AI Archives - Page 2 of 2

Yzabel / July 9, 2017

Review: Void Star

My rating: [rating=4]

Blurb:

Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying but it’s still a good time to be rich in San Francisco where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn’t rich, not quite, but she does have an artificial memory that gives her perfect recall, and lets her act as a medium between her various employers and their AIs, which are complex to the point of opacity. It’s a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from ageing.

Kern has no such access; he’s one of the many refugees in the sprawling drone-built favelas on the city’s periphery, where he lives like a monk, training relentlessly in martial arts, scraping by as a thief and an enforcer. Thales is from a different world entirely – the mathematically-inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, he’s fled to L.A. after the attack that left him crippled and his father dead.

A ragged stranger accosts Thales and demands to know how much he can remember. Kern flees for his life after robbing the wrong mark. Irina finds a secret in the reflection of a laptop’s screen in her employer’s eyeglasses. None are safe as they’re pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.]

This story takes us on the paths followed by three characters very different from each other: Irina, carrying a brain implant that gives her perfect memory and access to AIs; Kern, a young refugee from the San Francisco favelas, who taught himself through books and martial arts thanks to a laptop found in a dump; and Thales, son of a murdered Brazilian politician, whose life hangs by a thread only because his body may reject the implant that saved his life at any moment.

The world depicted in the novel is not exactly cyberpunk, not exactly transhumanistic, not exactly dystopian, but a blend of all three? Life-prolonging and youth treatments exist… only for those who can afford them. The implant in both Irina and Thales’s brains is exceptional… but. Large corporations dominate everyday life, but the protagonists are different from their more usual cyberpunk counterparts. Earth is going through climate changes and places like Singapore are gradually going underwater, and many people don’t have access to basic necessities… but at the same time, a sense of wonder still permeates the story, if only because of the way the characters are confronted to various threats and obstacles, yet also to hopes and openings towards new paths. Kern’s laptop, for instance, because of what it represents, or could represent, for a young boy living in the streets. Or the inhuman and fascinating beauty of the AIs introduced here, the destructive Cloudbreaker and the elusive Mathematician.

This is both close to us, making it possible to grasp it, with its technologies that we can understand (tablets and phones, albeit somewhat obsolete for the wealthier characters), and at the same time deeply alien and full of mysteries (what would it be like to live with a perfect, artificial memory you can access just whenever, yet that may send you into seizure and kill you?).

‘Void Star’ reads well, although for some reason I felt like taking my sweet time with it, perhaps because unconsciously I didn’t want to finish it too fast? It may sometimes be a wee difficult to follow, since it doesn’t rely on detailed explanations, instead taking its readers through its characters’ travels; I quite liked that, though—I like that in general in SF/F, even though I know I can’t read such stories when I’m too tired, for fear of losing my pace and missing important hints. While some events appeared, as a result, a little confusing, in the end I could still piece everything together. The three main narratives are well interwoven—chapter Y actually holds the missing answers to what happened in chapter X, and so on—and even when I didn’t have all the information to understand their world in the beginning, it wasn’t much of a problem.

Conclusion: Not the easiest read around, due to its (beautiful but sometimes complex) descriptive language and concepts; however, if one is ready to tackle that, this book can be positively fascinating.

Yzabel / April 1, 2017

Review: Waking Hell

Waking Hell by Al Robertson

My rating: [rating=4]

Blurb:

Leila Fenech is dead. And so is her brother Dieter. But what’s really pissing her off is how he sold his afterlife as part of an insurance scam and left her to pick up the pieces. She wants him back so she can kick his backside from here to the Kuiper Belt.

Station is humanity’s last outpost. But this battle-scarred asteroid isn’t just for the living. It’s also where the dead live on as fetches: digital memories and scraps of personality gathered together and given life. Of a sort.

Leila won’t stop searching Station until she’s found her brother’s fetch – but the sinister Pressure Men are stalking her every move. Clearly Dieter’s got himself mixed up in something a whole lot darker than just some scam.

Digging deeper, Leila discovers there’s far more than her brother’s afterlife at stake. Could it be that humanity’s last outpost is on the brink of disaster? Is it too late for even the dead to save it?

Review:

[I received a copy from the publisher through NetGalley.]

