(SF Humor) The squids from space haven’t been very popular for a while, but washed-up director Tony Casagrande has a can’t-miss plan for a detective thriller with a human and a squid. (5,278 words; Time: 17m)
Rating: ★★★★☆ Funny, Tense, Heartwarming
Showing posts with label Oliver Buckram. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oliver Buckram. Show all posts
Friday, September 8, 2017
Sunday, June 26, 2016
An Open Letter to the Person Who Took My Smoothie from the Break Room Fridge, by Oliver Buckram
(Cartoon Humor) Someone in the Alliance of Doom has stolen Dr. Nemesis's smoothie, and he e-mails his fellow super-villains to complain. (866 words)
Rating: 4,
Recommended
Sunday, September 13, 2015
This Quintessence of Dust, by Oliver Buckram
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2015; 1,605 words
Rating: 3, Good, ordinary, story
Rating: 3, Good, ordinary, story
Having lost her human partner, a robot investigates some deaths.
Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)
Reminiscent of "There Will Come Soft Rains," by Ray Bradbury.
This is a "comic book AI" story, where the robots are essentially human beings in drag who occasionally drop phrases like "algorithm," "subroutine," or "neural net." However, if you're going to do it, you might as well do it big: the narrator feels jealousy, melancholy, foolish, etc. and ends up feeling "good to be needed." To that extent, it works fine as a story. It's somewhat ironic that the robots are having all that empathy stuff removed, now that there are no people to appreciate it. The detail that the other robots can appreciate each other isn't taken up.
Unfortunately, making the robots so human destroys the poignancy that Bradbury's story had.
This is a "comic book AI" story, where the robots are essentially human beings in drag who occasionally drop phrases like "algorithm," "subroutine," or "neural net." However, if you're going to do it, you might as well do it big: the narrator feels jealousy, melancholy, foolish, etc. and ends up feeling "good to be needed." To that extent, it works fine as a story. It's somewhat ironic that the robots are having all that empathy stuff removed, now that there are no people to appreciate it. The detail that the other robots can appreciate each other isn't taken up.
Unfortunately, making the robots so human destroys the poignancy that Bradbury's story had.
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