Sci-fi reviews mostly

Another writing prompt: "The king has ruled for 1000 years, secretly using black magic to take over the bodies of his heirs. This is only known to a select few in a dark, secretive Order. You are the next heir, and have discovered the truth. Now you're on the run, and the dying king has sent his agents after you." "There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic." The small dark room smells like rotten food and piss. I take a drink from my flask and try to keep the door closed. I boarded the entrance with the remnants of a bed, but it will at most buy me minutes. I need more time! They would have killed me by now and taken the next one in line, but the old man really wants me. It's an ego thing, he wants to prove that he beat me in every way possible. That no one can escape his will. Well fuck him! We'll see about that. The door erupts in a shower of splinters and the masked men rush in. My fathe

First story I wrote for a writing prompt:  [WP] When you die you can stay as long as you want as a ghost. The year is 2028 and the crew of the first human mission to mars has no idea that the ship is filled with the ghosts of hundreds of scientists, explorers and intellectuals. "Entry 1" : Some say there is a god in the machine. If I were a superstitious man I could swear that I find things moved, small things that in zero gravity could have floated away on their own. When I am alone at my shift in the silence I hear sometimes faint whispers. I can almost make out what they say, though they always remain unrecognisable. Sometimes I see things out of the corner of my eye, I can even feel a hand on my shoulder. There's nothing there though, there never is. We're on our 110th day of our voyage and we have all sacrificed so much to be here! My daughter knows me mostly from our online sessions and I see the sad look in my wife's eyes. It

Second story done for another writing prompt: Turns out humanity was alone in the universe because they were way too early to the party. Now, billions of years later aliens find a strange planet, Earth, and begin to unveil the secrets of the first intelligent species. Life is a game of inches: Our path was a hard and arduous one. We fought tooth and nail just so we could get past our atmosphere. We are not built for space travel. We cannot think well in spatial terms. We are not creative and everything we've created was done while we failed again and again and again. With each iteration we got one minuscule step closer - continuous improvement is our mantra, our shield, our first and last rule of efficiency. But the truth is we would never have thought to reach space if we had not received the signal. It was so incredibly alien, so strange, so alluring! Against our instincts we have striven forward and upward! We changed our genetic make-up so we could

This is something I wrote for this subject. First original post on this blog: "You noticed as a child that every night you can’t sleep, a disaster occurs somewhere in the world. You’ve been having chronic insomnia for weeks now. Something big is coming." I am a human measuring tool for loss of life. Instead of degrees like a thermometer, I measure in time of no sleep. Until now longest I've gone is 2 days without sleep. It's been two weeks now and I feel like I'm dying. I find myself rather excited at the thought. During the first week I was really afraid. One day of no sleep usually means 1000 people dead. That's an average of course, but the growth is not geometrical, it's exponential! When you have insomnia you are never asleep, but you are never really awake either. There's this quote from fight club : "With insomnia nothing's real. Everything's far away. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy.". I th