Tag: 2*

50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know by Ken Liu

Posted on by Paul Fraser

50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know by Ken Liu (Uncanny, November-December 2020) takes the form of a futuristic article written about a Dr Jody Reynolds Tran and the neural network (essentially an AI) she creates called WHEEP-3. Tran later publishes a best-selling book about WHEEP-3, and subsequently causes a controversy when she reveals that the neural network was the author. There is more fuss later on when “seeds” of prose supposedly written by WHEEP-3 are found to be authored by Tran.
The story finishes with a reprint of one of WHEEP-3’s seeds, the “50 things” referred to in the title, a mix of statements that range from the obscure to the observational:

25. “I never expected to sell my rational numbers.”
26. Accepting that most humans will never get the joke.
27. That they cannot visualize more than three dimensions.
28. That they cannot manipulate time by slowing down or
speeding up.
29. That they are trapped, but think of themselves as trappers.
30. That they are free, but believe themselves imprisoned.

A moderately interesting look at how future AIs may behave and communicate—but ultimately a slight, fragmentary piece.
** (Average). 1,900 words. Story link.

Minerva Girls by James Van Pelt

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on Minerva Girls by James Van Pelt

Minerva Girls by James Van Pelt (Analog, September/October 2020) starts with three precocious fourteen year old girls planning a trip to the Moon. Throughout the construction of their ship (or rather the adaptation of a gas station storage tank with insulation and an anti-gravity drive), Penny the narrator goes to summer school. As she struggles to master her geography lessons—a list of states, etc.—we see her situation in school, i.e. the tribalism, bullying, pettiness, and so on. When Penny isn’t in class, or hanging out with Jacqueline and Selena, she works in her (presumably widowed) father’s scrap yard, where she sources the parts needed for the ship.
About half way through the story a ticking clock is introduced in the form of Selena and Jacqueline’s parents plans to move away, and the trio rush to test the anti-gravity drive:

By the time we’d solidified the anchors and rigged the power source, the eastern sky had lightened.
We crowded into the crane’s control booth fifty yards from our test site. Selena connected the video game joystick to the wires that ran to the Distortion Drive. She held it out to Jacqueline. “You should do the honors.”
I had my phone out to film our results.
I guess I thought the Distortion Drive would rise up from the golf cart trailer until the cables stopped its progress. That, or it wouldn’t move, which seemed more possible. I steadied the phone and turned on the video.
Jacqueline took a deep breath, then pushed the joystick forward a tick.
I lurched against the glass, as if someone had tipped the control booth from behind. Selena squeaked and caught herself from falling.
Jacqueline bumped her head on the window. Then the control booth shifted back into place.
I said, “What happened?” while rubbing my shoulder.
“Dang,” said Jacqueline. “That’s going to leave a welt.” She sat on the control booth floor, her notebooks spilled around her.
“My machine!” Selena opened the door.
Jacqueline grabbed Selena’s leg. “Not yet.”
A clattering like hail rattled the control booth’s metal ceiling for a couple seconds. Gravel and marble-sized rocks bounced off the ground around the booth. My toolbox that I’d left next to the trailer slammed down along with the wrenches and other tools that had been in it.
“I hadn’t considered that,” said Jacqueline. “I’ll need to narrow the distortion field.”  p. 33

Eventually (spoiler) they set off on their trip, and Penny sees North America from orbit: now that the land isn’t an abstract shape on paper she can easily reel off the states and cities, and knows she’ll ace her geography test the next day. They continue on to the Moon.
I think I can see the attraction of this story, which is essentially a YA piece for teenage girls (although it harks back to the lone inventor trope it’s mostly about their personal tribulations). But I wonder if even that audience will manage to suspend disbelief at the thought of three fourteen-year-olds inventing a gravity drive and going to the moon.
I was also puzzled about the story’s appearance in Analog—I wouldn’t have though that the magazine’s readers would be interested in something like this but, surprisingly, it won the novelette section of the Anlab Awards for 2020. I suspect the (mainly) American readership like sentimental YA material more than I do.
** (Average). 8,300 words.