Sequel to ‘Crashing Heaven’, a novel I read a couple of years ago, and quite liked. The world is roughly the same—Station, floating in space—but the protagonists are different, and the situation has changed: one of the gods was forcibly removed, and the fetches (dead people reconstructed from their memories) now have existences of their own, even though their community went through a plague that almost destroyed them along the way.

The characters: as mentioned above, no Hugo Fist or Jack Forster here, although they’re briefly mentioned. This time, the story mainly follows Leila, a fetch who’s trying to save her genius brother Dieter, and Cassiel, a Totality mind who’s investigating said brother’s death. It starts with Dieter falling prey to an old tech artifact, and dying from it; however, contrary to what Leila thinks at first, he cannot be brought back as a fetch, due to a fishy contract he signed at the last moment with a couple of shady characters called ‘pressure men’. Finding herself the unwilling beneficiary of this contract that left her a rich heiress, Leila uses her newly acquired money—and the door it opens—to try and find out what really happened to Dieter, and bring him back at all costs, the way himself helped her build herself back up after the fetch plague almost deconstructed her for good.

Even though I admit I didn’t like Leila much at first (too whiny and self-centered), and would have hoped to see Jack and Hugo again, soon enough the new characters grew up on me. On the one hand, Leila tends to keep focused on Dieter and not on the bigger picture, but this bit on the selfish side makes her, in a way, very human. On the other hand, she puts herself on the front line as well: you definitely can’t call her a coward, all the more as the enemy could very well wipe her out of existence. As for Cassiel, she brings a lot of information about the AIs, the way they live, and how close they are to humans even if the latter don’t always notice it.

(Interestingly, as a fetch, Leila is just as much dependent on hardware and on the local equivalent of the online world to exist and manifest herself. The world of Station definitely keeps blurring the lines and questioning what makes us human, especially once you throw the gods into the mix: the Rose who isn’t so infallible, East who’s obsessed with the media and her reality shows…)

There are a lot of epic virtual reality/online world/hidden servers moments. Because both Leila and Cassiel are reconstructed or artificial AIs, they’re both powerful and frail. Without a physical body, and armed with a weapon Dieter had once designed for her only, Leila has means of her own to fight and resist; and Cassiel was designed as a weapon herself, with a nanogel body making her suited for both physical and digital combat; and yet, because they’re software-based, they’re vulnerable to viruses and similar attacks… which makes the pressure men and their ability to edit data (including memories) all the more dangerous to them. Memory is clearly one of the stakes in the novel, because there comes a point when neither characters nor readers can really tell whether their memories are true or were manipulated.

A few discrepancies in terms of style (I had noticed that in the first book already: sometimes the prose switches to short sentences that jar a little with the rest), but not enough to really be a problem. All instances of ‘brought’ were also printed as ‘bought’, but since I got a preprint copy, this was hopefully corrected in the final version.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars. I found the ending a little rushed, with some loose ends not so properly tied, and there were a couple of moments when I had to push through for a few pages (for some reason I can’t exactly pinpoint). Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed diving into Station and its particular blend of bleak cyberpunk and transhumanism. Should there be a third book, I wouldn’t mind reading it either.

Yzabel / March 1, 2017

Review: Cyber World

Cyber World: Tales of Humanity’s Tomorrow by Jason Heller

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Blurb:

Cybernetics. Neuroscience. Nanotechnology. Genetic engineering. Hacktivism. Transhumanism. The world of tomorrow is already here, and the technological changes we all face have inspired a new wave of stories to address our fears, hopes, dreams, and desires as Homo sapiens evolve—or not—into their next incarnation. Cyber World presents diverse tales of humanity’s tomorrow, as told by some of today’s most gripping science fiction visionaries.

Review:

[I received an e-copy of this book through NetGalley.]

A collection of short stories with virtual reality, AI and technology themes in general. Despite the ‘cyberpunk’ flair, I agree with the curators: it’s not so much cyberpunk in its original meaning, as dealing with various ideas that fit our current societies more than the ‘old cyberpunk’ feeling.

* “Serenade:” 3/5

A hacker decrypting data on an old USB sticks realises that said data is not about future useful information, but memories.

* “The Mighty Phin:” 3/5

In a prison ship controlled by an AI, not everything is as it looks, and truth may be more difficult to stomach than the characters think at first. Bit of an abrupt ending, though, when I think about how it could’ve been more developed.

* “Reactions:” 3/5

What a drone pilot pumped up on battle drugs goes through when the operation he’s on is suddenly cancelled… but not what’s still lingering in his organism. I found it interesting, although, like the story before it, I’d have liked some more development (especially regarding the soldier’s decision to break his family).

