Reading Wednesday

[liv]

I said when I was looking ahead to 2015 I might try a new way of talking about books here, so I'm going to have a go at reading Wednesday, which seems a really nice tradition anyway.

Recently read: Basically nothing in the past few weeks. The internet, really.

kaberett recommended a really marvellous fic, Why wouldn't she be my friend? I'm fantastic, which is a really nice take on the somewhat overdone theme of someone who falls in love with an AI. I really really enjoyed the story and I'm considering nominating it for a Hugo (I don't think a story has to be commercially published to be eligible, does it? I should check the rules.)

I love the world-building in it, but what I really connected to was the way that it explores relationships primarily mediated by text. I have important friendships and romantic relationships with people I rarely see in person, or in any case only start seeing in person once we've well established our relationship in words on screens. And WWSBMFIF isn't going for the obvious thing of, is this internet-based relationship "real" or not, but exploring the implications of those kinds of relationships. I suppose I do feel very much like a person made out of ideas, and the way I happen to be instantiated in my body is less important. And when I'm relating to other people, I try not to make assumptions about how they relate to their bodies or genders either, and it's just interesting to have a really sweet romantic story that operates within that paradigm.

At around the same time I read another story about a human falling in love with a robot, How to become a robot. It's a much darker story in many ways, and partly about the ways that gender and forcing people into relationship boxes can hurt, and it contains quite a lot of reference to self-harm and suicide. But it's also sweet in its way, and it's doing really interesting things with a happy-ever-after ending which isn't the conventional heteronormative dyadic thing. It's not just boy meets girl transmuted into agender person meets robot, the relationship structures are much more complicated and interesting than that.

Currently reading: Clive Barker: Imajica. rysmiel gave it to me for my birthday, and it's a fairly original urban fantasy with some interesting relationship structures. It's very emotionally intense, a bit id-fic really, but I'm definitely enjoying it. (Don't spoil me, please! I'll aim to discuss it here when I've finished it.)

I should probably admit I've officially given up on Milorad Pavić: Dictionary of the Khazars, which I was sort of trying on and off to read through most of the end of last year. It's very meta-fictional, very pomo, and the combination of the way it's non-linear and the way the individual story fragments are excessively surreal / magical realist meant that I didn't really get into it, even though it is very cool and clever.

I'm sort of dipping into Pat Califia: Macho sluts, which is a mostly-lesbian, BDSM erotica collection a friend lent me. But the way I read erotica is not quite the way I read novels, which is why this is an on the go in the background book, not a book that I'm reading from start to finish as I usually do.

Reading next: Not sure. I'm about a fifth of the way through the 700-page doorstop book that is Imajica, so even if I read it a lot faster than I've generally been reading in the past half year or so, it's going to take a while to finish it, and a lot will depend on my mood then. I have a number of books in my to-read pile that people have given me as presents, and a number of sequels that I'm excited about. And I'm sort of considering rereading some of my old favourites, partly cos of being at the stage of getting to know people where I want to recommend and lend books and I want to remind myself of exactly how they go so we can talk about them.

I'll want something that contrasts to Imajica, so probably SF or mainstream / litfic and something that's not too emotionally heavy. I have my eye on Natasha Solomons: Mr Rosenblum's list, a present from khalinche. A lot depends on where I am physically when I finish Imajica; if I'm in Keele probably I'll reread a loved favourite since this is mostly what I have available here, if I'm in Cambridge then one of the books I've acquired but not started, and if I'm travelling then something that happens to be in my e-reader, possibly Karl Schroeder's Sun of suns.

Comments

[cjwatson]

I've been a sucker for AI fiction ever since picking up some Asimov shorts from the local library as a teenager, so thanks for passing on these two - and the latter is indeed sweet in its own way. When I ran across the former via kaberett, for some reason it reminded me very distantly of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect; if you haven't encountered it before, it's a weird mixture of hard-take-off singularity fic, serious exploration of the ethics of AI and simulation, and some really disturbing exploration of what masochism turns into when you can't die. (Chapters 1 and 3 in particular deserve big flashing trigger warnings.)

I like stories that have a sort of liminal nature like this, with their chronological beginning in a familiar setting and then having the characters gradually discover the fantastic. The next thing along in my chain of associations that way would be Intervention by Julian May, which I discovered many years ago and has lasted through innumerable rereadings: in part, it's about the discovery of true psychic powers and scientists working to put them on a solid footing.

[liv]

Oh, yay, I'm glad I made this post if it means more chances to talk about books! I read really a lot of Asimov's golem-influenced robot stuff as a teenager too, and a little later one of my favourite SF stories ever, Orphanogenesis. I'm not as enthusiastic about Diaspora as a whole, but that opening chapter really set the bar for AI stuff that actually says something interesting about consciousness.

Thank you for describing The metamorphosis of prime intellect. I am figuring out whether I actually want to read it because it does sound like it might have more torture than I'm really comfortable with.

I really do need to get a p-book of Chris Moriarty's Spin state so I can lend it. It has a really interesting AI in it, you can see Moriarty has read all the golden age classics but she's going somewhere really interesting with it. It's certainly not an example of a book that starts out familiar, it opens with the semi-cyborg protag mining for material with almost magical quantum properties. But it's very cool.

[cjwatson]

Diaspora is one of my favourite books in general (it'd have to be beaten by A Fire Upon The Deep, although that's a pretty high bar!), but it's very true that Orphanogenesis is one of its most brilliant passages.

I've gone ahead and ordered my own copy of Spin State, because it sounds like my kind of thing and why not, thanks :-)

[shreena]

I love Mr Rosenblum's List! I really hope you enjoy it.

[khalinche]

I bought it on your recommendation! I also enjoyed it a lot, thank you for mentioning it.

[lovingboth]

I have read Imajica, but so long ago that I can't remember a thing beyond that. Ditto Great and Secret Show and various other Barkers.

Christopher Priest is my perennial recommendation.

[liv]

Thank you, more recs always appreciated.