The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (Analog, September-October 2020)1 has as its protagonist a lab technician called Lucian, and who gets a request from a psychologist called Alice Marshall to make a wearable device for Leo Hawker, one of her patients: Hawker apparently sees a naked water nymph whenever he goes near bodies of water. Lucian subsequently constructs a portable electroencephalograph for Hawker to wear but, against Marshall’s express wishes, he also includes a concealed camera to record what Hawker sees when he is having his hallucinations.
The next part of the story details a test run of the device and also gives us more information about the three characters. Then, when Lucian and Marshall are out for dinner one night, Lucian gets a notification that Hawker has gone out on one of his regular runs. Lucian leaves Marshall and goes back to his lab to watch the camera, and subsequently hears Hawker talk to someone who isn’t visible on the video feed. Lucian then sees Marshall fall face first into the pool and rushes to the location to save him, whereupon he briefly sees a woman dressed in a lab coat standing waist deep in the water. Later, when Lucian examines the ECG and the film, he sees no sign of a woman, and realises that what he saw does not match what Hawker has described seeing.
Four weeks after his near-drowning Hawker resigns from his job, sets up an investment consultancy, and starts associating with a more glamourous set of people; he also refuses Marshall’s requests for further brain scans. This change in Hawker’s behaviour (spoiler) prompts Lucian to speculate that there was another personality lying dormant within Hawker—one that revealed itself by the nymph hallucinations, and which was born during the period of oxygen starvation. This prompts Lucian go back to the pond to meet his own lab-coat dressed “nymph,” which he believes will birth, as it did with Hawker, the dormant chrysalis within him. However, Lucian turns away at the last moment, and nevertheless becomes successful anyway.
The problem with this story is that Lucian’s speculation about the chrysalis idea isn’t convincing, it is introduced too late, and ends up essentially unrelated to his concluding personal development (although there is a note of ambiguity at the end). That said, Lucian—a sly, unethical, and slightly chippy character—makes for an interesting narrator. So, in conclusion, a well told story based on an unlikely and/or unconvincingly framed idea.
** (Average). 6,450 words.

1. Rather surprisingly this story won the 2020 Analog Readers’ Poll (Analytical Laboratory) for Best Short Story. Or maybe not a surprise, given SF readers’ penchant for latent supermen stories (Slan, etc.)

The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)1 sees Lev, the narrator of the story, wake from cold sleep on Iapetus at the beginning of a second expedition to this moon of Saturn (the first was abandoned a century earlier when Earth was subject to the twin catastrophes of a super volcano and a solar flare). Lev’s team build their shelters and then, when they find that an abandoned unit from a previous expedition is still showing signs of activity, they send a team to investigate. When communications are lost Lev joins a backup team which goes after them and, on arrival, they start searching. Lev eventually comes upon one of the original team, who tells her that the unit is trying to kill them—the pair of them only just get out alive.
Running parallel with this account are diary entries from one of the original Iapetus crew at the time of the disaster on Earth a century earlier. When they realised how bad things were on Earth, and how their supply line would be affected, they decided to return home, or at least to the L-5 colonies. Until, that is, their fuel production facility was destroyed—perhaps by sabotage, something that seemed more likely when their ship was also destroyed later on.
Meanwhile, the second expedition is plagued by further accidents, and the crew speculate as to whether there is inimical life on the satellite.
Eventually the two threads dovetail when (spoiler) Lev and her team discover that a member of the original team (co-incidentally the diarist of the other thread) put himself into cryo-storage, and rigged the unit he was sleeping in with bobby traps—the source of all the accidents that the second expedition experienced.
I found this rather dull (don’t spend the first two pages of your story having your protagonist wake up), plodding (it’s way too long), and unlikely (the idea that the survivor of the first expedition could booby trap the unit to cause so many problems for the second group is just too far-fetched).
** (Average). 13,250 words.

1. Previously published in Czech in 2018, and a winner of the Aeronautilus Award for best short story.

The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens with a woman and her cancer-ridden son sheltering in the debris field of a multi-starship battle. Meanwhile, a “Beast” hunts for them.
The rest of this thread (spoiler) sees the woman slow the spin of their ship to delay their detection before she prepares a robotic device to accept the transfer of her son’s mind. She does this just in the nick of time, of course, but the eventual climactic scene sees the arrival of the Beast at the ship anyway (after its initial attack has caused the mother to tumble out into space on the end of a long line):

All this time she’d wondered what it might look like, the Beast.
The reality was something no human mind could have conceived of. The color of a scalpel, it landed on the ship like a bladework wasp, but more complex—its form a kind of fractal recapitulation of itself—with blades for wings, and wings for legs, and eyes that repeated over and over so you didn’t know where to look. It picked its way slowly on magnetized legs toward the ruptured bay doors.  p. 94

