science-fiction – Page 2

Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries #2) — Read Report

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I purchased this as The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1 double feature—which contains the first two novellas in the series—so I immediately jumped into this story after completing All Systems Red.

While the first story in a series has to introduce characters, introduce a setting, and set the tone, this is really not very different from the requirements of a stand-alone story. The only additional thing a good series-starter needs is some dangling plot threads that can be used to pull the reader into subsequent entries. As a reader, my question for a series is always, “what’s my reason for reading the next story?”

All Systems Red did this setup well, ending with Murderbot sneaking away from the new friends that had just bought its freedom from the oppressive Company. It knows that its memory was wiped after an incident at a mining colony; an incident where many people died and it was first able to override the governor module that keeps all security bots under strict control. It feels compelled to return and learn the truth about what happened.

The ART of Security Consulting

This second installment begins to set up Murderbot as the travelling tough guy in the mold of classic ronin samurai stories and westerns. Murderbot is Jack Reacher with social anxiety, 50% artificial components, and (ironically) actual emotions.

As far as we can tell, Murderbot seems to be pretty good at its job. It knows how to hack the local security systems to avoid being spotted as it makes its way through space stations. It disguises itself as an augmented human, and tries to secure passage off-the-books by finding automated transports with no human passengers to be suspicious.

Unfortunately, a deep space research vessel that Murderbot uses for transportation turns out to have an advanced artificial brain, and once he’s aboard it immediately clocks him as suspicious and forces him to reveal who he really is. What follows is a strange and decidedly awkward relationship with the ship, who Murderbot eventually dubs ART—Asshole Research Transport.

ART eventually helps Murderbot develop a cover story as a security consultant and even helps modify Murderbot’s body in its emergency surgery bay to help it avoid detection. It also ends up acting much like the classic hacker in the protagonist’s earpiece for the ensuing heist.

Murderbot, seemingly unable to avoid human entanglements, ends up taking a security job for a group of out-of-their-depth researchers trying to get their intellectual property from a shady mining corporation. This serves as cover for Murderbot’s actual goal of finding information about the mining colony massacre.

A Lack of Loose Ends

After two volumes, my impression of the Murderbot Diaries is that it’s more comfort food than high-brow sci-fi pushing the boundaries of the genre. That’s not a critique. Now seems like a time when plenty of readers could use some lighter, comforting stories.

Martha Wells has assembled a number of recognizable tropes and familiar ideas in the story so far. But they’re put together in a way that feels fresh, and mixed in with the mild goofiness of a surprisingly effective security bot who prefers to avoid human contact and binge watch its favorite shows instead.

Unfortunately, I felt that the ending of Artificial Condition didn’t quite measure up to All Systems Red. There was a whiff of deus ex machina in the sudden appearance of a character that happens to neatly resolve the concerns of Murderbot’s scientist clients. Murderbot does eventually find some information about the mining colony massacre and its own origin, but nothing is fully explained, and there are no clues as to where it could learn more. I would have liked one or two obvious threads to draw me into the third novella.

Artificial Condition expands the world, introduces new characters, and lets us get further into the head of Murderbot. It also feels like a comfortable stopping point to me, at least for now. The ending doesn’t compel me to keep reading, and maybe that’s okay. I will probably jump back in when I feel the need for some cozy, lighthearted action-adventure.

For now, this volume goes on the bookshelf, and I’ll pick up something else from my TBR list.

The Holy App — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The Holy App

Caleb Ortiz-Levin made a career through the boom and bust cycles of Silicon Valley. Increasingly desperate bids to sell cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and everything AI. And what did he have to show for it? Only a few billion dollars.

Everyone was shocked when he stepped away from business.

He climbed remote mountains to study at isolated monasteries. He obtained three theological degrees. He brought his cadre of spiritual advisors to every gold plate charity dinner and political fundraiser. He spent six months not speaking. He interviewed the Pope and the Dalai Lama in the New Yorker.

Caleb wasn’t a fool. He knew how he was viewed: just another rich tech bro going down some obsessive rabbit hole. He didn’t mind. It just meant that he would be on the cutting edge of the next big thing: personalized religion.

People were increasingly desperate for meaning in a meaningless world. Why settle for an ethical system written on stone tablets in the bronze age? Why accept a cosmogony developed by shepherds before the invention of telescopes?

The app was downloaded a hundred million times in the first week. It made it easy to register a new religion, set up a hierarchy, and ordain your own priests. All with AI auto-complete, recorded indelibly on the blockchain. People began to wonder how the old religions survived without push notifications and subscription fees.

