Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is the discussion topic for our chosen August, 2013, SF/F Novella read and discussion:


Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente


"Silently and Very Fast" can be purchased as a stand-along eBook from Amazon or B&N, or as part of the anthology The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25.

Or, you can read it for free on-line at ClarkesWorld Magazine (part 1, part 2, part 3.)

Or, you can listen to it as an MP3 for free, also at ClarkesWorld Magazine (mp3 1, mp3 2, mp3 3.)

How do you feel about CMV's comment on the concept of Turing test in this story? How would you compare it with other sf stories about the relationship between human & ai?

I had been meaning to read this story for a few months before I actually got round to it. I had heard good things about it, many people felt it deservedly won its awards and there seemed plenty to it that was discussion worthy.

I have CFS and with this I fluctuate between being able to read, more or less as anyone would to being completely unable to follow a single sentence. When I read this first time I was not at my best so plan to reread it before saying too much here. Even if I was at my best I think this is a work that would reward if not demand a second reading in any case given the revelationary nature of the story

This was my second experience of Valente, having only read Fade to White which I didnt really connect with and I really liked the way she writes. Many people in the genre write with the intent to engage readers and tell a story but with little apparent aspirations beyond that. I felt with Valente she was consistently trying and succeeding in writing in a more literate way.

I enjoyed reading it as an experience but will really need to reread it to say more about it.

There is a recent anthology Recent AI's which may well place this best in the context of other ways in which AI's can be considered by short SF. Of the stories in it I have only read Mary Robinette Kowal's Kiss me Twice (its free from her website) which I thought was a hugely enjoyable, credible, original and more accessible consideration of the potential for AI's than the Valente. I would encourage people to check that out as it is a very interesting and entertaining story.

I can already see me reading more of Valente but it may be her more accessible work such as "The Girl...." series that I make my next access point.

The title of the story comes from the last line of a poem ("The Fall of Rome") by W.H. Auden. Final stanza:

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

(This doesn't appear on the text version on Clarkesworld's website, though it is cited in the audio podcast version.)

Ben wrote: " I think this is a work that would reward if not demand a second reading in any case given the revelationary nature of the story..."

I mentioned last week, as an aside in our Discussion of the story "The Flowers of Aulit Prison" from Nancy Kress's "Beaker's Dozen" anthology, that "Silently and Very Fast" was another example of a story told from an alien viewpoint, and especially in the opening chapters it was a struggle to figure out what the heck was happening. I don't think it was until the second installment that I began to grok the narrative, and the opening sections definitely made more sense on a second read.

I have been known to lose patience with the book if it doesn't start to crystallize into a coherent narrative framework after a bit, but luckily "Silently and Very Fast" (as well as "The Flowers of Aulit Prison") began to make at least some sense soon enough.

Xdyj wrote: "How do you feel about CMV's comment on the concept of Turing test in this story? How would you compare it with other sf stories about the relationship between human & ai?"

Short answer, the Turing test is human-centric.

In "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Alan Turing's paper that's quoted several times in "Silently and Very Fast", Mr. Turing considers a number of objections to his "imitation game" conjecture. He does, however, never asks why a thinking computer would want to imitate a human. Also implicit in this imitation game is that the digital computer has been fed a great deal of information about human beings and human society. Otherwise, it couldn't answer even the simplest question about human experience.

Imagine trying to use this on an alien, or an AI created by an alien.

Science fiction is dominated by AIs who interact with humans by assuming a semi-human personality, either assisting humans or deciding to conquer them. There are few stories like this (Vernor Vinge, e.g.) where super intelligences simply take no notice of humans at all, since they think so much faster and have incomprehensible motivations.

In "Silently and Very Fast", the AI interacts with the humans in a dream-state, which is an environment where it doesn't need extensive knowledge of the physical world humans inhabit, since dreams are infinitely flexible, unconstrained by reality. Even so, we don't get much hint of what the AI does when it isn't interacting with a human.

It also appears that there are both humans and AI superintelligences mutually ignoring each other. (It's amusing that we're told the humans failed the AI's "Turing Test".) Both find the Elefsis AI/human hybrid and intolerable anathema.

almost finished with part II. so figured out it's about ai. writing is excellent. i'll see how i feel about the story by the ending:)

This novella hit me by surprise. A positive one! And thank you for bringing it up as a group read.

From a narrative point of view, it feels like the dreamy, versatile, slow Little, Big which I love. Or like some Samuel Delany, e.g. The Einstein Intersection with it's sometimes psychedelic and experimental pictures. The very visual narrative feels like some expressionist's or surrealist's painting:

"Everything has a narrative, really, and if you can't understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you're not really alive at all."


I especially appreciate the mashup of mythology (in the prologue), modernized fairy tales (lots of Grimm's tales like Snow White or Red Riding Hood to be found here) and scifi.

I like books that let me think and don't just dive through action waves like The Black Prism. That touch my intellectual, philosophical (what is to be alive?) and emotional antennas.

Here it pushed all my buttons:
As a computer scientist, I love the concepts and hints to artificial intelligence, Turing Test, self-programming etc.

And it has exactly the right length. Maybe I have to refrain from 800 page novels and read more novellas.

Awesome 5 stars!

There are so many elements that I really liked about this story and a few that I didnt.

+
The quality of the writing was really engaging, interesting, unusual and literate. If you were wanting to show someone who dismissed genre writing as "bad" literature this would be a good story to prove them wrong but they would probably find the whole think pretty incomprehensible. It is a story that a familiarity with SF and science and ideas around AI will assist your enjoyment of the story.

It is written in a way where even when you dont know exactly what is going on or what is happening it manages to be curiously engaging and satisfying and the revelations are really cleverly built so that when you read one part it connects with something before, a light bulb comes on in my head and something I have read before starts making sense or becomes clearer. Dealing with revelation is tough to do well. I think Wolfe's Fifth Head of Cerberus is another example of this technique working well. With Wolfe though I did feel more connected to the characters which I preferred.

Aside from being engaging, interestingly written it actually has stuff to say about AI, humanity and so much more without falling into dull repetitions of what many people have said before.

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This didnt rock my world. I have found myself thinking about the story since, I have in fact reread it which is something I do not do all that often but... there are other stories I have read recently that I have been thinking more about.

Still a superb story, very glad it being selected got me to finally read it through (twice) and I would be very interested to know more about what other people think of this story. I have read quite a few of the comments on GR and it seems some couldnt be doing with it where as others really loved it.

Ben wrote: "It is a story that a familiarity with SF and science and ideas around AI will assist your enjoyment of the story...."

I mentioned earlier that after reading this story, I re-read Alan Turing's seminal paper in which he proposed his now-famous "Turing Test". I was amused that the title for parts 2 & 3 of this novella are also section-titles in Turing's essay.

I wonder, did anyone read anything into the name "Elefsis"?

In ancient Greece, this was the home of the Elefsinian Mysteries, aka Eleusinian Mysteries, a secret religious rite of passage ceremony related to praying to Demeter, the harvest Goddess, for a good crop, plus her daughter Persephone's abduction by Hades into the underworld. The latter story coincidentally also in three parts: descent, search, ascent.

I compared Persephone's with the story's opening recounting the myth of Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of harvest to also descended into the underworld and returned. Joseph Campbell describes both these myths as allegories of metamorphosis and rescue.

Presumably the "descent into the underworld" is when Elefsis & Ravan "uplinked", and Neva is the rescuer? Why the jump from Samaria to Greece, though?

Allegorical stuff is not my forte.

I was too lazy to analyze that first mythological part thoroughly.

For me, it was more like a background or introductory music: I enjoyed the taste and feeling but didn't digest it.

I may have missed something, but I thought that Elefsis never uplinked (i.e. connected to the internet).

Andreas wrote: "I may have missed something, but I thought that Elefsis never uplinked (i.e. connected to the internet)...."

As I recall, (view spoiler)[the Ravan/Elefsis apparently finally attempt in an uplink. The Earth-descended had divided into two groups that mutually hated each other: biological humans and highly evolved AIs, both of which rejected the bio-AI synthesis of Ravan/Elefsis, resulting in feedback that seemed to have burned-out the uplink interface. Apparently, this killed Ravan, which is why Neva won't answer Elefsis when she asked the question about Ravan, and why Elefsis feels a hole in her memories about how she abruptly transferred from Ravan to Neva. That's how I interpret section 17 ("The Uses of Enchantment") when Neva gives Elefsis a saphire-Ravan/Elefsis fragment memory. (hide spoiler)]

It is interesting to also read Vernor Vinge Singularity paper in the context of this story http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing...

for those who have not looked at it recently.

Thanks for pointing out the uplink interpretation and the historical read from 1993!