Status Updates From More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

The Hunt (p56-95)
Started off strong but fizzled out in the end.

The Accident (p. 25-55)
Great descriptions of rock climbing

Pirx’s Tale (p1-25)
Laughed out loud at least six times

The concept of “passing” lurks in the background of one story here: the notion of a marginal or shunned type passing as a more mainstream, accepted type—gay passing as straight, Black passing as white, and so forth. Here, it’s machine intelligence passing as human—whether it can, whether it should have to.

“The Accident,” written decades ago, addresses a now-current issue: how can we tell whether a computational device possesses consciousness? One character, Pirx, believes he sees evidence for it; the others don’t think so, a stance that happens to protect “their vision of the world” (page 50). So far, I've been on the side of the doubters, but I could be wrong.

“In Pirx’s mind there was something inherently unfair, something fundamentally wrong, about a situation whereby man had created an intelligence both external to and dependent on his will” (page 25).

“Sci-fi? Sure, I like it, but only the trashy stuff,” says Pirx on the first page of the first story in this volume.