None of my neighbours know I die with my battery rather than my heart.
Oh, something about this just got me.
Usually my ‘artificial intelligence� shelf
None of my neighbours know I die with my battery rather than my heart.
Oh, something about this just got me.
Usually my ‘artificial intelligence� shelf is for actual artificial intelligences learning how to be people; but despite this story being literally titled “I am AI�, our main character is in fact very much human. She’s just more like a cyborg, her various features having been replaced and mechanically augmented over time. It’s set in a decaying far-future where Ai is a struggling gig worker/contract writer who falsely advertises herself as generative AI, and works herself to the bone to fulfil various writing assignments on impossible deadlines.
And it asks a Ship of Theseus-esque question: after carving off so many pieces of yourself and augmenting them, how much remains of your original self? Are you still human?
Ai is also constantly running against the steadily-ticking countdown of her battery, needing to recharge or she’ll die. I was filled with palpable tense anxiety the entire time I spent reading this: her constantly running on thin margins, barely staying ahead of death and starvation. You can relate to her being so frustrated by her weak and vulnerable human limits, but after she finally affords her next upgrade to carve out her own heart, it takes such a chilling turn.
And then there’s that be careful what you wish for theme: that when she strips away too many of her frailties, then she loses the very touch that made people prefer her writing over the big corporation’s algorithm to begin with. Art � writing, painting, creative work � still needs to be made by humans. The connection and the empathy is the point.
I always like bleak cyberpunk worldbuilding feat. characters trying to claw their way out of soul-crushing debt, but the importance here is that people still find warmth and community in each other.
For all that the technology here is futuristic and sci fi, all of this also dovetails with stuff that is literally happening today: the way that tech companies over-promise miraculous features but, so often, their “A.I.� is in fact exploiting underpaid human workers in third-world countries. See , which discusses how Amazon’s “just walk out� technology was secretly workers in India being paid poverty wages to monitor you on cameras and try to see what you’d picked up from the shelves:
I can’t stress enough how little of a surprise this should be. First, the fake robot shtick is very, very old. It goes back at least to 1770, and the original “Mechanical Turk�, a chess-playing robot that wowed the courts of Europe for decades until being revealed that it was, in fact, a series of grandmasters hiding in a box. Recent updates include Facebook’s “smart assistant�, M, which claimed to be AI but referred any complex queries to people; and Cruise, the self-driving car company whose operations required remote workers to intervene every two-and-a-half to five miles.
All of these are, separately, quite funny stories. But collectively they paint a picture of a society, and a culture, utterly unequipped to register the violence that is being done to it, merely because historical process is draped in the ribbons of “technology�. This violence is enacted simultaneously on the high street and the global stage. What makes me angry about how often we keep falling for it is not merely that we should know better, but what the costs of doing so actually are.
It’s bleak and awful and I hate so much about where society & technology today is going, in real life, in our actual world. So this little story � read as a Best Novelette nominee for the 2024 Hugo Awards � ruminates on exactly that, and imagines what that violence and what that cost might look like in the far future.
4.5 stars, read as a Best Novelette nominee for the 2024 Hugo Awards, and might get my vote unless something else blows me away more....more
Rose House, labyrinthine. In the non-light before dawn, there are soft footsteps in its hallways, across the floors of its halls and chambers; there a
Rose House, labyrinthine. In the non-light before dawn, there are soft footsteps in its hallways, across the floors of its halls and chambers; there are footsteps, no matter who is there to hear them. Rose House, singular, alone � turning in on itself.
2.5 stars. I feel like I should have loved this novella more than I did, considering its component parts are all up my alley: a locked-room murder mystery with elements of cyberpunk noir, a female detective investigating a dead body reported by an autonomous artificial intelligence embedded in a house.
There are also pieces of tantalising worldbuilding: the advancements in tech and (real) AI, the water riots, the climate change. It starts off so intriguing and I couldn’t wait to see this mystery unfold. Only for it to become so slow and surreal and dreamlike as soon as they entered the eponymous Rose House itself, and for the plot thread to promptly unravel.
The prose became so flowery seemingly just for the sake of being flowery, and nothing much actually happens, all vibes and no substance. I eventually found myself genuinely bored and straight-up skipping paragraphs just to reach more significant exchanges or the end itself.
Like, it’s trying to say something about personhood and artistic legacy, but I can’t really tell what it’s getting at, and the story/functional plot itself turned out to not be engaging enough to carry me either.