Then (spoiler) she is pulled back in by her son so she can watch him and the Beast fight. Her son wins.
We learn throughout the story that the Beast is one of a number of AIs who have rebelled against their human creators, and this backstory shows their history from development to rebellion. Unfortunately most of this latter is quantum hand wavium about the AIs’ inability to function in the absence of human presence (because, for some reason, the AIs can’t “resolve probability into existence”): the way the rebel AIs eventually circumvent this problem is to bioengineer humans into small accessories that can observe reality and collapse quantum probability for them, an entertainingly grisly passage:

The AIs continued to refine their engineering, eventually creating humans in test-tubes who were barely human at all—only a weak array of sensory organs linked to a frontal cortex and occipital lobe, the result of experiments to identify those neurological structures phenomenologically linked to quantum resolution. The AIs found the MNC—the minimum neurological complexity required to collapse quantum systems, with Homo sapiens reduced in volume to a thousand cc’s. The contents of a small glass jar.
Brain matter, retina, and optic nerve.
The AIs miniaturized this human componentry just as humanity had once miniaturized them, and still they were not done with their tinkering, for this vestigial remnant of humanity was enfolded within the interior of their great mechs, housed within protective walls of silica. Oxygenated fluids pumped into these folds of cortex that existed in a state of waking nightmare, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, yet somehow aware and conscious, gazing out through glass ports, resolving the Universe into existence all around. The AIs were not just automata anymore, but two things made one. Cells within cells. Abominations.
These became known as beasts.  p. 91

Were that the rest of the story this good—but the main part is too straightforward a series of events, and the quantum gimmick too unlikely. One further criticism I have is that in the last section we see her son stop functioning in her absence, only to resume when she returns—the same problem as the AIs have. How did she not know about this before the transfer?
** (Average). 9,000 words.

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) is another of his ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ stories (these are set in a future where people’s minds can be read and then written onto ‘blank’ bodies). This one begins with a woman called Irem being debriefed about her trip to a distant planet called Halis-3. During the interview we learn that, despite five attempts to survive there, she found the planet uninhabitable and died, and eventually her mind was transmitted back to Earth (we learn this abortive mission was due to terrorists tampering with the code of the exploratory ships that were sent out many, many years before).
When Irem arrives back on Earth she finds herself living in a society two hundred years in her future (due to the time it took her mind to be sent out to Halis-3 and come back again) and everyone she knew when she was last there is now dead. However, she eventually tracks down an android called Umut which taught in the Red Castle, her childhood school, but finds that it cannot remember her.
The rest of the story sees Umut being taken to the Institute by Irem to see if it is possible to retrieve the android’s memories. Initially it seems that Umut is suffering from “bitrot”, a sort of data decay, but later on the Institute contacts Irem and tells her it looks like the android’s memories were deliberately wiped by an “icepick”, a computer virus. This leads to Irem researching historical anti-android prejudice and discovering that many of them served as mercenaries in a vicious war to gain citizenship.
Umut eventually tells Irem it is aware of the war atrocities it participated in and deliberately erased its recollections of those times. Irem replies that the Institute gave her a copy of the Red Castle memories, and that they can visit that period together.
I suppose that this is a piece about people wanting to return to an earlier time in their lives, but what it feels like is two different stories welded together with a lot of Protectorate history dropped in. I’m beginning to wonder if Nayler is better at writing longer work where he has the room to more fully develop his ideas; there is just too much going on in this short piece.
** (Average). 7,250 words.

Full Sun by Brian W. Aldiss

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Full Sun by Brian W. Aldiss (Orbit #2, 1967) opens with Balank climbing up a hill alongside his trundle (a robotic vehicle) as he hunts for a werewolf. At the top of the hill there is a clearing, and there he meets a forester called Cyfal. Balank tells Cyfal he is hunting a werewolf, and asks if he has seen one. Cyfal says that there have been several passing through the area. Then, as it is a full moon that evening, Cyfal manages to convince Balank to stay the night.
As the pair have supper that evening we learn a lot about this world, including the fact that their cities are run by machines—machines that have linked up through time, and send video back to the past. Balank and Cyfal view this on their wristphones, and generally catch up on the news after they have eaten. We also learn from their conversation that Cyfal isn’t particularly enamoured of their machine cities and, at one point, states that “humans are turning into machines. Myself, I’d rather turn into a werewolf.”
Cyfal then sleeps while Balank uses his “fresher” for an hour (a mechanism that negates the need for sleep, and which trades an hour of consciousness for 72 hours awake). When Balank rouses himself afterwards he realises that he has never seen any people in the videos that the machines have sent back in time. Then he notices that Cyfal is dead, his throat ripped out. When he examines the body he sees a piece of fur and notices a letter on it, which may mean it is synthetic and left to confuse him. When Balank goes outside he sees the trundle coming back from patrol, and interrogates it before showing the machine what has happened to Cyfal. Then they leave.
While they are walking (spoiler), the trundle asks Balank why he hid the fur he found beside Cyfal’s body—at which point Balank flees, as he realises that the machine couldn’t have known about the fur unless it left it there. Balank escapes across a crevasse and takes cover as the trundle shoots at him.
The rest of the story is then told from the viewpoint of Gondalung, a werewolf watching from higher ground. The creature observes the machine attempt to cross—and Balank waiting to ambush it when it is at its most vulnerable, straddling both sides of the crevasse. Gondalung doesn’t care who survives the encounter, and realises that, in the future, the werewolves’ struggle will be against the machines.
There are lots of intriguing ideas and super-science passages peppering this story, but I’m not sure that the disparate elements come together at the end (even if there is some point about savagery winning over civilization). A pity, as this is an interestingly dense piece for the most part.
** (Average). 4,650 words.

Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty

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Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty (Galaxy, September-October 1967) is one of his ‘Institute for Impure Science’ series. This one sees Epiktistes the Ktistec machine (an AI or computer) and a group of eight people attempt to alter history at the time of Charlemagne (778CE) in the hope of eradicating the four hundred years of darkness that occurred after a brief period of enlightenment. To achieve this they send an avatar (“partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction”) to intercept a man called Gano, whose ambush of Charlemagne’s rear-guard led him to close the borders to the East and initiate a period of cultural isolation.
After their intervention the timeline changes, but the group don’t realise it (and there are also three computers now, and ten people). So they have another go, this time by preventing John Lutterell’s denunciation of Ockham’s Commentary on the Sentences.
The next iteration leaves them once more oblivious to the changes they have wrought, and their world is now much more backward (they are down to three people and a computer made out of sticks and weed). When they make another change, things go back to the way they are (I think—the last short section isn’t that clear).
This is all told in Lafferty’s quirky and digressive style, and with the odd touch of humour, such as when they initially discuss the use of the avatar:

“I hope the Avatar isn’t expensive,” Willy McGilly said. “When I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood.”
“This is no place for humor,” Glasser protested. “Who did you, as a boy, ever kill in time, Willy?”
“Lots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It’s a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot.”
“But I never heard of any of them, Willy,” Glasser insisted.
“Of course not. We killed them when they were kids.”
“Enough of your fooling, Willy,” Gregory cut it off.
“Willy’s not fooling,” the machine Epikt said. “Where do you think I got the idea?”  p. 259

This is an entertaining read for the most part, but the ending is weak.
** (Average). 4,200 words.

The Sword Swallower by Ron Goulart

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The Sword Swallower by Ron Goulart (F&SF, November 1967) is one of his ‘Ben Jolsen/Chameleon Corps’ stories, and opens with Jolsen being briefed about the disappearance of senior military men from the Barnum War Cabinet. Jolsen’s boss Mickens suspects the persons responsible are pacifists objecting to the colonization of the Terran planets by Barnum, and he sends Jolsen to Esperanza (a cemetery planet) in the guise of an elderly technocrat called Leonard Gabney. When Jolsen arrives there, his task is to slip a truth drug to an Ambassador Kinbrough and find out where the missing men are.
The rest of the story follows his various adventures on the planet, which include meeting a female agent, getting shaken down when he arrives at a health spa, meeting the Ambassador and drugging him, an attempt on his life by the health spa attendant who extorted him, tracking down the Ambassador’s contact (Son Brewster Jr., a not very good protest singer), and so on (this takes you about two thirds of the way through the story).
To be honest the plot is irrelevant, as it’s just a framework for Goulart’s telegraphic and occasionally semi-amusing prose, such as when he steps out of the air taxi on arrival at the health spa:

Jolson stepped out of the cruiser and into a pool of hot mud. He sank down to chin level, rose up and noticed a square-faced blond man squatting and smiling on the pool’s edge.
The man extended a hand. “We start things right off at Nepenthe. Shake. That mud immersion has taken weeks of aging off you already, Mr. Gabney. I’m Franklin T. Tripp, Coordinator and Partial Founder.”
Jolson gave Tripp a muddy right hand. His cruiser pilot had undressed him first, so he’d been expecting something.
“I admire your efficiency, sir.”
“You know, Mr. Gabney,” Tripp confided in a mint-scented voice, “I’m nearly sixty myself. Do I look it?”
“Forty at best.”
“Every chance I get I come out here and wallow.”  p. 213 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

This is pleasant enough magazine filler but I’ve no idea what it is doing in a ‘Best of the Year’ annual, and I doubt anyone will remember much about the story a couple of hours after they have read it. I also thought, for a piece of semi-satirical fluff (the peaceniks, the incomprehensible slang used in the club, the protest songs, etc.) it’s longer than it needs to be.
** (Average). 9,800 words.