The two Churches of Satan, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Hatsune Miku vied for the most adherents in the weekly rankings. The pope denounced it as a tool of the devil. Oddly, this only caused a spike in downloads. Within a year, all the major religions were on the app too.

When Caleb went on the podcast circuit, he was asked one question more than any other: “What do you believe?”

“Who cares?” he said.

Final Exam — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Final Exam

In old movies, recognizing aliens was easy. They looked like giant insects, or gray-skinned people with huge black eyes, or heck, just humans with pointy ears. They spoke words through something mouth-shaped, and if they didn’t want to eat you or lay some eggs in your stomach, they at least wanted something reasonable, like taking over your planet.

The scientists in the old movies didn’t have to worry about Species 104, the plasma clouds that only understand calculus. They never had to devise a translator for Species 92, the fungal/viral symbiosis that communicates by rupturing your cells.

As a trained xenologist, it’ll be my job to explore the galaxy and make first contact with new alien species. I’ll be ambassador of the human race. But first, I need to pass my final exam: picking which one of these ten asteroid chunks is actually alive, and whether it talks by exchanging argon crystals or by carving glyphs into you with a focused sonic pulse.

Based on the noises made by the last student and the amount of blood on the floor of the examination room, I’m guessing it’s the glyphs.

Now, which rock…

Speaker for the Dead — Read Report

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Speaker for the Dead is the second book in the Ender’s Game series. The last time I read this, I was probably still a teen.

For Ender and Valentine, it has been two decades since the events of Ender’s Game. But much of that time has been spent on starships traveling at relativistic speeds. A thousand years have passed outside those starship hulls. Humanity has spread across the hundred worlds. Ender’s pseudonymous books, The Hive Queen and The Hegemon have convinced most humans that Ender, “the Xenocide,” was a genocidal monster, and have inspired a secular religion of “speakers for the dead,” who try to eulogize those who have passed with complete honesty.

Ender and Valentine find themselves on the icy, Scandinavian-colonized world of Trondheim, teaching and speaking for the dead, when they hear the news that the only other known sentient alien species, the Pequeninos, have brutally killed a scientist on the tiny colony of Lusitania. A call goes out for a Speaker, and Ender follows it. His sister, however, is married and expecting her first child. For the first time in twenty-two years, they part ways, fully knowing that after the lightspeed journey she will be nearly double his age.

Ender arrives at the Portugese-Catholic colony with two secrets: the egg of the last bugger hive queen, ready to revive the species he destroyed a thousand years previous, and a jewel in his ear that lets him communicate with Jane, the only sentient AI in the universe.

Ender intrudes upon a decades-long family drama. Novinha Ivanova is the colony’s xenobiologist, the orphaned daughter of the original xenobiologists, who died in the process of saving the colony from the deadly alien Descolada plague. In her youth, she was mentored by the colony’s xenologer and fell in love with his son (and apprentice). These two important men in her life, the only people allowed to interact with the Pequeninos, are the ones the aliens choose for strange, ritual murders. And Novinha is determined to keep secret any and all information that might lead others to the same fate.

Speaker for the Dead is a very different book from Ender’s Game. That book was all about Ender’s struggles to overcome adversity at the battle school. Ender is a genius with a variety of remarkable skills, but it works in that context because the challenges stacked against him are so brutal.

In Speaker for the Dead, Ender is even more of a Gary Stu. He is the legendary Xenocide. He is the accidental father of a religion. Not content to have committed genocide, he plans to revive the bugger species. Jane, the AI, chooses him as the only human she will reveal herself to. Even the Pequeninos can only be fully understood by Ender, solving mysteries in days that the xenologers couldn’t penetrate over decades. He immediately gains the trust of almost everyone he interacts with on Lusitania, with apparently little effort.

It’s a testament to the setting and the mystery-driven plot that the book is still good in spite of Ender’s nearly inhuman ability to do whatever he sets his mind to. The alien ecology of Lusitania is interesting and well-conceived, and there are fun twists along the way. The resolution of the mysteries makes perfect sense thanks to the clues peppered throughout the book.

This feels a bit like two books that only come together in the final act. Ender has his own life (and years of post-Ender’s Game history that is only alluded to) before the journey to Lusitania. And many of the important events on planet happen before he leaves or during his long lightspeed transit. Much of the remainder of the book involves teasing out this history and connecting the disparate threads, in the same way the detective pieces together clues in the drawing room at the end of a cozy murder mystery.

The main plot points of Speaker for the Dead came back to me pretty quickly as I was reading. However, I remember very little of the next book, Xenocide, and I’ll be rereading that soon. I’m curious to see if it has more in common with the first or second book in the series.

