A short-story-a-day: John Shirley and William Gibson
By the Branta Webcrawler • May 5th, 2010 • Category: Brave New World, Editor's Picks, From the Interweb, Short Fiction 
In the last several years a movement has been underway to declare May the month of the short story. As there are no governing bodies deciding what months mean — and that itself would be a hair-too-whimsical of a short story plot — this is a grassroots movement. To contribute to that movement, I hereby present, every day this month, a short story link.
TODAY: The Belonging Kind, by William Gibson and John Shirley
In 1981, William Gibson’s Sprawl mythology was yet to be written and this collaboration with John Shirley (the author who put the punk in Cyberpunk; pictured on the left above, with Gibson) is unique in Gibson’s oeuvre as it’s more of a surreal fantasy piece. Shot through with melancholy, The Belonging Kind is about a social misfit figuring out that the confident and the popular, those people who seem to fit in anywhere, may be members of a shape-shifting species that survives by metabolizing alcohol from free drinks. A nerd’s lament.
Original post at Globe and Mail
the Branta Webcrawler is a compiler of information discovered, recommended and retrieved from either the "real" world or the world which is both wide and webbed.
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