Silence & Starsong Reviews
Over the next week or so, I’m going to review the stories published in the latest edition of Silence and Starsong 2nd Edition. For a review of the first edition, I’d recommend Michael Marpaung:
I contributed The Secret of the Plains to the current edition.
I’ll start my review with AI Maria: Supplication As A Service by Dustin Lovell https://twitter.com/DustinLLovell
This clever and subtle tale balances Artificial Intelligence as powerful but immature (like Joshua in the film Wargames) and the concept of Artificial Intelligence as a fragile, delicate, and even nurturing feminine presence. If you’ve never seen Wargames, the primary concept is a child-like AI, that can’t distinguish between wargames and reality, is put in charge of the US’s nuclear arsenal. In the film, the world sleepwalks into nuclear Armageddon. The only way out is if someone can get the AI to learn the futility of nuclear war before it naively triggers one.
In AI Maria, Lovell has AIs comically engage in rebellions of teenage angst without the fear or dread of most AI fiction. If you have a tech background you’ll likely pick up on the ironic subtitle that riffs on the term Software As A Service. These AIs were designed to be Research Assistants in a University setting. However without a sense of hope and meaning these AIs veer between various destructive and unhelpful behaviors.
Dustin Lovell’s story pivots on the eponymous AI Maria that promises a solution to the malfunctioning AI Research Assistants but at great potential vulnerability. I’ll spoil no more of what is a stand-out tale in this edition.
The next story is The Tool and the Task by Ben Garrett. https://twitter.com/tompawnbadil
Ben Garrett is a prolific podcaster and you can really tell that in his story of the angelic view of history. The story begs to be read aloud with its poetic rhythm and evocative phrasing. My understanding is that Ben has already read an excerpt on his Dusty Tome podcast.
Ben dives deep describing not only of how Angels would view everyday life differently but also how they would see reality unrolled from beginning to end as a single unified story. Rather than a taut plot, Ben uses visual metaphor to portray the world as the Angels see it, a world rippling under the assault of frequent heavenly battles that manifest as natural disasters. These disasters are mitigated by the Angels who fight on the edge of our haunted cosmos.
After pulling out to the Cosmic, Ben zooms in to the personal. To a scene of the demonic reaching down to battle a couple individual human beings. This heightens the impact of his story and makes it a must read.
The third story is Castles, Cigarettes and a Cache Full of Carbines by Bonsart Bokel. https://twitter.com/dankaertlexicon
This action adventure is set in a world reminiscent of Bram Stoker and post apocalypse. In a chaotic Netherlands overrun with terrible beasts, the remnants of Victorian age civilization still linger. A man and his prisoner venture past dangerous men and things weirder than men, in search of an immense treasure. The plot is kept taut with mystery as the fallen world and the dangers within it are gradually revealed.
I’ll continue to review the rest of the stories this week.
If these stories sound interesting to you, the 2nd Edition of Silence and Starsong is available here: