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beccastareyesFirst off, Cat Valente has incredibly rich prose, full of imagery. Silently and Very Fast is basically a story told in stories to describe the relationship between machine intelligences and human intelligences.
(The first part is here)
Elefsis is a machine intelligence that used to be a house, modeled by his creator as a lares familiar, a 'household god' like the Romans worshiped. He's been in the same family since his creation and interacts with them via dreams. Neva is the human he's interacting with now, inheriting her role from her brother, Ravan. Elefsis doesn't know/remember what happened to Ravan, and so the mystery of him trying to find out and find out more about the world outside the dreams he, Neva and her ancestors create/have created are interwoven with his history and a series of fairy-tale-like fables.
It's unusual in that I'm grouping the Hugo stories into webs right now by what I see in them and not by obvious categories. Mira Grant's two pieces and Leviathan Wakes sit in the space of 'truth versus the public good', while this, Among Others and Embassytown are about language and metaphor and communication. Elefsis learns how to be 'a person' by dreams and stories, and the story does talk to the two stories we tell about 'robots': humanity's children that treat us like Zeus treated Kronos or the 'Good Robot' who wants to be Pinocchio. The Matrix and Battlestar Galactica (or The Terminator… actually this one is easy to think of narratives) or Data from Star Trek or Asimov's 'The Bicentennial Man'. There isn't room in humanity's cultural narrative for robots and computers to be themselves.
(Come to think of it, we tell the first story about genetic engineering too. Or every superhero story where the changes are biological.)
(The first part is here)
Elefsis is a machine intelligence that used to be a house, modeled by his creator as a lares familiar, a 'household god' like the Romans worshiped. He's been in the same family since his creation and interacts with them via dreams. Neva is the human he's interacting with now, inheriting her role from her brother, Ravan. Elefsis doesn't know/remember what happened to Ravan, and so the mystery of him trying to find out and find out more about the world outside the dreams he, Neva and her ancestors create/have created are interwoven with his history and a series of fairy-tale-like fables.
It's unusual in that I'm grouping the Hugo stories into webs right now by what I see in them and not by obvious categories. Mira Grant's two pieces and Leviathan Wakes sit in the space of 'truth versus the public good', while this, Among Others and Embassytown are about language and metaphor and communication. Elefsis learns how to be 'a person' by dreams and stories, and the story does talk to the two stories we tell about 'robots': humanity's children that treat us like Zeus treated Kronos or the 'Good Robot' who wants to be Pinocchio. The Matrix and Battlestar Galactica (or The Terminator… actually this one is easy to think of narratives) or Data from Star Trek or Asimov's 'The Bicentennial Man'. There isn't room in humanity's cultural narrative for robots and computers to be themselves.
(Come to think of it, we tell the first story about genetic engineering too. Or every superhero story where the changes are biological.)