This might be unfair to extrapolate, but I feel like Martine was trying to evoke The Haunting of Hill House; see the quote above against the one below, plus the embodiment of a building, characters� deteriorating sanity while trapped inside it, and said sanity particularly falling apart when they try to run through the house and escape� but frankly all of that just made me want to reread Hill House for the nth time instead.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Recreation was a waste of time, a luxury that belonged to people who had a planet of their own. For the soldiers of Gaea Station, the last true childr
Recreation was a waste of time, a luxury that belonged to people who had a planet of their own. For the soldiers of Gaea Station, the last true children of Earth, there was no such thing as rest.
HOW DO I LOVE THIS BOOK, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS. It might have been brewed up in a lab to be my entire everything.
Our main character Valkyr � aka Kyr —pushes herself impossibly hard to be the perfect soldier of Gaea Station, forging herself into a vengeful weapon to wage war against the aliens who murdered Earth.
It reminded me so much of other things I adore: in terms of military SF space opera and hardscrabble human survivors having lost Earth and now having to eke out a desperate subsistence life on the edge of extinction, it reminds me of Battlestar Galactica, The 100, and Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward. In terms of children growing up in particularly brutal military environments, defining identities via their wings/groups, and running impossible VR simulations, it reminds me of Ender’s Game, one of my favourite books of all time.
And yet it’s still its own thing: a breath of fresh air with diversity, and a jolt to the system with a critical story being told from inside a fascist machine, examining how these structures happen and how they persist and how hard they can be to dismantle. Genuinely one of my favourite themes is child soldiers learning to unwire their programming and undo the fascist poison they’ve been reared on (truly, mind the sexism and homophobia and racism warnings at the start of the book).
Even the side characters wind up more complicated and important than you expect, and I also adore the sibling feelings between Kyr and her twin brother Magnus.
I’ve seen some people mention “unreliable narrator� for this book, but Kyr’s not exactly that; because she is genuinely describing the world as she understands it. It’s just that she has been lied to her entire life, and she hasn’t been able to imagine anything outside the strict lines and boundaries of her small existence. I appreciate when an author isn’t afraid of letting their protagonist be brutal and unlikeable, either.
Kyr’s slow arc is fantastic: slow but believable, her wrestling with deprogramming every step of the way, her concept of the world falling apart, going through the crucible and coming out stronger for it. It’s great seeing these characters finally questioning the values they’ve been raised with. Should they sacrifice everything for Gaea Station? How much do they owe to humanity? Are they allowed to be people, and do the braver thing and be soft, and show empathy? How many dead children and dead soldiers are enough?
There are occasions where you see a reveal or detail coming and put it together faster than Kyr does, but that’s part of it: her self-inflicted blinders, the ways in which she is very purposefully and consciously not letting herself see an unpleasant detail that she’ll have to wrestle with. I love how the worldbuilding unfolds so patiently for the reader, too; how certain details are insidious from the start, while others might be small or seemingly-innocent until you wind up re-evaluating them later.
I love where it all goes; it’s bigger and weirder and more ambitious than it might seem at first glance. There’s quiet character moments and bonding, but also grand explosive action. This book also pairs well with The Light Brigade, in terms of military SF space opera, gruelling wars, timey wimeyness, desperate soldiers being fed to the meat grinder, and the book being titled after famous war poetry.
It’s just. So good. Highly highly recommended. I sat down on a Sunday and blew through it for 5 hours(!) until I could finish, simply because I wanted to find out what happened next. It’s been a long time since a book held my attention for so long. For favourite quotes, at times it felt like I was highlighting swathes and entire pages at a time (because I was); it’s painfully well-written and I love all the characters and their journeys. I can’t believe it’s Tesh’s novel debut, and it’s absolutely getting my vote for Best Novel in the Hugos.
And the title, of course, comes from Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est and evokes that line, how sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country. It’s an absolute banger of a poem and also one of my favourites:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,� My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
“Damn you!� he yelled at the ceiling, because, even though he’d come from above and knew nothing was up there, that was still the direction that the p
“Damn you!� he yelled at the ceiling, because, even though he’d come from above and knew nothing was up there, that was still the direction that the powers of Earth resided, whether gods or just rich people in spaceships.
