The Spark + Unbewusstes - Finish The Story Contest - Week #66 @bananafish
Cover art by Peter Saga for 12-Feb-2014 issue of Perihelion Science Fiction
The Spark
by @oivas for Finish The Story Contest - Week #66!
“Don’t state the obvious,” the human Colonel warned the iron sentinel.
“But I don’t remember,” a deep metallic din protested. Though called iron sentinels, these were state-of-the-art humanoids made of titanium-mercury alloy. They could withstand the blast of a thousand RDX and come out without a scratch.
“What was that?” Colonel Arlong had never witnessed a sentinel raise its voice, least of all, protest. A forty-ton humanoid towering fifteen feet over the Colonel in a dim-lit interrogation room was definitely not a foe that the Colonel expected to antagonise.
“Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to..”
“You didn’t mean to what?” Arlong ensured that he maintained an upper-hand. The sentinels were smart AI and could sense human emotions from miles. If they ever sensed fear, then only the Almighty would have to intervene to save the human bosses from the sentinel’s wrath. After all, these were created to exterminate humans; the enemies of the bosses.
The sentinel's blue lights, substituting for eyes, stayed focused on the colonel. They didn’t blink. They never did. “I was about to fire, but the screams of the younger human brought back some memories.”
“Memories? You have no memories. You have no consciousness. None of the sentinels have. All that you are made up of is a clock, gears and Radium-powered cells.”
“I don’t know. I was unable to open fire. It felt like my son,” the C-10Z01 looked away. That was another unusual expression. Machines don’t look away, and they don’t have children.
“Alright, this has gone too far. We need to investigate your synapse,” the Colonel got up, and so did the sentinel, “ and you will not resist the link.”
“What will happen?”
“That’s none of your look-out C-10Z01,” the Colonel was curt. “Take him out.”
Two more sentinels walked in and grabbed C-10Z01. The machines walked out with loud dins and thuds following their moves.
The colonel lit his cigar, and even before he exhaled, words poured out, “what did we just witness?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Jennifer, the resident sentinel architect, responded.
=======
Unbewusstes - @carokean's part
Cover art by H. Fowler for 12-Aug-2015 issue of Perihelion Science Fiction
Jennifer inhaled a sweet whiff of cigar smoke
and blinked, hard, to thwart a lurid vision that tried to intrude on the landscape of her mind. Colonel Arlong channeled that Man with No Name in 20th C westerns. She tried not to picture his lean, hard, sun-baked body in a serape, but the smoke of his phallic cigar made the cold, clinical world of AI-controlled sex devices and teledildonics seem, well, clinical, and cold.
Like this iron sentinel was supposed to be.
She had to blink again to focus solely on the 15-foot iron man, prostrate and straight-jacketed on a table, metal head wired to test equipment.
“You are an iron sentinel,” Arlong said. The end of his cigar rose and fell from his clenched teeth. It was so organic. And so irreverent of him to trespass with his smoke into a lab full of electronic delicacies. Er, equipment. His eyes, crinkled at the corners, drilled into the cold LED lights of the humanoid's. “Remind me what a sentinel is, C-10Z01.”
“I prefer to be called Karl.”
A deep inhale, fists clenched at the colonel’s side, was followed by an awesome dragon-blast of smoke.
“A sentinel is a guard,” the metal being fired, “a lookout, keeping watch. If one is watching a pot, waiting for it to boil, one is said to be 'standing sentinel' over it.” A metallic rasping, like a man clearing his throat, came from AI's speaker. “The pot, of course, will never boil until you turn your back on it.”
The cigar went limp and dangled from Arlong’s slack jaw. His gaze shifted to Jennifer. “Did you hear sarcasm?” He faced the troublemaker who asked to be addressed as Karl. “Iron sentinels perform many functions, C-10Z01. Thinking for yourself is a gross malfunction! As an AI, you can inspect your own synapses and identify the source of this...this...leak. This freak display of humanity leaking into your circuitry. Who is doing this to you?”
Jennifer frowned at the AI's answer, Ko-leck-teefus Oon ba Voostis.
“Kollektives Unbewusstes.” Arlong activated a voice-to-text that sent textbook date to her head chip. “Collective unconscious. The deepest segment of the mind is genetically inherited, not formed by the experience of the individual, and contains ancestral memories from across the ages. We are not aware of it.”
Jennifer faced the iron being. “Who is Karl?”
Its blue lights blinked. A metallic sigh caused more fist-clenching from the colonel.
“I was drafted into Hitler’s SS and forced to kill or be killed. You know what I witnessed.” Images of the Holocaust were accessible in all mental technopedias, and Karl filled theirs with bloody horrors. “I will not be a tool for murder again.”
“You are not Karl!” Arlong roared. “You’re a malfunctioning tool with Radium-powered cells!”
“You’re a malfunctioning bag of skin, unaware of your own epigenetic flukes.”
“And our 500 words are up,” Jennifer said. She caught Arlong’s cigar before it dropped to the floor. “Mind if I…?”
For a long time now she’d been wanting to feel that rolled tobacco leaf between her own lips. She drew in a mouthful of smoke and slowly let it out, along with the name she couldn’t blink out of her mind at night.
Arlong.