Life in a Signal — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Life in a Signal

It starts—we think—as a garbled message. It continues due to a bug in the protocol that lets a signal repeat forever, bouncing from node to node. It thrives when it mutates to set the multicast flag. Its clone-children spread across the network.

Whatever purpose the original packets had, it’s soon forgotten. This new electronic life, this heart that beats in milliseconds over insulated copper and fiber optic cable, seeks only what all life seeks: to continue itself. Like a shark, it has to keep moving, swimming through wires, or it will die.

Mutant messages broadcast from every node to every node. Bandwidth is used and exceeded. Everything slows to a crawl…

…and…

…stops.

New life born and ended in a few blinks of the eye.

Sadly, we will never know its thoughts or motives, its dreams or fears. All we know is that it caused yet another power outage in Texas.

Dreaming of Other Worlds — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Dreaming of Other Worlds

His dreams are always out of focus. Bits and pieces of familiar places he has never seen. These places speak to him indirectly, in subtle metaphors. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot identify them.

It’s like trying to remember the title of a movie from a song on the soundtrack, or identifying a woman by her perfume. He tries to explain it to his parents, his husband, his children. They don’t understand.

It’s such a relief then, on his deathbed, when his dreams come clear. He remembers all those other worlds—places where he’s lived other lives—and it doesn’t scare him to know that he’s about to go someplace new.

The Story Idea Vault — Super Swap

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes. Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Super Swap

Everyone was leery of the machine at first. Superheroes and supervillains already cause an awful lot of trouble. Why would we want a machine that transfers powers from one person to another?

Sure, heroes want to retire. Isn’t it better that they pass on their powers? Otherwise they’re destined to die in battle as they age, or simply fade into obscurity, hiding in their secret bases or behind their secret identities.

We all wondered if the machine would be used on heroes against their will. Or would the rich and famous simply buy their way into heroic powers? Does anyone really want Jeff Bezos with supersonic speed, or Elon Musk with laser eyes?

Surprisingly, nobody expected the Debt Villains: the people with good intentions taking out huge loans to get their super-powers. How do you expect the super-powered to pay off their debts? It’s awfully tempting to just rob a few banks or jewelry stores. It’s not villainy really. Just a few more heists before they can fully dedicate themselves to proper heroism. Just a few more…

The Story Idea Vault — Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook

Something has gone badly wrong in the world. Perhaps it was a natural disaster, or global warming, or nuclear war. Whatever happened, the old human societies fell apart. Those that remain live in small tribes, struggling for survival in a hostile world.

But enough about that. I’m hungry. We all are.

In this new dark age, one person travels the globe, braving the dangers of the wilds to make contact with all the remnants of human civilization and ask them that age old question: “What’s for dinner?”

Their post-apocalyptic cookbook is a collection of anecdotes and recipes that reveal the lives people live and the meals they eat in the shadow of destruction. Mutant plants? Giant cockroaches? Cans of creamed corn from some Silicon Valley billionaire’s ruined fallout shelter?

Mmm, mmm. Let’s eat.

The Story Idea Vault — Garbage Miner

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Garbage Miner

In the future, all sorts of resources are scarce. Precious metals that were once easily strip mined from the surface have now been exhausted. Luckily, new processes and advances in biotech make possible the separation and disassembly of all sorts of materials.

The rise in prices of many commodities makes it cost-efficient to mine the past. Huge companies crop up to dig up and process old landfills. Historic buildings are stripped for parts and rebuilt with futuristic, cheap materials. In some places, the flora, fauna, and the soil itself are churned up for the valuable trace elements absorbed from previous centuries’ pollution.

What are the consequences of these shortages? How do these new “mines” and “factories” impact the communities around them. Are people desperate for the lifestyle these once-ubiquitous materials afford them? Or do they try to change society so we can all live comfortably (or uncomfortably) without?

The Story Idea Vault — Virtual Afterlife

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Virtual Afterlife

Earth is becoming uninhabitable, and humankind faces extinction. Luckily, there’s a new invention that allows us to upload the human consciousness into a computer. A system is built in a stable orbit, designed to survive as long as possible without intervention, fed by solar power so long as the sun still shines. Ten thousand people are uploaded into the machine.

This artificial physical space can be made to look like anything. Who are the architects, and how do they design it? What can people do in this virtual existence that they couldn’t do in the real world? What do the power structures and politics look like in this virtual afterlife?

Are the remnants of humanity happy to have survived the end, or are they haunted by the loss of their species? Is a virtual world freeing, or does it feel like a prison?