It was my birthday month and in celebration my health insurance decided not to take my doctor away. Hooray, hooray. I kind of wish I knew any of the dirty details involved but I do not so I’ll just take the win. What else did I do this month? I got the Just Bento 2 cookbook and made a carrot salad from it that was really good. The recipe is not online but you can look at the cookbook on the Internet Archive. It’s one of the first recipes in there. I also tried making some chicken meatballs from the same cookbook but mine came out a little under-flavored. Better luck next time.
May in posts
You already know that the month started with abrupt opening lines, and that then that was followed by a statement of unclear purpose. But the Taylor Swift New York Times interview, the AI-generated metaphors, the vague wish that more things were in the public domain—what of those? Oh, you know about those too.
May in Japanimation
May in perfume
May in Weird Sisters
Once again I can’t really put research in here, so instead I will open up a question to the room.… I was reminded recently that Fritz Leiber has a story, “The Creature from Cleveland Depths” (1962), that is basically a satire about AI assistants. If you were putting together a list of sci-fi stories that were about AI before AI, what would you put on it?
Definitely: Other than the Leiber story, I’d put E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1928) and John Sladek’s “The Happy Breed” (1967) on the list.
Maybe: I thought about “Nobody’s Home” (1972) by Joanna Russ, but that story is more about a frictionless future of human superintelligence than a frictionless future of machine intelligence. Ted Cogswell’s “Limiting Factor” (1954) and R.A. Lafferty’s “Eurema’s Dam” (1972) are both about the relationship between machines and intelligence but I wonder if they’re too different in emphasis.
Next month: June, so soon?
Some June preorders
Devotions (Lucy Caldwell)
Light in the Canyon (Darren Cools)
The End of Everything (M. John Harrison)
Sublimation (Isabel J. Kim)
Meeting New People (Daniel Lavery)
The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions (Ruth Ozeki)
Lovers XXX (Allie Rowbottom)
June in Japanimation
“Magnetic Rose” from Memories, Satoshi Kon (June 13)
Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii (June 27)
These got shoved back a week because I have to get Memories from the library and I don’t know how long interlibrary loan will take. It will be cool to “meet” Satoshi Kon at last. I guess I have to figure out how I’m handling Paranoia Agent sooner rather than later, huh.… For people who read the Japanimation posts, a brief poll. I do not bind myself to the results.
June in perfume
This will be a little bit different… I had a sample of Isabelle Larignon’s “Milky Dragon” for the milk post, but then I thought to myself that I really had no idea what “milky oolong” smells like. Then it turned out getting “real” milky oolong is sort of hard and most of the tea you get has milk flavoring added and I ended up ordering tea from Taiwan in my quest for knowledge and… anyway that will be next month’s perfume post.
Bradbury has this poem at the start of the short story "Night Call, Collect" (1969):
"Suppose and then suppose and then suppose
That wires on the far-slung telephone black poles
Sopped up the billion-flooded words they heard
Each night all night and saved the sense
And meaning of it all.
Then, jigsaw in the night, Put all together and
In philosophic phase
Tried words like moron child.
Thus mindless beast
All treasuring of vowels and consonants
Saves up a miracle of bad advice
And lets it filter whisper, heartbeat out
One lisping murmur at a time.
So one night soon someone sits up
Hears sharp bell ring, lifts phone And hears a
Voice like Holy Ghost Gone far in nebulae
That Beast upon the wire,
Which with sibilance and savoring!
Down continental madnesses of time
Says Hell and O And then Hell-o.
To such Creation
Such dumb brute lost Electric Beast,
What is your wise reply?"
My essential AI story (novel -length) would have to be The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts!