Through space and time with a different mind

kw: book reviews, science fiction, multiple genres

I read through most of this book on an airplane from Phoenix to Philadelphia. Sometimes when I fly I work puzzles the whole time in the air, first whatever is in the airline's magazine, then in a puzzle book. I like the books with a great variety of different kinds of puzzles, not just crosswords or Sudoku. This time I began to read right after push-back, and read pretty steadily through most of the flight.

Do you remember Apple's "Think Different" motto of about 20 years ago? They were criticized for not using "Differently", but the word was not intended as an adverb; it was a noun: "Think [things that are] Different". When I first saw it I recalled the century-old NCR/IBM motto "Think". But that one meant "Think [because nobody else is doing it]".

Well, Hugh Howey thinks Different. Though he has published more than 20 novels and novellas, and a passel of short stories, reading the collection Machine Learning was my first exposure to him. I'll make sure it is not the last.

The volume contains short stories and at least one novella made up of short story-length vignettes, in a few SciFi genres. The author supplied endnotes about the stories, of what he was thinking at the time. He'll think inside a character: What is going through the mind of a truly bug-eyed, tentacled alien in a force bent on attacking Earth? ("Second Suicide"); he takes a riff on his friend Kevin Kelly's statement, that when a machine first becomes self-aware, the first thing it will do is hide ("Glitch"); he considers the consequences of love between human and robot (Algorithms of Love and Hate, a 3-story sequence). This last reminded me a little of The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov, but with a very different take on societal reactions. Finally, "Peace in Amber" is the author's memoir of going through 9/11 in the actual shadow of the twin towers (until they fell), interspersed with a truly weird alien zoo story. Based on his endnotes, I think the zoo story was needed to "spread out" the memoir so he could handle the flood of emotions.

The word "gripping" comes to mind. Read the book and see what word it evokes in you.