Read as the third of Tchaikovsky’s Terrible Worlds: Revolutions triptych, and gosh but it’s a good one. I’m hard-pressed to choose which of the novellas was my favourite (maybe still Ogres), but this one is great. It’s set in a sweltering African city named Ankara Achouka, the chaotic ramshackle settlement built around the base (the “anchor�) of one of several space elevators leading up to the Grand Celeste, a luxurious spaceship being built and gearing up to leave a dying earth.
The eponymous firewalkers are the scrappy repair crews sent out into the inhospitable, unforgiving desert to repair the solar panels which everyone else relies on. Tchaikovsky paints such an evocative picture of a dying planet, roiling in its death throes of climate change � all of which is too-close and too-real, featuring climate disasters we’ve already been experiencing ourselves tbh, as some cities drown and others burn. And behind and above it all, the rich make their escape plans.
(This is an odd comparison, but the novella actually pairs very well with the in-world history of Gideon the Ninth: the 1% fuck up our world, then make their plans to flee, while everyone else has to survive as best they can with their limited remaining time on the Earth’s corpse.)
The core conflict is simple enough: Mao and his crew are sent out for a repair job, to find out why the city’s solar panels are leaking power. But then the story itself is an exciting ride played out in this dangerous, apocalyptic setting, with some unexpected twists and turns and a touch of horror and the uncanny, and even some of my fave themes re: human-created artificial intelligence. Just all my favourite things in a blender. 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5....more
I had to blow through these novellas quickly for the Hugo Awards, so my review will be short:
Oh, this is great. It’s a story about a tea monk (SiblingI had to blow through these novellas quickly for the Hugo Awards, so my review will be short:
Oh, this is great. It’s a story about a tea monk (Sibling Dex, a nice little touch of nonbinary rep) going out into the wilderness, trying to find their purpose, and then crossing paths with a sentient robot, centuries after the robots left society to live undisturbed in the wilderness. It’s an interesting utopian setting where mankind has finally learned to reduce their footprint and live in peace with nature, but you can see that people can still struggle with mental health, with a listless dissatisfaction.
I loved our hapless monk trying to figure out their new trade (they are originally very bad at it); the worldbuilding of how these robots live; and the growing friendship between our two main characters, and how they both wrangle questions of ‘purpose� in life. Because meanwhile, Mosscap is a robot deciding it wants to learn more about humans and to understand them better, because humankind is just as curious and mythical as the AIs have become for humans. And as we all know, one of my soft spots is artificial intelligence learning how to deal with emotions!!
As always, too, this novella is shot through with Becky Chambers� kinda meandering, idyllic, hopeful optimism in her sci-fi. It’s just a really cozy read, and multiple people have described reading it as feeling like a warm hug.
There’s a followup, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, which I’m definitely going to read eventually, now that we’ve been introduced to this setting and these characters....more
4.5 stars!! Mainlined in pretty much a single day in order to hit my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reading challenge goal, and I managed it in the nick of time.
When this 4.5 stars!! Mainlined in pretty much a single day in order to hit my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reading challenge goal, and I managed it in the nick of time.
When this book first opens, it seems like it might fall into some neat and pat YA structure -- a bit of 'more of the same', which I wouldn't necessarily have minded because I loved Skyward.
But then, much to my delight, Sanderson flips the table and completely overturns what you thought the plot & setting was going to be. It blows open the scope and worldbuilding of this setting; pushes Spensa to learn and change and grow, utilise some entirely different skills, unwire her own prejudices, face some of the uglier ambiguities about war; and most deliciously, it places her in position of responsibility and duty and, in the form of Brade, having to train basically herself and see how frustrating it was for everyone else to have to deal with a hotshot pilot who always wants to fly off on her own and be a hero and not work with a team, rofl. (Brade's backstory is so interesting and lowkey heartbreaking, and I was so intrigued by her, and can't wait to see more of her!)
I'm purposefully being pretty vague about the actual plot details of this whole book, because of how it was such a surprise.
But I do have to talk about the delvers, because they're one of the things I loved most here. Thanks to them, I very nearly almost put this book under my "Lovecraftian" shelf, and I would've if it were just a more generically-named "cosmic horror" shelf: catching the eye of something ineffably, incomprehensibly large and beyond human comprehension, which looks upon us as tiny mites. It reminded me of the Reapers from Mass Effect, or the Resurrection Beasts in Harrow the Ninth, or even the beings in Under the Dome -- it's just a concept that I love a lot, and the particular way that it was implemented here was so interesting (and oh, the ending gave me feelings).
