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ladybusinessThis week's stories are about time travel, technology, talking foxes, and I guarantee one of the oddest quest protagonists you'll have met in a long time.
Monday
Who doesn't want to read a story about a talking fox obsessed with coffee? "Coffee and the Fox" by Mari Ness delivers just what it says on the tin - the tale of a fox trying to get its fix in a human world that doesn't take kindly to foxes trying to pick up a latte. His solution? Children.
I said recently that I found Mari Ness' story "Tweeting" a little too focused on the practicalities of the magical set up, but I thought that same kind of focus on everyday practicality worked well in this story. I'm not sure if it's because I found the minutiae of a fox trying to procure coffee more enchanting and entertaining than the practical aspects of a person turning into a bird. I mean imagine, a magic fox running around like Fagin employing an every changing group of children in order to get his caffeine. Charming! It also might have something to do with the fact that my reading of "Coffee and the Fox" wasn't burdened by any expectations linked to the structure of the story. Whatever the case, I enjoyed this story very much. It does take a slightly dark turn right at the end which introduces a contrast and a slight twist; a little like the ending of "The Family Recipe" by Alexandra Grunberg. I'm not totally sold on the narrative necessity of such an ending, but I can certainly understand the technique of making a last minute tone change to complicate a story.
Tuesday
If you like The Chronicles of St Mary's books you will probably enjoy "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel: A Syllabus" by David DeGraff. As you can guess from the title, this story is structured as a course syllabus; a short story structure I don't think I've seen before. The syllabus is written with a fair amount of hindsight, as you might expect from a time travel course, and so involves the professor cautioning his students about the mistakes they will make, and have made. The rundown of these mistakes takes in a whole load of time travel tropes, including some things we don't see addressed very often in time travel stories but absolutely know would be some people's first instinct were time travel taught in colleges. I think someone's going to have to explain the timeline to me so I can parse the conflicting statements 'This is my last time teaching the class' at the start of this story and 'I really want to keep teaching this class' closer to the end, but then I am a timeline dunce so that's just me.
Wednesday
"50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know" by Ken Liu is a story written as an obituary for a retired AI AI-critic 'WHEEP-3 (“Dr. Weep”)' which takes the reader into the mechanics and ethics of creating, and working with, a sentient AI. If you, like me, are very into stories about machine ethics I think you'll get a lot out of this story, even if you're not very knowledgeable (also like me) about what all the technological terms mean.
The story covers lots of familiar bases like the debate about sentience, AI social justice, whether AI networks are capable of creation. A large part of the meat of the story, aside from those issues, is the claim, at retirement, by WHEEP-3's creator that she authored a large part of its later work, and her subsequent retraction of this claim, which brings an interesting twist to the story as the reader grapples with the same issues the public in the story faced at the time, 'Had Tran really managed to troll much of the technorati for years? Or had she made up the claim because she was jealous that her creation had exceeded herself in fame and achievement?'
However, I predict that the reader will find themselves severely influenced in this 'debate' by the list which ends the story titled 50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know. Supposedly a fragment from the AI during its time giving advice to other AIs, it's an instruction manual that explains AIs need to be aware of in order to understand humans, and to successfully navigate them. It's almost a poem full of references to famous robots, and meditations on the human condition, and it climaxes with a phrase which could be both an appeal to humanity, a hope for AI kind, and a rallying to action when you consider that WHEEP-3 has given this roadmap to independence to an uncounted number of AIs. It's a convincing argument that WHEEP-3 is a creator, and essentially the author if its own life since the point of its creation (as much as any child growing into adulthood must be as well) if, y'know, you needed that argument and hadn't just assumed AIs can be sentient anyway because you've been fed hundreds of stories to that effect. It's also a moving commentary on WHEEP-3's specific relationship with Tran.
Thursday
I'm really enjoying a short story trend I've been seeing recently where the epic quest story is written with unlikely, often miniature, heroes like in "The Woeful Tale of Sir Banana" and ""Down To Niflhel Deep". "The Love Song of M. Religiosa" by Nibedita Sen is another example of this as it features a praying mantis trying to reach the love of his life 'She'. She is your typical remote, unattainable, gorgeous female character of quests of old, and is described as an example of perfection in flowing, romantic prose at the start of the story:
Mantis escapes his cage, and sets out on an epic journey where he meets other insects, and consults them on how to win over She, and crucially mate with her without getting eaten. These meetings are part of what brings the epic quest flavour to this story as Mantis uses the same phrase to greet each set of insects, and the way the various insects talk makes them sound like the kind of riddlesome, roundabout talking fantasy characters someone on a quest might encounter:
There's a lot of humour in this story, outside of the fact that it's about an insect on a quest for love, provided by the background human characters in the lab Mantis lives in who are often just as interested in getting it on as Mantis. And it's just a really fun, different story in general.
Monday
Who doesn't want to read a story about a talking fox obsessed with coffee? "Coffee and the Fox" by Mari Ness delivers just what it says on the tin - the tale of a fox trying to get its fix in a human world that doesn't take kindly to foxes trying to pick up a latte. His solution? Children.
