21st Century Science Fiction (SF) - David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Eds.) ****

I saw this 2013 collection of twenty-first century SF short stories recommended as a way of discovering authors that are new to the reader - and it worked really well for me. It's an impressively meaty collection running to 576 pages featuring 34 stories ranging in length from a Nature sub-1,000 words short short to a novella.

Inevitably there were a couple of stories I didn't enjoy - but in a collection of this size, two was an impressively small miss list. For me Finisterra by David Moles never engaged me, while A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel by Yoon Ha Lee simply didn't work as a story - but those aside, while there was a mix of quality and style, every other story had something going for it.

If I were to pick out one favourite it was Cory Doctorow's novella Chicken Little which closes the book - I thought Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was excellent, and the contribution here reminded me that here's a writer that I want to revisit very soon. Chicken Little takes what could almost be considered a science fiction cliché - brains in a jar - and makes something remarkable of it by combining it with runaway capitalism and some genuinely interesting characters.

That's just one example of many I could pick out. What's excellent is I now have a whole catalogue of names I've not touched before - I'd read books by just three of the selection on offer - to explore further. And even if you don't use it in this way as a sampler, it remains an impressively solid collection of science fiction stories (especially good value on Kindle).

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog