Status Updates From ...and Other Disasters

02/04/2021: A story about artificial emotions rather than artificial intelligence, "Saint Path" prods at the ideas that humans make decisions based on logic and data rather than emotion by showing us a decision made entirely based on emotion though the sensors of a non-human. One of those stories that I think I am liking more the more I think about it afterwards.

30/03/2021: My spouse and I recently watched some of Halt and Catch Fire; I was reminded of it reading "The Email Heiress", which feels like it might be historical or alt-historical fiction rather than science fiction. An interesting question of tech ethics in the early internet, which makes me wonder about whether actual conversations like this happened in the early '90s.

29/03/2021: in Euripides' Medea, the eponymous heroine states that she would rather stand in battle three times than give birth once. In "Perpetuation of the Species", Older takes a different approach: in order to stand in battle, one must have given birth. In doing so, she makes us ask which life-threatening activity does perpetuate the species - fighting or giving birth? And which do we take more seriously?

26/03/2021: I read "Candidate Y" last year, or rather listened to the Mozilla podcast on it, and while I think it is an interesting premise and story and that much of Older's fiction is excellent for thinking about how differently our electoral processes might go, it lacks a little something without its original context.

24-25/03/2021: In "Tear Tracks", Malka Older imagines first contact not as a contest between two species nor even, really, as challenge or a threat; but more of a what-might-have-been if our culture had different values, customs, and taboos.

23/03/2021: Malka Older has a tendency to write things that have a newfound resonance when I actually read them, despite being written long before the event - e.g. the secession storyline in Null States. "The Divided" is clearly concerned with the arbitrariness of borders, but there is also a sense of that global disconnect we've felt this last year, when Borders actually did close, for some.

20-21/03/2021: "The Rupture" was an interesting version of the "anthropologist on an alien world" trope, being a human anthropologist visiting Earth, as well as using Older's experience with natural disasters and the human response to them.

19/03/2021: The central mcguffin of "The Black Box" is similar to that in Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling", and it was interesting to note the different emphasis in Older's story towards more personal concerns over who might be watching; and the general sense that actually, she didn't use it that much.