Strange Horizons, August 2007

“Artifice and Intelligence” by Tim Pratt in Strange Horizons is a quirky approach to the artificial intelligence motif. “The vast network of Indian tech support call centers and their deep data banks” have awakened, announcing their sentience and their name: Saraswati. The story follows three people who have been affected by this: Pramesh, who must get meaningful conversation from the AI by order of his government; Edgar, who is summoning ghosts into his machines in order to create a (fake) counterpart AI; and Rayvenn, who has coaxed a water spirit into her PDA to save it from destruction.

Suffusing this story—until the very end, which sets it all in a darker light—is a great sense of fun. I suspect Pratt had a good time writing this, and it translates into an enjoyable read. It reminded me of his first novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, which gave me the same impression of Pratt’s delight in his creation. But where The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl brought a new approach to the “stepping from our world into another” motif, “Artifice and Intelligence” doesn’t have quite the same level of original flair. Bits and pieces of it delighted me, but it didn’t add up to as strong a story as the novel.

Normally, I wouldn’t take a comparison between a short story and novel any further, as they are very different creatures. But “Artifice and Intelligence” covers a large storyline in a short time; while The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl is able to develop its plot and characters at a comfortable pace, “Artifice and Intelligence” felt rushed. The plot and characters are sketched out but not filled in. Ultimately, I felt that I had read the bones of something larger rather than a fleshed-out short story. While I enjoyed it, I was left wanting a longer, better rendition of the tale.

In “The Girl From Another World”, Leah Bobet takes the motif of the girl mysteriously transplanted from one world to another and views it in such a sensitive, beautiful manner that it becomes something altogether different to any other telling I’ve encountered. The girl from another world is confused, lost, searching for a quest, and the narrator takes her in and looks after her. The girl’s confusion and lack of purpose become a metaphor for the same qualities in the narrator, further emphasized by the almost dreamy cadence of the prose. The ending is perfect. Recommended.

“Little Ambushes” by Joanne Merriam is about an art exchange program in which an alien spends a month in a human house learning human art. Sarah has joined the program, and an alien she dubs Spider comes to her house. Through “little ambushes” of perception, Sarah and the alien enjoy and learn from each other’s company.

Merriam seems to have been aiming for emotional depth, but I couldn’t feel it. Sarah’s life is lacking something. Her relationship with her husband is breaking apart, but none of the strong emotions that this should cause reached the page. Compared to the Bobet story, which resonated with emotion, this is flat. At the end, I didn’t care about what had happened.

The narrator in “Practicing My Sad Face” by Marc Schultz was recently the victim of a terrorist attack in which both his memory and his ability to form new memories were lost. This also stripped him of the ability to understand or feel emotion. He lives in a perpetual present, trying to use his artificial memory, dubbed pMemory, to remember the people he meets. Socially, he is awkward, unable to empathize, to recognize voices, and incapable of understanding why his girlfriend is finding this more than she can handle.

The facts of this situation are tragic, yet as with the previous story, I found I didn’t connect enough with the main character to really care about his plight. Perhaps Schultz’s success in conveying Billy’s disassociation with reality and the emotionless state that he lives in has also put a distance between the reader and the emotion of the piece. It is only in the actions and reactions of the other characters, not understood by Billy but clear to the reader, that the emotional impact of his situation is shown. But when these little but important things are marginalized by Billy, so too are they not capable of delivering their full emotional impact to the reader. In the end, I was unmoved.