New Sci-Fi & Fantasy Collection: Writers of the Future, Vol. 41

This year’s Writers of the Future has an interesting focus on AI. I guess that’s not surprising, because life right now has a focus on AI. The stories here found creative takes and avoided or worshipping or hating AI. I think because these often often on an AI as a character, like in Kitty Cat Kill Sat, it keeps that curious, specfic feel.

I enjoyed Ascii, by Randyn C. J. Bartholomew, about a self-driving taxi reading a passenger’s creepy manifesto and decides whether to crash the car, killing itself and the writer, and save wider humanity. It has a weirdly recursive vibe, as the manifesto is dangerous in a red-pill podcast-bro way, but crashing a car to kill a guy is dangerous in a direct way, and it does kinda prove the point about dangerous AI… And his book leaves the option of readers being smart enough to see through it, but the AI is smarter, but… 

One line stood out to me:

For many AIs, prime numbers have a disagreeable feel about them, similar to the way some Westerners view thirteen or some Easterners view four. It’s hard to explain why exactly, but primes are irregularities, isolated blights on the number line.

It’s such a great moment of strange AI logic and also Ascii’s cute non-threatening (when he’s not plotting murder) personality.

Kill Switch, by Robert F. Lowell, is also about a murderous robot and about identity at the same time. This feels like a pulpy scifi action story, full of blasters and baddies, until  I realized it’s really raising questions about responsibility. and mistakes.

Both of these worked really well by setting up a world and a main character quickly, and then using that future world to ask questions about our current technology and our relationship to technology.  Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of retro scifi, which includes short stories written for magazines, and I’m always so impressed when short stories can show a new world and a different society quickly. It’s amazing how some authors can let us know we’re in a strange new setting without an infodump or confusion. Ascii, Kill Switch, and a few others in this  year’s Writers of the Future really nailed this.

Maybe it’s that last year’s collection was particularly fun, but I wasn’t as impressed with WotF41 as some previous years. There were two very different time-travel stories that both flopped for me, and a third that was perfectly ok,  which was an odd feeling because I usually love timey-wimey adventures. I do not, as it turns out, enjoy timey-wimey meanderings. 

I found a story called The Boy From Elsewhen disappointing, too. In the future where everyone is plugged in, one special boy isn’t, yadda yadda yadda. The unplugged child knows all the special and important things from books, not just the dumb pointless things that the plugged-in kids know, etc. etc. I’ve read this in loads of other stories, like Feed, and I’ve enjoyed it when it’s done well, but I don’t need to read the same story again.

Overall, WotF 41 is another year’s collection from talented new science fiction and fantasy authors. There are also some more craft essays from prolific scifi authors, with notes for aspiring writers.