* “The Bees of Kiribati:” 5/5

Chilling because even though this doesn’t exist (yet), the principles behind the murders in this story could very well be applied in other ways. It also raises the old but still accurate ethical question: would you kill a few people, even babies, if it meant being able to save many more?

* “The Rest Between Two Notes:” 2/3

Promising theme (a teenager killing her mother repeatedly in virtual reality), but I found the plot too muddled in places. The resolution brought at the end wasn’t too clear–I wouldn’t mind in a novel, but in short stories it’s another matter.

* “The Singularity is In Your Hair:” 5/5

Touching and horrible. A girl suffering from a degenerative disease, who can only experience living through virtual reality, performs jobs and meets people thanks to an AI who may or may not be so benevolent. The promise of one day being fully uploaded to virtual space, and leaving the meat behind instead of facing the prospect of her impending death, keep her going. And she desperately hopes this will come true sooner than later.

* “Panic City:” 5/5

In an underground city that is both a refuge and a prison, people have been living for generations following models and using technology that are gradually failing. When something threatens to break an opening into this ‘homeostatic’ environment, the AI controlling the city has to make a decision: is their original programming really ideal in this case?

* “The Faithful Soldier, Prompted:” 4/5

A veteran from corporate wars receives prompts on his augmented reality system, even though the war is over. While such defective prompts are known to be useless, and should be discarded, these seem different… and so he follows them, desperate in his hopes that the rewards will save the woman he loves. I liked the writing here–even the prompts sounded poetic.

* “Your Bones Will Not Be Unknown:” 4/5

An assassin is sent to kill a rival boss, knowing full well there are little chances of success here. But what the boss has in mind for them is not necessarily death, and could even actually be a gift.

* “Staunch:” 2/5

A group of kids-hackers-rebels, led by a doctor who used to be part of a legendary team, travel through what’s left of the UK to save the life of one of their own. Though the plot itself was a bit weak, I liked the technological problems used in it (replacement organs shutting down if the firmware’s outdated or the copyright has changed hands, etc.)—definitely freaky.

* “Other People’s Thoughts:” 2/5

About empathy, telepathic powers and gender fluidity. Good themes, and I would’ve loved actually liking the story, but it was more descriptive than actual plot, and I found it too weak to hold my interest.

* “WISYOMG:” 1/5

Almost skipped that one. The style and character weren’t appealing, and I’m still not sure what was the idea. Warning people against body mods and fads? It was hard to follow, so I’m really not sure.

* “We Will Take Care of Our Own:” 2/5

Of corrupt politicians and corporations trying to make money by officially solving problems, and officiously sweeping them under the carpet. Again, good theme, especially since the politician has a skeleton of her own in the closet, but in terms of plot and development, it wasn’t strong nor long enough.

* “A Song Transmuted:” 3/5

A young musician comes up with a new concept to be music, rather than simply playing it—spurred by her relationship with her grandfather, his way of encouraging her to meet other people and play music with her, and this in spite of a dishonest colleague stealing her idea. Good, though not groundbreaking.

* “It’s Only Words:” 2/5

A sort of neo-Luddite theme, of a boy writing his school project on paper when everybody else is constantly connected to the web and not doing anything in an “analogue” way anymore. I’m not sure where this story was going, though: I felt that something was missing, that the point wasn’t strongly made enough at the end, because nothing really changes, and the people targetted may not even have understood what was happening?

* “Small Offerings:” 5/5

Horrific but fascinating. A story about the means that may be necessary, in a future and over-polluted world, for people to carry healthy children to term, by sacrificing others.

* “Darkout:” 2/5

Good build-up to something bigger, in a society where everybody’s living under the camera’s eye… but the end just fell flat, and nothing really happened.

* “Visible Damage:” 3/5

A hacker goes on the trail of a nascent AI, in the hopes of finding it before everyone else obliterates it. Interesting, but a bit confusing.

* “The Ibex on the Day of Extinction:” 4/5

A man far from his family comes home to find everybody and everything gone—no GPS, no radio, no internet, and only empty clothes left behind.
I kind of suspected what had happened early on. Still, I liked this story. Sometimes all I need is for the conclusion to vindicate what I’m already thinking.

* “How Nothing Happens:” 1/5

Kind of what it says on the tin? I get the basic idea, but the way it was developed didn’t grab my attention.

