The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert E-Book

Cora Buhlert

• Herausgeber: Cora Buhlert
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Bertha and Alfred, married for twenty years, enjoy a truly science fictional life in the twenty-first century. But in spite of all the technological marvels surrounding them, an argument about sharing a dessert at an upscale restaurant escalates and threatens their friendship with their neighbours, the Hoppenstedts.This parodistic piece is a mundane short story of 6000 words or approximately 20 print pages, written in the style of science fiction’s “golden age” of the 1940s and 1950s. With bonus recipe.

Leseprobe

The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert

by Cora Buhlert

Bremen, Germany

Copyright © 2016 by Cora Buhlert

All rights reserved.

Cover photo © by jirkaejc via CanStockPhoto

Cover design by Cora Buhlert

Pegasus Pulp Publications

Mittelstraße 12

28816 Stuhr

Germany

www.pegasus-pulp.com

Introduction

The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert is a parody, intended to poke fun at the conventions of a certain kind of science fiction story.

This story was written in response to the Not Really SF Short Story Challenge instigated by science fiction and fantasy writer E.P. Beaumont.

The challenge was a response to complaints by some more traditionally minded science fiction writers and fans that science fiction had been invaded by literary writing and that the virtues, values and scientific rigour of science fiction’s so-called “golden age” had been forgotten.

In response, E.P. Beaumont proposed launching a counter invasion of literary fiction by science fiction. The challenge was to write an entirely mundane and realistic short story in the style of science fiction’s “golden age”, complete with clunky overexplanation of every single piece of technology, no matter how mundane, with which the characters interact.

The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert is such a story. It is the story of two couples in a restaurant nearly coming to blows over sharing a dessert told as if it were a hard science fiction story of the 1950s. There is also a lot of Latin and bonus bad anthropology and history, since a lot of hard science fiction never really took the “softer sciences” seriously.

I would like to thank Wikipedia and the Internet for providing an overview of the science and technology behind many common household objects.

I would also like to apologise to the brilliant German comedian Vicco von Bülow a.k.a. Loriot for borrowing not just the plot of his famous skit Kosakenzipfel (Cossack’s Prick), but also the recipe for this unusual delicacy. However, since the borrowing was done for the purpose of satire, I suspect Loriot would not mind. Perhaps he would even smile.