★★★☆☆ A positive (maybe?) take on AI?

Better Living Through Algorithms

Naomi Kritzer

In this issue of Clarkesworld I am reviewing only the 2024 Best Short Story Hugo finalist "Better Living Through Algorithms", by Naomi Kritzer. This is barely science fiction, in the sense that an optimist could easily imagine this story happening right now, in the very world we are living in. Most people probably would not, however, because we are conditioned to always imagine Thinking Machines as A Bad Thing -- you know, Frankenstein's monster and HAL 9000 and the Terminator and about a million other stories. I find that trope tiresome and irritating, so I love an original take on how AI could go right.

This is, it turns out, a fairly small scale "going right", but not the less interesting for that. It's a good story. It would not get my vote for the award (that would be "The Sound of Children Screaming", by Rachael K. Jones), but this is a good story and I would not feel robbed if it won.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★☆☆ There was never going to be an HEA

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★★★★☆ Fictional autobiography of Rome's fourth Emperor

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★★★☆☆ Peggy Carter sans Steve Rogers

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★★★☆☆ Minimal surreal magic school story

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★★★☆☆ Informative but annoyingly tendentious

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues Jonathan Kennedy There is a book that everyone who is interested in biology and history should read: William H. McNeill 's Plagues and Peoples , published in 1976. I suppose that is long enough ago that we are allowed to call it a classic. Plagues and Peoples is an example of what I call a "I have a new hammer -- look at all these nails!" book. McNeill 's new hammer was consideration of the effects of infectious disease on history. He argued that infectious disease was an important force in history, persuasively in my opinion. Jonathan Kennedy 's Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues intends to update McNeill . Kennedy points out quite correctly that the advances in technology since 1976 enable us to see more deeply and clearly into the past of infectious disease than McNeill possibly could and thus to replace much of McNeill 's speculation with clearer and more solid answers. H

★★★★★ Cornelia Funke still gots it

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★★★★☆ If Virginia Hall was fictional, she would not be believable

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★★★★☆ A broken mindship and lost children

In the Shadow of the Ship Aliette de Bodard Aliette de Bodard 's In the Shadow of the Ship is a novella set in her Xuya Universe . Like many Xuya stories, this one takes place aboard a mindship. This particular mindship is called Nightjar and was damaged escaping from the collapsing Empire. (Exactly which Empire this was I am not sure -- there is more than one in the Xuya Universe .) At any rate, Nightjar is not a healthy place. She escaped carrying some of her family. They still live aboard and afford her the loyalty she expects, mostly. Nightjar demands tribute in the form of children whom she lures into her dead zones, from which they never emerge. When Khuyên was a child she was invited to the dead zones by her cousin Anh, but she refused. Later she did the unthinkable: she left Nightjar for the broken Empire, where she rose to the post of Magistrate. Now Khuyên has returned to Nightjar for her grandmother's funeral, where she is met with a complex mixture of disdain

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