Tag: #scifi

The Last Broadcast — Christopher Ruz

By 5t4n5

The Last Broadcast -- Christopher RuzAn AI is put in charge of looking after a space ship with thousands of people in hibernation pods.   The journey is to last thousands of years and the AI has no one to talk to …

… and so the AI starts to have a bit of a mental health crisis.

I really enjoy good AI stories and this is certainly a good one.   As machines become more intelligent one can imagine that they will begin to break down due to similar issues: what are we going to do with these machines when we don’t have them crunching data and they can do many years of thinking in a few seconds?

Food for thought.

My only complaint about this is that it is way to short for such a brilliant idea.   I would have loved this very premise to be played out in a novella at least.   But, sadly, us greedy and demanding readers can’t have everything we want.

Also available in Future Tides.

Christopher’s Page

#scifi #christopherruz

Self Aware — Matt Martinez

By 5t4n5

Self Aware -- Matt MartinezA.I. and that — and it was free so i thought i’d may as well give a new writer a try.

It was rather a disappointment.

At no point does it explain how this AI is a cyborg — or how a cyborg could be classed as an AI.   It makes clear that it was completely manufactured so where the term cyborg is relevant to this i have no idea.   One would think that a when one sets out to write about a cyborg one would spend at least a minute or two at Wikipedia and find out what the term meant.

This is also a short-story/novella kind of thing and one would also think that with the couple of minutes at Wikipedia the writer would get a friend who can read to go quickly through the book and point out the errors.   Missing words and jumbles are pretty inexcusable for a book this size.

And the story is quite unimaginative and wishy washy, with no effort being made to the actual realism of experimenting with a military cyborg or AI or whatever it is.   How did this get out of the laboratory, why wasn’t it isolated from the facility’s mainframe/network?

Nothing much here to make me want to read anything else by this writer.

Deleted

Matt’s Page

#scifi #mattmartinez #whataloadofcrap

All the Retros at the New Cotton Club — DeAnna Knippling

By 5t4n5

All the Retros at the New Cotton Club -- DeAnna KnipplingA free book that i received when i signed up to the Wonderland Press newsletter.   I think you get a different free book now so you’ll have to go to Amazon and buy it now.

This is my first book by DeAnna and i was delightfully impressed with it.   Although it’s just a short little novella, it does allow you to sit quietly for an hour or so and read the whole book, quite easily in one sitting, with a cup of coffee and slice of cake — or whatever your reading thing is.

If you’re into the AI/VR stuff with downloaded/uploaded human minds (a bit like what goes on in Altered Carbon) then you’ll most probably really enjoy this.

I do hope that DeAnna writes some more stuff in this sci-fi arena: the New Cotton Club seems like a wonderful playground for many more literary adventures.

Wonderful stuff for a freebee, but worth paying for as well.

DeAnna’s Page

#scifi #deannaknippling

Jeff Wayne’s The War of The Worlds — H. G. Wells

By 5t4n5

Jeff Wayne's The War of The Worlds -- H. G. WellsWooohooo….   finally, an audiobook gets to make an appearance on Kindleworm, whatever next?

If you go to Audible you get a 30 day free trial and you’re allowed to keep the audiobook you chose.   I chose this because i remember the original Jeff Wayne double album from years gone by; yeah, real vinyl played on a record player and all that — showing my age here.   Anyway, i got this because i thought it was like a super extended full story version of that.

It’s a bit of an annoyance as you can only listen to it using the “Audible App”, but you can still listen to your audio book after you cancel your free trial membership as long as you keep the app cluttering up your chosen device.

So onto the review:

As i said above, i got this because i really liked the original version from way back in the long ago and i genuinely thought that this was a super extended version of that, but it isn’t.

It’s a completely redone thing with different actors — sorry ladies, no David Essex on this one . . .

WTF!!!

And worse of all, there’s none of the original music.   No songs whatosever.   Just crappy remade, piecemeal versions of the original music playing in the background and foreground far too occasionally — and, worse of all, without any lyrics whatsoever.

Sadly, i’m very disappointed with the whole thing.   It’s basically a simple radio play of the book with some mood music thrown in.

It would have been superb if the original double album had been built up with the full story, but alas, it wasn’t to be.

So my first attempt at an audio book, after all these years of resistance, has ended in woe.

Final thoughts: if you enjoyed and loved the original version you’ll probably not like this at all — especially if you liked, loved, or had a schoolgirl/boy crush on, David Essex.

H. G. Wells’s Page

#scifi #hgwells

It Does Not Follow — Joseph R. Lallo

By 5t4n5

It Does Not Follow -- Joseph R. LalloA short story that is a conversation between a scientist and an AI — with an interesting twist in the tail.

For those who have read Joseph’s Big Sigma series, you’ll know how good he is writing AI’s into his books.

Originally only available to Joseph’s Patreon subscribers but now also in the collection Paradoxes and Dragons.

Joseph’s Page

#scifi #josephrlallo