Slow Time Between the Stars (SF)

Slow Time Between the Stars (SF) - John Scalzi ***

This is a bit of an oddity - it's a review of a single SF short story, available separately on Kindle (free to those with Prime/Unlimited). As I noted when reviewing Connie Willis's Time is the Fire collection, science fiction is a natural for short stories and the concept here is both timely and interesting.

Getting to the stars is going to take a long time - far too long for an ordinary human voyage. Over the years, SF writers have come up with all sorts of ways around this, from generation starships to warp drive, but the most realistic option is we don't send people at all. In John Scalzi's story, a fully autonomous AI is sent out with the ability to create human life if and when it reaches a suitable planet. We get to see the AI's decision making over thousands of years, how it decides to approach its mission and how its viewpoint drifts away from its human creators.

Unfortunately, while a good idea is essential for a short story, so is engagement of the reader - and that really doesn't happen here. The story is all told in the first person by the AI - making it a story that's a single internal monologue, and not a very interesting one at that. This means we get a whole lot of tell and no show. According to my Kindle, the story is a 19 minute read but it felt a lot longer than that.

Sometimes to make an idea work you have to approach it tangentially. The story is described in the blurb as mind-bending, but I'm afraid I found it rather mind-numbing.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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