Anyway, just great stuff. The ending sets it up nicely for escalating conflicts and changing status quos in book three, and I can't waitttttt to see what happens next. Probably the only downside was that there wasn't as much Jorgen this time around (my boyyy)....more
Oh, this was a delight. I have a weakness for YA war stories, space, hotshot pilots, and plots structured around competitive military schools, so thisOh, this was a delight. I have a weakness for YA war stories, space, hotshot pilots, and plots structured around competitive military schools, so this was wayyyy up my alley. (Also: straightlaced duty-bound leaders, so I love Jorgen Weight so much.)
Skyward is set on a planet shut out from the sky by orbiting debris, where all of mankind lives in underground tunnels/caverns to avoid bombardment by the alien race they're continually fighting in aerial dogfights. Our protagonist, Spensa "Spin" Nightshade, is desperate to make it into flight academy and become a fighter pilot to reclaim & redeem her father's legacy. I really enjoyed seeing her journey as a cadet: the growing camaraderie and great friendships within Skyward Flight, particularly her changing contentious dynamic with her flight leader Jorgen/Jerkface, and her mentor/mentee relationship with Cobb.
Spin starts off a little obnoxiously over-the-top with her bombastic speeches and obsession with not being a Coward�, but trust, the narrative is aware of it and she learns and grows over time. Her disillusionment and the things she learns are great; whenever I thought this book was going to tread too-neatly into predictable YA tropes, it often surprised me and went somewhere I didn't actually expect (like, I'm particularly impressed that my prediction about the nature of the Krell was wrong).
Just a really fun sci fi jaunt, and I'm already going to dive right into the sequel. Particularly recommended if you love Ender's Game like me, but want to read something by an author who isn't a bigot!...more
I'd originally planned not to write Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviews for the Hugo-nominated short stories -- they're too short, and would cheat my reading statisticsI'd originally planned not to write Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviews for the Hugo-nominated short stories -- they're too short, and would cheat my reading statistics a bit -- but then I had to pin down my thoughts & feelings about this one.
"STET" is a blisteringly angry short story, crafted in the form of an academic paper about machine ethics in self-driving cars; which is topical, considering last autumn about precisely this thing, called "The Moral Machine experiment". As you wade through the rambling footnotes and livid red marginalia, you piece together exactly why this topic matters so much to the author -- more than anything, the story unravels in multiple layers in the metatextual back-and-forth between the author ('Anna') and her editor, each interjection rebuffed with a terse, furious "STET." ('let it stand'; used as an instruction on a printed proof to indicate that a correction or alteration should be ignored)
One look at it on my Kindle, though, and I instantly knew it couldn't be read as an ebook. This is one where the format matters so much. It's technically only three pages, but I absolutely recommend that you read it in PDF form, in how this was originally presented in Fireside Magazine; the handwriting gives you so much, so that I can practically picture Anna's red pen tearing through the paper, her writing turning cramped and angrier by the line.
It's disorienting to read, this rapid see-sawing back-and-forth, but that just contributes to its punchiness.
Fireside has made a valiant effort at reproducing it online with pop-up footnotes, and you can read it for free here:
But honestly, as mentioned, I don't recommend reading it online -- the flat text strips the editorial notes of their personality somewhat. I just love the format, you guys.
I've been hit-or-miss on de Bodard's short fiction before, but this novella was alright. It's an oddly Sherlockian futuristic premise, with our traumaI've been hit-or-miss on de Bodard's short fiction before, but this novella was alright. It's an oddly Sherlockian futuristic premise, with our traumatised war veteran 'Watson' being cast as a ship's AI-human construct mind called The Shadow's Child, retired from military service and consigned to brewing tea for humans. And the consulting detective, with her deductive reasoning, is a stern woman dosed to the gills with drugs administered by her bots.
It's an interesting setting, this odd couple reluctantly teaming up to solve a murder, and The Shadow's Child recovering from the mental trauma of losing all her crew, and solving this mystery with a human that she doesn't quite like, and who seems far more inhuman than the ship itself.
