Category: Artificial Intelligence

I’m currently working on a review of Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback for the journal Foundation. I’ve been looking for stories that relate to the two main elements of Rollback: 1) radio communication with a distant alien world, and 2) the disconnect between artificially created generation gaps (two old people, one made to look young, the other not).

I had forgotten about Ian R. MacLeod’s “New Light on the Drake Equation” (2001). As I wrote in my review of Gardner Dozois’ Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels (which includes MacLeod’s story) in SFRA Review:

“New Light on the Drake Equation” is the warmest piece of the nanotech stories. It features a scientist listening to the sky for signs of alien intelligence who lives in a world impacted by commercial nanotech used for altering the mind and body for such ends as bird-like flight and overcoming alcohol addiction. The story is about the transformation of humanity into the aliens sought by the scientist, and breaching the gulf between those most alien to us–lovers, friends, and other cultures.

Of course, I’ll also talk about Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. If you can think of other stories that engage either or both of the two themes above that I should look at, please post them in the comments.

Gene Wolfe employs a far future perspective in his 1973 short story, “Feather Tigers.” In the distant future humanity is dead and aliens that look like blue, baby rabbits visit Earth for biological and anthropological study.

It reads as an anti-Vietnam story for two reasons. The first comes from an exchange between a flying car with artificial intelligence, a human artifact, telling the alien, Quoquo, about the long war over the Mekong River. Quoquo doesn’t believe anything that the car attempts to explain to him.

The second reason comes from the Quoquo’s subject of study: The People of the Yellow Leaves. These are a nomadic people who live in Thailand and have a myth/tale about “feather tigers.” They believe that tigers are capable of projecting their spirits beyond the body in order to scout the land. One may observe this spiritual manifestation in the shifting patterns of light passing through the jungle foliage. For Quoquo, this myth has more substantiation than the facts that the technological artifact tries to tell him. This, and the fear that Quoquo exhibits later, destabilizes and undermines the traditionally privileged position of technology, which may represent the advanced technology of war making.

“Feather Tigers” is a romp-like story that reads more like a ghost tale than a SF story.