This science fiction short story collection by the always-amazing qntm is a slim volume of tales, just over 100 pages, with stories compiled from his website, Twitter, and other online sources.
It's not a big book, but it does give us ten of qntm's best stories. These are science fiction tales full of hypothetical and theoretical science, so they're deeply weird, along with hard science so they're plausible enough to be terrifying.
The tales included are:
* Lena - Possibly the most remarkable story in the book. It tells a complete, compassionate, and haunting story about digital braintaping in the guise of a Wikipedia entry.
* If You Are Reading This - The most traditional story in the book, this tells the story of a science blogger who gets to meet up with an old online pal and then with an idol from his youth, an astronomer who reveals a shocking fact about Earth's communication with other worlds.
* The Frame-by-Frame - A scant few seconds of a conversation between the AI systems of a self-driving car as they decide matters of life and death.
* The Difference - A man finds himself in solitary confinement forced to interact online with gamers who think he's a computer program. Can he convince anyone to believe he's a real person?
* Gorge - A gray goo nightmare, visited upon planet after planet after planet.
* cripes does anybody remember Google People - A story created by qntm and a few followers on Twitter, as they reminisce about a short-lived, extremely experimental, and disturbing social network.
* Driver - A sequel to "Lena," about another downloaded digital personality.
* I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility - If we have the technology to simulate other universes, maybe other universes have the technology to simulate other universes, who have the technology to simulate other universes...
* A Powerful Culture - A higher level of reality decides to dump its waste products into a reality on the other side of our own, and being the inadvertent middleman in the cosmic waste dumping business doesn't do us any favors.
* Valuable Humans in Transit - Earth's final moments are here. Can the world's smartest and most powerful computer figure out a way to save at least some of humanity?
Again, it's a short book, but it's got enough high-quality stories to fill a collection much, much larger than this. Do you wanna read a book stuffed to the gills with fantastic science fiction? This is one you've got to go read.
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The paperback seemed exciting to own; very nice covert art, good size, good paper. However, not even 10 pages in, and I've had 3 pages already fall out with very little applied stress!NOT recommended.
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ThomasReviewed in France on May 23, 2023
Excellent livre (en anglais) de très courtes histoire de science-fiction.
