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    The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #3
    The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #3
    The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #3
    Ebook27 pages15 minutes

    The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #3

    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 how to decorate the Christmas tree escalates and threatens their marriage.

    This parodistic piece is a mundane short story of 2900 words or approximately 12 print pages, written in the style of science fiction’s “golden age” of the 1940s and 1950s.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPegasus Pulp Publishing
    Release dateDec 18, 2015
    ISBN9781519989970
    The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree: Alfred and Bertha's Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life, #3
    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 Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree - Cora Buhlert

      Introduction

      pinstripe

      The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree 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 Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree is such a story. It is the story of a couple arguing about how to decorate the Christmas tree 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

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