John Jr.’s Reviews > More Tales of Pirx the Pilot > Status Update

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.

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