The Automaton, by Ian Young, is an indie darling that has been teasing me from the aether for a while now. Its striking and bold cover with an old school automaton, staring at the reader, was a sniper shot trained on me. Throw in some concerns about the difference between a digital human being and…
I am trying to get to a lot more novellas this year, which means the lot of you will have to put up with some quickfire reviews about some quickfire books. Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz, is a short 200-page novella about a near-future American dystopia where a collection of abandoned service robots open a…
Artificial intelligence has been a mainstay within science fiction since the genre’s inception. We all know the various tales of robots, their human creators, and the inevitable rebellions that are mustered forth, just or unjust. The large language models and generative AI that are dominating the cultural discussion and banging on the doors of our…
Continue reading ➞ Mechanize My Hands To War – Forever Unto The Breach
I feel a bit weird having devoted three whole posts to a series of novella (first two can be found here and here), but Martha Wells is worth it. The Murderbot Diaries, of which All Systems Red just (deservedly) won the Hugo for best novella, comes to a close this year with Wells’ final installment,…
Continue reading ➞ Exit Strategy – A Temporary End To A Story That Shouldn’t Stop