Yzabel / April 26, 2016

Review: Illuminae

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman

My rating: [rating=5]

Blurb:

This morning, Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the hardest thing she’d have to do.

This afternoon, her planet was invaded.

The year is 2575, and two rival megacorporations are at war over a planet that’s little more than an ice-covered speck at the edge of the universe. Too bad nobody thought to warn the people living on it. With enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra—who are barely even talking to each other—are forced to fight their way onto an evacuating fleet, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit.

But their problems are just getting started. A deadly plague has broken out and is mutating, with terrifying results; the fleet’s AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be their enemy; and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a tangled web of data to find the truth, it’s clear only one person can help her bring it all to light: the ex-boyfriend she swore she’d never speak to again.

Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, schematics, military files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more—Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping, high-octane trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.

Review:

4.5 stars. I had to wait for 4 months to finally be able to borrow it from the library (10 people ahead of me, bah), and I admit I was worried about the whole epistolary/chats/format thing, because it’s too easy to just slap “witty” formatting on pages and call that a good book. Fortunately, the story and characters really hooked me–yes, even though the “chat-speak” on some pages would normally quickly have annoyed me in other circumstances.

There was romance, but not of the stupid kind that casts a shadow on the whole plot. While Ezra and Kady do think about each other, after their world was turned upside down and forced them to reconsider the importance of a breakup for what I shall call “puny teenager reasons”, they didn’t spend their time mooning, groping each other, and sending the rest of their crews to hell just because feeeeeeelings. Contrary to what happens too often in many YA novels (you know, “the world is ending but we’re still too busy pondering who we want to go out with”). It wasn’t the best romance ever, but at least it was far from being the worst I read.

The format: fun to read, although I tended to prefer some aspects over others (the “chatspeak” conversations, for instance, weren’t my favourites). I think this was because of the whole “report” side of it, which made for a strange dichotomy in the narrative: both very factual (“here are recordings from camera X”) and unreliable (how were those recordings recovered and put back together?).

The characters: so I’ll be honest, Ezra and Kady were “good” to read about but not really more. Ezra enlisted to help, not knowing much to what he was signing up for, yet aware someone should help, and gradually revealing a few things about his family that were hard to suspect at first. I didn’t care for Kady much at first, because of her sullen, do-not-want-to-do-that attitude; however, she redeemed herself later, and anyway was more of an action girl with a bit of romance on the side than the usual (and annoying) lovestruck heroine who lets The Boy do all the work.

Yet as far as I’m concerned, the one character I really, really loved reading about was AIDAN. It’s crazy and damaged and desperately trying to latch upon what’s left of its programming, pushing its core directives in directions that may or may not be completely at odds with what the crews of the three spaceships would like (or need). And in doing so, in being so, it was all so human, spiralling towards both destruction and a new awareness.

And, frankly, I just loved that AI. It added at least a full star to my rating. No kidding. And just for AIDAN, I’d read it again. (Also for the unreliable parts I mentioned above, and the way they tie together, and you’d better pay attention to a few tiny details here and there.)

Yzabel / August 18, 2015

Review: Aurora

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

My rating: [rating=1]

Blurb:

Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now, we approach our destination.

A new home.

Aurora.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I haven’t read anything by Kim Stanley Robinson since 2003 or so, back when I read (and loved!) his Mars trilogy. So I was really excited and hopeful when it came to this one, and… unfortunately, it didn’t work for me. At all.

Excellent concepts, ideas and research. The generation ship. All the details its engineers didn’t foresee, and how the descendants of the original crew had to contend with those shortcomings. Genetic degeneration in spite of their efforts. Arriving to the “Promised Land”, only to find a paradise so hostile it basically kills all its denizens save for one. The choices the survivors had to make, the conflicts they bred. The conundrum—stay and potentially die, go back and potentially die just as well. The underlying despair. And, last but not least, Ship, the quantum computer turned AI, who for several chapters narrated this story as best as “she” could.

But. There are also quite a few buts in here.

I couldn’t find the excitement and—dare I say—magic that suffused the Mars trilogy. Not only due to the lengthy prose, which could easily have been shortened in place: also for the sheer lack of characters to get interested in. I couldn’t help but feel remote from their trials, perhaps because the narrative was rather detached from them: not an omniscient narrator, yet not “in their minds” either, so in the end, I felt unsatisfied on both accounts. The closest to caring I care was in the beginning, with Freya and Euan and what Aurora brought them; that quickly ended, though.

