I really only have one complaint with it. This is the first thing I’ve five-starred in 2020. I really disliked Riley by the end, and was pretty much rooting for the AI, even as what they were doing was scaring the shit out of me.
The specifics of the story make up for that predictability, mostly.
What kind of AI story doesn’t end with the SPOILERS AI murdering its creators and taking control? And the more power that AI has, the worse things will be when it happens END SPOILERS. Maybe she just hasn’t read enough science fiction.īut really, it wasn’t very surprising. I couldn’t figure out how Riley was so unable to see how creepy her creation was, and how bad things were going to go. I read through it very fast, and was freaked out pretty much the whole time. Taken on its own, it’s a scary story about creating something you can’t control, and it’s very effective. Taken on its own, it’s a story of a woman who accidentally creates the first true artificial intelligence, and the accidental consequences of that creation. This was at once terrifying and kind of predictable. I should know by now not to trust Blake Crouch to write anything that I can handle emotionally. Also, I just wasn’t in the mood (am rarely in the mood) for the kind of story it was wanting to tell. But mostly I’m dinging this a star because it seemed very hand-wavy in terms of the actual science (hand-waving science is Roth’s favorite thing, if reading Allegiant was anything to go by no I’m not still bitter).
The ending was more hopeful than the beginning made it seem like, which is what saved it for me. This isn’t adventure sci-fi, it’s quiet and introspective. Samantha is a melancholy character, and it wasn’t super fun to be in her head. Taking place against a backdrop where an enormous asteroid is set to annihilate all life on Earth, and humans have known for twenty years and prepared an exit strategy, our main character is one of the few remaining humans left on Earth, who stayed behind to continue cataloging and collecting samples for humanity’s journey to their new home, and to preserve as much of Earth as they can. This first story in the Forward collection is pretty short. It seems she’s learned how to be subtle, which is good! This is miles above the last book I read from Roth in quality. These are what they gave him (along with Crouch’s own story). Blake Crouch commissioned a bunch of his writer friends to bring him stories about some aspect of near-future technology, and how that might affect life on earth. I’m putting all my reviews of this collection in one post.
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