Aliette de Bodard Link to story: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/  (Spoiler-free) Thuận Lộc was haunted by crushing traumas of childhood memories, memories of slaving away in dark corridors of the Mausoleum for the cold-hearted Architects. She managed to escape, young, but this fortune came with a steep, steep cost: guilt. For her friends, Dao and Nai, never escaped, and while Thuận got to taste the sweet pleasures of freedom, their endless days of toil and struggle carried on, trapped deep within a labyrinth of an inescapable prison, a prison where any hope of leaving would be futile. And when the guilt became unbearable, she made up her mind. She would return to the Mausoleum, and she would not leave the place alone... This is one of those stories where the reader is thrown into a whirlpool of new invented terms within the first five paragraphs, and that could usually lead to either one o...

Story title: How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub Author: Phenderson Djèlí Clark Link to story: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/  (Spoiler-free) Ambition is what drives a man to ignore sane advice and attempt the unspeakable, just so one can eventually savour the tempting promise of success that is nothing but a hollow illusion. It is exactly ambition that pushed Trevor, our protagonist who was unsatisfied with the cards life has dealt to him, to engage in a crazy idea: raising a kraken at home. It started out smooth, an innocent creature, small, harmless, breaking free from its egg and entering a new world that is Trevor's bathtub. But krakens grow quickly. And they grow to great sizes. And Trevor finds himself dealing with something much more than his ambitious can swallow... This was not the first story of Clark I have read. "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" was one explosive whirlpool of a st...