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    The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #4
    The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #4
    The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #4
    Ebook43 pages28 minutes

    The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #4

    By Cora Buhlert

    ()

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPegasus Pulp Publishing
    Release dateJul 2, 2016
    ISBN9781524200459
    The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #4
    Author

    Cora Buhlert

    Cora Buhlert was born and bred in North Germany, where she still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently working towards her PhD. Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. When she is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher.

    Read more from Cora Buhlert

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      Book preview

      The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert - Cora Buhlert

      Introduction

      pinstripe

      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.

      pinstripe

      The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert

      A Not Really SF Short Story

      pinstripe

      The wonderful world of the twenty-first century offers a great variety of dining options to its denizens.

      In addition to traditional home cooked meals, there are also many industrially produced, prepared and pre-packaged ready-to-eat meals available, which only requires the consumer to place the meal into the microwave oven, a kitchen appliance which heats and cooks food by exposing it to electromagnetic radiation in the microwave spectrum, which induces the polar molecules in the food to rotate and thus produce thermal energy in a process known as dielectric heating.

      For those who prefer a more formal dining

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