Moreover, the narrative was often bogged down by lengthy musings and descriptions that didn’t add much, and whose very length weakened the power they may have had otherwise. The discovery of Aurora by the first people to set foot on it; the AI caring for her passengers; the ship struggling to remain a home; the travellers trying to keep going an ecosystem that had never be meant to last for that long; then another discovery, the poetry of endless blue skies instead of the domes of biomes inside the ship… All of this could have been more impressive with some editing in places.

The explanations behind the expedition left me cold as well. With the risk of being cliché, the story would easily lead anyone to think that the shop left because of troubles on Earth, because it was one of the last hopes, because humanity needed to get out of here fast (especially when combined with Devi’s lamenting how badly the original engineers had cobbled all this up together). And I guess this would’ve been an interesting story to tell. Instead, what was left on Earth was… flat, also cliché, and not so interesting. Basically, “let’s do that because we can”.

Conclusion: a disappointing read, that I basically finished because I wanted to review it more than out of real interest for it.

Yzabel / October 23, 2013

Review: Paradigm

Paradigm by Helen Stringer

My rating: [rating=3]

(I got this book from NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

Summary:

“If I ask you to do something, will you do it?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”

“Well, I don’t know what it is yet. But I’m guessing that death is the alternative, so I’m prepared to be reasonable.”

Sam Cooper is seventeen. He drives a cherry red 1968 GTO that he won on a bet, and spends his days exploring the open roads of the great American West. He should be living the teenage dream, but post-collapse America is a hard place to survive.

The United States is long dead, basic resources are getting scarcer, and no one on Earth has seen the stars since before he was born. Vast tracts of the country are now empty as people huddle together for safety. In all this chaos, Sam has survived on his wits and occasional luck. But a visit to the walled and prosperous Century City results in a split-second decision that changes everything. Soon Sam is on the run from the ruthless Carolyn Bast, and by something much more dangerous: MUTHA-a powerful artificial entity that has been watching and waiting for Sam’s return from the barren outlands. Sam unknowingly carries the key to something MUTHA can’t live without, something so dangerous that others are willing to kill him, or worse, to ensure that the great plex never possesses it.

Sam can’t stay one step ahead of them forever. His only hope is to unravel the secrets of his peculiar past and awaken the incredible power that sleeps within-because even in his beloved GTO, without the truth, Sam will never succeed in outracing the nightmare to come.

Review:

This novel range from “okay” to “I like it”. It is interspersed with good ideas and easily recognisable characters, and although some of the latter are a little bit on the cliché side, they still manage to stand on their own. (And let’s be honest: at some point, I do want clichés. I do want to picture the badass poncho-wearing girl slashing at enemies with knives in her hands and razor-blades woven in her braids. In fact, the illustrator in me wants to draw that.)

The villains were a little over the top at times, but I liked that they were also chessmasters, laying plans within plans within plans. Too often in books, I find the antagonists too simple-minded, so when I find one that actually remembers to anticipate, I’m glad.

What I liked less in “Paradigm” was how it could easily become confusing. It relies a lot on the reader’s intrisic understanding of vocabulary and concepts that is, indeed, part of regular readers’ of sci-fi… but not so much of others. Even though I managed to follow most of the technological ideas conveyed throughout the story, there were still moments when I had to flip back a few pages, or wonder if this or that explanation held water scientifically, or was just resting on wibbly-wobbly scientific notions. (My own knowledge in that regard isn’t fail-safe, so I can never be sure.)

The plot, too, is a bit all over the place. On the one hand, it gives off nice vibes of a mad chase; on the other, it also made me feel like the characters were always running around right and left, conveniently finding each other again, too. Things go fast, and you may not notice such details on the moment, but for me, they had a nagging tendency to come back to mind later. (I guess the main character, Sam, was confusing as well: he’s supposed to be smart, yet some of his reactions seemed to run contrary to the Sam I had learned to know until now.)

Last but not least, the romance part was simply useless. I enjoyed Alma’s badass streak and no-nonsense attitude, but friendship would’ve done the job just as well.

I’d give it a 2.5 stars, but decided to round it up to 3 all the same, because all in all, “Paradigm” kept me entertained. Still, I feel it necessary to point out that younger readers might be confused now and then by how the world is presented.