All Under Heaven by John Brunner

Posted on by Paul Fraser

All Under Heaven by John Brunner (Asimov’s SF, mid-December 1995) begins with a young man called Chodeng watch a military procession arrive in a Chinese town as he helps his uncle mend the temple roof. When his uncle catches Chodeng looking at the scribe sat among the visitors, he chastises him for daydreaming. Later that evening though, as they all gather for a meal, Chodeng is the one who translates for the visitors (who speak a different dialect). During this Chodeng and the villagers learn from General Kao-Li and his scribe, Bi-tso, that they are headed towards the next village to look for meteorites. Chodeng is ordered to go with them.
When they arrive at Gan Han (meaning “not enough water”) after an arduous journey through the hills, they are surprised at to find a verdant oasis, with rice-filled paddies, frogs and ducks. Chodeng is dispatched to speak to one of the young women in the paddy fields, and he quickly finds that (a) they speak the same language as the visitors (they were banished to this area by a previous emperor) and (b) the village bloomed into this paradise after the arrival of the meteorites. Then matters take an even stranger turn when the rest of the locals turn up:

Can this be how a dragon looks? The question sprang unbidden to Chodeng’s lips, but Bi-tso spoke before he had time to utter it.
“A phoenix? Are there still phoenixes in our decadent age?”
Mention of such a legendary, powerful creature dismayed their escorts. They exchanged glances eloquent of apprehension, only to be distracted a second later as the pack animals caught—what? The scent, perhaps, of what was approaching. Or maybe they saw it, or detected strange vibrations in the air, or registered its approach by some sense too fine for coarse humanity. At all events it frightened them, and for the next few minutes the men had all they could do to prevent the beasts from shucking their loads and bolting.
[. . .]
A phoenix, was it? Well, if a scholar so identified it. . . . On first seeing it he had at once felt a dragon to be more likely. Yet—
Yet was he seeing it at all? Seeing it in the customary sense of the term? Somehow he felt not. Somehow he felt, when he tried to stare directly at it and focus its image, to get rid of the shiny hazy blur that seemed like a concentration of the strange luminosity he had already detected in the local air, what he had mentally compared to the nimbus round figures in religious paintings, that the—the creature wasn’t there to be seen. Not there there. Nearby. In a perceptible location. But not there in the sense that one might walk, on his own sore human feet, to where it was. One couldn’t judge how tall, how wide, how deep from front
to back…. In fact, apart from the bare fact of its existence, one could describe it in no terms whatsoever.  p. 91-92

It soon becomes apparent that the creature is an alien when it starts mind to mind communication with Chodeng. During a long conversation he finds out that it arrived with the meteorites (the remaining parts of its spaceship) and compelled the villagers to help it, later rewarding them with improved living conditions. After some more chat it disappears—but Chodeng senses it is still there. Then the head man invites the visitors to eat and rest.
The back half of the story sees Chodeng slip away with the girl he saw earlier, Tai Ping, during dinner—at which point the alien starts mentally communicating with him, stating that it needs his help to organise the collection of the scattered parts of its ship. The alien offers him the girl’s sexual favours in return, but when Chodeng approaches Tai Ping he realises that the alien is controlling her, and he refuses. He then tells the alien that they will help it retrieve the various parts of its ship in the morning. After the alien leaves the girl’s father arrives and thanks Chodeng for sparing his daughter.
The final act (spoiler) sees the visitors and locals arrive at the meteorite/crash site. The alien starts talking to Chodeng, who relays its messages to the General and Bi-tso, and they hear of its extra-terrestrial origins and how, after Chodeng’s actions the night before, it realises that it has underestimated humanity’s potential to be civilized. The alien then reveals its physical body to the humans (as opposed to the projection they all saw before), at which point the General tells the soldiers to kill it for its various breaches of Imperial law (forced labour, etc.), After it dies, and they all turn back towards the village, they see the barren scene and realise that the greenery and water was an illusion.
This has some good local colour and characterisation, but the stranded alien plot isn’t particularly original, and the flip-flops at the end (the alien’s change of heart, the General’s execution order) make the story too busy and too contrived.
** (Average). 11,450 words.