However: I found myself mostly just missing the AIs from other sci fi? The Shadow's Child felt too, too human for it to actually hammer on my artificial intelligence feelings. I wound up missing Iain M. Banks' ship Minds from his Culture series, or even the issues of humanity & identity within Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series (a series I don't actually like that much). It also reminded me a bit of David D. Levine's short story Damage, which features a traumatised fighter ship trapped in an interstellar war. Or, in terms of our main character/ship's PTSD, I kept thinking of CJ Cherryh's excellent Merchanter's Luck, where the entire plot has to tiptoe around the traumatised loss of his entire family, and that novel has enough room to stretch its legs so that you really really care about that loss, that grief, that recovery.
Which is a lot of me talking about other things that I wish this had been, instead. Because here, because of the short length, it's pretty rushed and everything tidily solved in a quick bow by the end.
But I do appreciate a futuristic setting where Asia became the dominant culture, and seeing Vietnamese culture stepping out into the stars, and the plot proceeds at a pretty decent clip. 2.5 stars, rounded up.
(My buddy Amanda also wisely mentions that this novella is yet another one that misses the point, rather, about Mr. Holmes. The closest it got to nailing it for me was the line: Long Chau seemed to alternate between flashes of singular consideration, and complete disregard of others' feelings. That consideration and sympathy fell by the wayside a bit too much, though, and it's unfortunately what most people seem to drop or forget in their Sherlockian adaptations.)...more
A solid 4 stars, mostly getting me in my heart thanks to Three � it's the thing I've been waiting all series long to see, the inevitable meeting with A solid 4 stars, mostly getting me in my heart thanks to Three � it's the thing I've been waiting all series long to see, the inevitable meeting with (view spoiler)[another SecUnit (hide spoiler)]. This series as a whole has such an interesting structure, too, where the series starts with multiple novellas before we finally get this, a full-length novel. And for the first full-length, I really enjoyed it: it's a solid story with a sprawling cast, picking up the threads of MurderBot settling in with Mensah's family, and also bringing back ART (yay!! I love him so much!!!), and seeing what happens when corporations and alien remnants collide (spoiler alert: nothing good).
I also really enjoyed the inter-cut excerpts from the documentary MurderBot is participating in, slowly working through addressing their trauma, and finally pointing out what I'd noticed a while back, that MurderBot never names the company that owned them.
This book is definitely stronger for having read all of the preceding shorts, so I consider them pretty necessary reading to be attached to the characters. But in general, I prefer this so much over Ancillary Justice in terms of exploring the relationship between humans & bots, and also our protagonist's identity as an artificial but sentient construct who uses heaps of cameras and multitasking drones and split identities. Good, fun, action-packed stuff with a side of feelings re: exploring the personhood of artificial intelligences who don't actually want to be human, but do want to be considered as people....more
This novella finally picks up the threads of Mensah and the other teammates, and can be accurately summed up as "the mortifying ordeal of being known"This novella finally picks up the threads of Mensah and the other teammates, and can be accurately summed up as "the mortifying ordeal of being known". It was nice seeing Murderbot reuniting with the others and trying to figure out where they fit in, and fretting over what their relationship with their humans is supposed to be now that they're free. The action gets a bit muddled and hard to follow, though, which has been pretty par for the course with Wells' writing in this series, but I don't mind....more
4.5 stars. Oof, my heart. I could see where this one would inevitably go, but that doesn't change the fact that I was emotionally affected, that the e4.5 stars. Oof, my heart. I could see where this one would inevitably go, but that doesn't change the fact that I was emotionally affected, that the ending got me in my heartstrings. It's a fun romp through a relatively creepy abandoned station, and exploring even more corners of artificial sentience and types of bots. It's touching and a little sad, seeing the Murderbot so completely thrown by the existence of a pet robot who is genuinely kind, and believes so much in the warmth and love of humans � not because she's been programmed to, but because she has only experienced kindness from them, for once....more
Read for the 2019 Best Novelette nominees for the Hugos. A futuristic, post-apocalyptic tale where a lizard-like people seem to be the only survivors Read for the 2019 Best Novelette nominees for the Hugos. A futuristic, post-apocalyptic tale where a lizard-like people seem to be the only survivors on Earth, and our main character roams the wasteland with her tribe, her appointed task being to lay 'ghosts' to rest (but which turn out to be electricity, and computers, and technology, which was so cute and clever).
I liked the eventual feelings about space and exploration, and shaking a society out of staid convention, and an AI trying its best to fulfill its purpose long after the reason for its purpose is gone -- but the worldbuilding was a little messy and vague and underbaked, so I just wanted a bit more from it....more
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