Archive for the ‘Robert Reed’ Category
Enjoying some Clarkesworld short fiction by Reed and Chandrasekera, Narrated by Kate Baker
Posted on: June 10, 2017
Me and audio fiction have a tenuous friendship. I tend to get distracted while listening to audio fiction, which means I have to listen to the same stories over and over and over again, almost like they are long musical pieces. Do I listen to the occasional audio book? Sure do. Are they something I seek out? Not really. But . . . long commute to work through beautiful farmland is the perfect setting for some audio short story podcasts. And Clarkesworld has the amazing Kate Baker. So there’s that.
If you’re not sure audio short stories are for you, find something narrated by Kate Baker. Her voice is warm and welcoming, drawing you in to the inflections and pauses. When I listen to her, I feel like it’s just the two of us having an intimate conversation in a dark pub where the bartender knows us and lets us hang out at that table in the back as long as we’d like. She’s not reading me a story, she is telling me a story. My brain responds to her voice the same way my brain responds to music, even though she’s not singing. All that to say that Kate Baker’s voice has absolutely spoiled me.
Still, I stick with the shorter of the short stories that she narrates. Maybe the more I listen to, the more I will want to listen to and will download longer stories? Time will tell, I guess.
Last week, I listened to “Left of Bang – Preemtive Self-Actualization for Autonomous Systems” by Vajra Chandrasekera from the April issue (issue #127) of Clarkesworld, and “Two Ways of Living” by Robert Reed from the March issue (issue #126) of the same magazine. Both were narrated by Kate Baker, and by “listened to”, I mean I listened to them each at least 3 times. Only today, as I’m writing this blog post am I actually looking at the text versions on the Clarkesworld magazine website, mostly to just check the spelling of character’s names. How strange the shapes of the text seems, after having heard the stories on audio.
I’m randomly working my way through the Clarkesworld Year Four anthology, which includes all the original fiction the magazine published in their fourth year. This is the second post in the series, click here for the first post.
The more I read in this anthology, the more I enjoy it. The stories are relatively short, mostly around 9-12 pages, perfect tasty nuggets of strangeness. I’ve linked each story back to Clarkesworld, so you can head over there and read the ones that catch your attention.
Today I’ll be talking about short fiction from Richard Parks, Brenda Cooper, Robert Reed, and Melissa Lingen.
Night, in Dark Perfection by Richard Parks – The Faerie Queen insists that everyone attend her parties. Anyone who doesn’t come willingly, will be forced, or perhaps the entire party will have to be cancelled. Elsewhere, the Captive Princess is trying to escape. Something very strange is going on, there is something skewed and not quite right about these characters right from the start. They have both been alone for a very, very long time even though the kind and gentle voice of the Palace speaks to both of them. The Captive Princess hears strange voices while she is exploring her prison, but for once, these voices do not belong to the Palace, or any of the usual residents. For you see, the Faerie Queen and the Captive Princess are AIs (or at least, that was my interpretation of them) on a derelict ship, and the ship has been discovered by salvagers. Did the ship’s mind create them, in an attempt to stave of insanity, or perhaps as friends, other voices to talk to in the void?
Robots: The Recent A.I., edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace
published in 2012 from Prime Books
where I got it: purchased
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For no good reason, I’ve never read much short fiction. I’ve had mixed luck with anthologies in the past, and that is a terrible reason to shy away from short fiction. Good thing I ran into Robots: The Recent A.I., an anthology so packed with my favorite authors that I felt like a kid in a candy store. Authors such as Cory Doctorow, Cat Valente, Lavie Tidhar, Tim Pratt, Rachel Swirsky and more whipping up near and far future tales of an aspect of science fiction that is near and dear to my heart: artificial intelligence. How could I possibly say no? Most of these stores have already appeared elsewhere, but I had only ever heard of the Valente and Doctorow titles. Blazing big and bold on the cover is the word “robots”, but artificial intelligence is so much more that a metal machine that can have a conversation with you or play chess.
These are the stores about the new holy grail: creating an artificial intelligence that is so close to human we can’t tell the difference. When an AI is so close to human you can’t tell, where is the line between ownership and freedom? Where is the line between loving someone and being programmed to love that person? For a discussion about cold hard programming, where every decision comes down to a sharply defined one or zero, these are some mighty emotional and sensual stories. Some are told from a humans point of view, others are from the point of view of an AI. These are not your Papa Asimov’s robot stories, and it’s suddenly about more than playing chess.
It’s one thing to program a machine to believe that it is a human. It’s an entirely different thing to deal with the consequences. Frankenstein’s monster indeed.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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