I said recently that I found Mari Ness' story "Tweeting" a little too focused on the practicalities of the magical set up, but I thought that same kind of focus on everyday practicality worked well in this story. I'm not sure if it's because I found the minutiae of a fox trying to procure coffee more enchanting and entertaining than the practical aspects of a person turning into a bird. I mean imagine, a magic fox running around like Fagin employing an every changing group of children in order to get his caffeine. Charming! It also might have something to do with the fact that my reading of "Coffee and the Fox" wasn't burdened by any expectations linked to the structure of the story. Whatever the case, I enjoyed this story very much. It does take a slightly dark turn right at the end which introduces a contrast and a slight twist; a little like the ending of "The Family Recipe" by Alexandra Grunberg. I'm not totally sold on the narrative necessity of such an ending, but I can certainly understand the technique of making a last minute tone change to complicate a story.
Tuesday
If you like The Chronicles of St Mary's books you will probably enjoy "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel: A Syllabus" by David DeGraff. As you can guess from the title, this story is structured as a course syllabus; a short story structure I don't think I've seen before. The syllabus is written with a fair amount of hindsight, as you might expect from a time travel course, and so involves the professor cautioning his students about the mistakes they will make, and have made. The rundown of these mistakes takes in a whole load of time travel tropes, including some things we don't see addressed very often in time travel stories but absolutely know would be some people's first instinct were time travel taught in colleges. I think someone's going to have to explain the timeline to me so I can parse the conflicting statements 'This is my last time teaching the class' at the start of this story and 'I really want to keep teaching this class' closer to the end, but then I am a timeline dunce so that's just me.
Wednesday
"50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know" by Ken Liu is a story written as an obituary for a retired AI AI-critic 'WHEEP-3 (“Dr. Weep”)' which takes the reader into the mechanics and ethics of creating, and working with, a sentient AI. If you, like me, are very into stories about machine ethics I think you'll get a lot out of this story, even if you're not very knowledgeable (also like me) about what all the technological terms mean.
Created by Dr. Jody Reynolds Tran more than two decades ago, the experimental generative neural network that would become WHEEP-3 was at first intended as a teaching assistant in Stanford’s tech and ethics courses...
Initially, Tran named herself the author of the book, acknowledging “Dr. San Weep” as a collaborator. Later, however, during a live interview, she produced time stamped logs showing that WHEEP-3 had written all the words in the book.
The story covers lots of familiar bases like the debate about sentience, AI social justice, whether AI networks are capable of creation. A large part of the meat of the story, aside from those issues, is the claim, at retirement, by WHEEP-3's creator that she authored a large part of its later work, and her subsequent retraction of this claim, which brings an interesting twist to the story as the reader grapples with the same issues the public in the story faced at the time, 'Had Tran really managed to troll much of the technorati for years? Or had she made up the claim because she was jealous that her creation had exceeded herself in fame and achievement?'
However, I predict that the reader will find themselves severely influenced in this 'debate' by the list which ends the story titled 50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know. Supposedly a fragment from the AI during its time giving advice to other AIs, it's an instruction manual that explains AIs need to be aware of in order to understand humans, and to successfully navigate them. It's almost a poem full of references to famous robots, and meditations on the human condition, and it climaxes with a phrase which could be both an appeal to humanity, a hope for AI kind, and a rallying to action when you consider that WHEEP-3 has given this roadmap to independence to an uncounted number of AIs. It's a convincing argument that WHEEP-3 is a creator, and essentially the author if its own life since the point of its creation (as much as any child growing into adulthood must be as well) if, y'know, you needed that argument and hadn't just assumed AIs can be sentient anyway because you've been fed hundreds of stories to that effect. It's also a moving commentary on WHEEP-3's specific relationship with Tran.
Thursday
I'm really enjoying a short story trend I've been seeing recently where the epic quest story is written with unlikely, often miniature, heroes like in "The Woeful Tale of Sir Banana" and ""Down To Niflhel Deep". "The Love Song of M. Religiosa" by Nibedita Sen is another example of this as it features a praying mantis trying to reach the love of his life 'She'. She is your typical remote, unattainable, gorgeous female character of quests of old, and is described as an example of perfection in flowing, romantic prose at the start of the story:
She, greenest, to put any leaf to shame. She of the flitting legs and the wet-sheened exoskeleton, the straight neck and enticingly rounded abdomen. She of the globe-eyes with their black-dot pupils and the shining needle arms... She is a chitinous lodestone, a centripetal force that tugs eye and feeler and antennae to her through the glass.
Mantis escapes his cage, and sets out on an epic journey where he meets other insects, and consults them on how to win over She, and crucially mate with her without getting eaten. These meetings are part of what brings the epic quest flavour to this story as Mantis uses the same phrase to greet each set of insects, and the way the various insects talk makes them sound like the kind of riddlesome, roundabout talking fantasy characters someone on a quest might encounter:
“Spiders,” they drone in chorus. “Leaping, lascivious, long-legged things. They spin and they strike, they weave and they wait. Spiders are not our friends, and we do not know their lair. Why do you seek them?”
There's a lot of humour in this story, outside of the fact that it's about an insect on a quest for love, provided by the background human characters in the lab Mantis lives in who are often just as interested in getting it on as Mantis. And it's just a really fun, different story in general.
