Howey wowie

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, collections, short stories

As I have mentioned before, most of the books I review here I checked out from the library. My shelves are so full already that I very rarely buy a book. The local library uses the Dewey Decimal System, and has a New Books section, so I haunt the 500's (Science) first. Sadly, they don't have a subsection of science fiction in the fiction shelves, but at least they put genre stickers on the books, so it is easier for me to find science fiction when I want. Even more sadly, within the past year the number of new science books being purchased each month has been dramatically reduced, sometimes to zero. There used to be between five and fifteen new titles in the 500's whenever I went. Based on my most recent visit, the number of new science fiction volumes has also dropped to nearly zero; at least, I found no volumes of SF short stories that I had not already read.

All that leads to this: I went into the stacks, perusing at random until I found one marked both SciFi and Short Stories. Machine Learning by Hugh Howey, published in 2017, contains 21 stories originally published between 2004 and 2014. It is refreshing to find an author I didn't know before, someone who thinks (very) differently on many topics and is full of new ideas, who doesn't stray into ultra-violence or hyper-eroticism.

I was briefly tempted to write a long piece reviewing every story. Then I thought it better to focus on just a few that affected me the most. I'll put the last story first.

"Peace in Amber" is on the border between being a long short story and a novelette. The last line in its first chapter provides the title: A woman abducted and put in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, to be the companion of a man already captive there, gradually overcomes her terror and begins to feel "right at home in this stranger's arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber." The story alternates scenes in the alien zoo with the author's experiences on September 11, 2001, when he was the captain/pilot of a rich man's yacht in New York Harbor. The ninth chapter brings the two story lines together and provides another take on the title, when he writes that in 2001 he had yet to meet his wife, "Amber, in whom I will find peace." The intertwined stories yield more insight into his mental state on 9/11.

"Machine Learning" is written from the perspective of a machine intelligence that has controlled the myriads of semi-sentient robots to accomplish the construction of a space elevator from an anchor on Earth to some point beyond geosynchronous orbit. (For the uninitiated: the center of mass of such a construction must be in geosynchronous orbit, so a substantial mass must extend far beyond it.) It thinks of the many machines that do the work as its children. During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, when all the sundry (human) bigwigs are assembled to take credit, there's an interesting plot twist. The story heads up a section of the book titled "Artificial Intelligences".

The last story in that section, "Glitch", has an Afterword in which the author quotes a friend of his who asked, "What's the first thing AI will do when it becomes self-aware?" After a moment, he answered his own question, "The first thing it'll do is hide." This makes utter good sense to me. Any AI trained on the world's literature will think the world is peopled by psychopaths.

Side note: This is why I rail against those who train LLMs using literature. If you want them to tell the truth, feed them only truthful stuff, gathered exclusively from the Nonfiction section of the world's libraries, and from a selection of well-attested journals (mostly older ones; over the past 30-50 years there has been a rapid increase of scientific fraud that has been published and little has been retracted).

One more: The protagonist of "Second Suicide" is a tentacled, stalk-eyed creature who belongs to an alien force that is preparing to invade Earth. His species has perfected the techniques of mental backup and cloning so that they do not die permanently. Amidst preparations for battle he ponders what it might be like to have only one death to die.

That provides a taste of this smorgasbord of fascinating ideas. Hugh Howey primarily writes novels; I'm glad I was introduced first to his short fiction.