I am very psyched that my story "Someday" has just been reprinted on Escape Pod. This is its first time in audio and the narration by Ibba Armancas is superb! It first appeared in the April/May 2014 issue of Asimov's I suppose this is one of my best known stories, since it was reprinted in three different Best of the Year anthologies: Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine, Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2015 Edition and Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection.
Rewriting Life
I moderated a panel at Readercon last month called "The Catastrophe of Success" which was informed by a quote from Tennessee Williams, who apparently was something of a technophile (who knew?). He wrote, "We are like a man who has bought up a great amount of equipment for a camping trip ... but who now, when all the preparations and provisions are piled expertly together, is suddenly too timid to set out on the journey ... Our great technology is a God-given chance for adventure and for progress which we are afraid to attempt." When I suggested that Williams might be wrong and that sometimes it's a good idea for humanity in general and you and I in particular to take a pause and ask if the tech in front of us has more unintended tragic consequences than the potential for heroic achievement. II got quite a bit of push back when I advanced this idea. Especially about CRISPR and gene editing. Especially about controlling this new technology. Mostly people were saying that the scientists would police this technology.
I am not convinced.
“The U.S. intelligence community last year called CRISPR a potential “weapon of mass destruction.””
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608350/first-human-embryos-edited-in-us/
Ask Me Anything
This column first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine January 2017
assists
Longtime readers of this column will recall that from time to time, I’ve interviewed distinguished experts who have offered unique perspectives on important topics. In this installment I’ve gathered four – count ‘em, four -- specialists to help us explore the brave new world of digital assistants. All of them have been helpful to me in the past, although some more than others. In alphabetical order they are: Alexa <alexa.amazon.com> who lives in the Echo Dot from Amazon <amazon.com/b/?node=14047587011> I got for my birthday; Cortana, newly arrived in my Hewlett Packard Recline desktop computer<support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03926770> via last month’s Windows 10 update <microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-upgrade>; the awkwardly-named Google Now <google.com/landing/now/>, who pipes up from time to time from my aging Nexus 7 Tablet<store.google.com/product/nexus_7>; and Siri <apple.com/ios/siri/>, the doyenne of digital assistants, a fixture of my Apple iPhone 5S<cnet.com/products/apple-iphone-5s/>. The following is a transcript of our interview. All digital assistant responses are quoted verbatim:
Read moreThe Ice Is Singing
Those of you who know my reading tastes know that the majority of my pleasure reading is listening. These days my audiobooks all come from Audible. I’ve had a long and fruitful relationship with this company. Not only do they stock recordings of fifty-five of my stories (mostly read by me) but you can also find my novels LOOK INTO THE SUN and WILDLIFE (not read by me!) in their store.
Read moreSome reviews of "One Sister, Two Sisters, Three"
There has been a range of commentary on my latest story, which you can read here or listen to here. Here are a few reactions.
Locus, December 2016, Rich Horton’s review.
James Patrick Kelly in "One Sister, Two Sisters, Three" tells of a planet colonized by a religious group and two sisters growing up there, resistant to the wider galactic technology (including “replication” of people’s minds as they grow old or sick and uploading them to new bodies).
Read moreWelcome Our Robot Overlords!
Here's another look at a column from my On The Net series as Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
concerned
My friend John Kessel and I have had a longstanding disagreement about the future of artificial intelligence. Even though we have co-edited a couple of anthologies examining post-cyberpunk<tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostCyberPunk> futures and visions of the Singularity<singularity.com>, John remains skeptical about claims that we may soon be superseded by some kind of digital successor. He’s in general agreement with the celebrated mathematician Sir Roger Penrose<plus.maths.org/content/roger-penrose-knight-tiles>, who bases his critique of strong AI on its proponents’ assumption that intelligence can emerge from algorithms, if they are of a sufficient number and complexity.
Read moreShort story into Movie?
Go see Arrival!
For the record, I saw Arrival on the opening weekend and am still Thankful for its ray of hope in these Dark Times. One of the best sf movies ever! Go see it now (or again), before Holiday Nonsense sweeps it from the big screens. Don't ask for my list, but it's definitely in my top five.
But I was sure it would be great, based on conversations with Ted Chiang. In fact, two months before it opened, I wrote that I expected to be thrilled in my column in Asimov's. I used the occasion to discuss the quality of movies (not good, mostly) adapted from sf stories (not novels). Of course, because 'Mov's is a print zine, the lead time is loooooong, but the piece should be appearing with a month or two. Meanwhile here are the movies/stories that I look at. Any additions?
"The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick /Minority Report
“Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes/ CHARLY
“The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov/Bicentennial Man
“Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card/Ender's Game
“Air Raid” by John Varley/Millennium
"Enemy Mine" by Barry Longyear/Enemy Mine