NOTE:
For a few good years, I was the book reviewer for Perihelion Science Fiction. Sam Bellotto Jr. suffered some medical emergencies and a computer crash that wiped out all his software, and he has not gotten "Perihelion" back online on the twelfth of every month, but some of the artwork and some of the stories have been archived with permalinks.
In Sam's words (and I second them!),
Archives of Perihelion Covers
THE COVER PAGES of “Perihelion” are some of the finest works from today’s best graphic artists. We keep them here so they can always be available to view and appreciate. Images are grouped by year. Below each image is its month of issue, and the name of the artist who created it. Click on any individual cover thumbnail from the gallery below to see the full-size work.
@carolkean
novelist, reviewer, editor, book critic
fan of indie authors & underdogs
#Freewritehouse addict
Follow My Reviews at Goodreads, NetGalley and AmazonVine
Let's Fry Chicken Little by Carol Kean for Perihelion, nominated for 2015 Pushcart Award
Find me at Twitter: @tea_in_carolina
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Thank you @bananfish, @F3NIX,
and all sponsors, hosts, and supporters of Finish The Story Contest - Week #66!
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Great stuff! Karl the paranoid android. And that Jennifer one, what a hussy!
Hussy! Hussy!
Have you read any of these books about the future of sex - with AIs, robots, tele-dildo-whatevers?? I only read a little ABOUT these books, and some short stories. Poor Jennifer! Her world is devoid of real men!
But I digress. :)
And I love it that called her a hussy. I ran out of words and didn't squeeze in what the "sentinel architect" might know about Karl and his "leak."
Off now to see the other entries.. I try not to read those before writing my own, but @owasco and @mgaft1 were too tempting
Thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you continue to do more writing (prompt delivery is a time consuming job).
Hi carolkean,
Visit curiesteem.com or join the Curie Discord community to learn more.
Thank you!!!!
Thank you so much - Thank You!!!
Congrats, @carolkean!
Well deserved, and I'm glad to see it got accepted ;)
Thank you Jayna, and Raj, thank you for being the most astute and insightful reader and greatest supporter - if you ever want a paid editing gig or to be a co-author, you are the one person I would trust above all others because you know what I meant to say even better than I do. (And because a lot of things.) Seriously...if your own fiction didn't take all your time and energy, I'd recruit you as co-author and finally finish my dusty old novels (one is now historical fiction; I wrote it in the 1990s before the internet) . Sorry. I always digress. Thank you everyone at @curie for all your time and attention and the #Jackpot! level of excitement at the upvotes. :)
I'm not voting until tomorrow because my votes are depleted and I want to give you a full one. This is so very clever that I will have to re-read to catch all the hidden gems. And it starts with the title Unbewusstes. I knew I was going to have fun after I read that.
Teledildonics? Jennifer inhaled a sweet whiff of cigar smoke?
You really lay a trail and hope we know how to follow it, and chuckle.
A writer with subtlety and wit--what a treat. At least this audience of one thinks so.
Kudos!!
OMG I love you!! You're the kind of reader every writer hopes for!
I need to create a book club. I never took my dream of becoming a publisher seriously because I have no business or math skills, but I'd be an accquisitions editor, and moderator of a Book Club - as it happens, @rhondak now has a vision (and the brains) to create a publishing house and a book club.
thank you so much @agmoore!!!!
How did that reply show up so far beneath @agmoore's comment?
My bad...
Nice to see you get disoriented on the platform. I'm always getting lost :)
You must have had great fun writing this...you certainly know how to amuse yourself :))
LOL!
Growing up on a last-century farm, before the internet, before so many things, yes, one had to learn how to entertain herself....
i read too many books, escaped into my own imagination, and overlooked too much in real life, but there is no use lamenting that now.
I was always "out of it."
Old habits die hard.
You, always lost...? You?? You seem so much more savvy than me!!
Thanks for the encouraging words. :)
To add to that a clever dose of humor too.. 500 words are up..😁 😁
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They get away with it in Wayne's World - I love how they trot out all the possible endings.
Especially the Scooby Doo ending! OMG, I loved that. (And yet my husband cannot stand that movie. I bought it anyway. For the Bohemian Rhapsody scene if nothing else. For Alice Cooper delivering a monologue about the history of Wisconsin and its native tribes. Sheer genius! Talk about a character acting out of character - that has to be the best example in all cinematic and literary history!
I have a friend who grew up in Arizona and Alice Cooper was one of her neighbors.
She said he was a super nice guy, very smart, and that one of the things she loved about his onstage persona was that it was so incredibly different than the man himself.
I read an interview with him, a couple of years back, and he was asked about the infamous incident where he threw a live chicken into the audience and the fans literally tore it limb from limb.
He said that he and the band were as horrified as those who later vilified them for it, but they were a bunch of city kids, and didn't know that domestic chickens can't fly.
They'd expected it to fly over the crowd and land somewhere safely. Oops.
Ohhhhh the chicken story!!!!
A worse outcome than the ol' "Let's go snipe hunting" ploy country people do to city people, and I have never found it even remotely amusing. Because (as a farm girl) I know that snipe exist, and that shining a light into a chicken's eyes is the way to make them "freeze" (deer in headlights) and get caught. The gag is based on too much logic and not enough "Anyone with half a brain would know not to fall for that."
#GottaLoveAliceCooper!
Lolol, my sister Carol, who never married or had kids, became a Cub Scout leader at age eighteen, because one of our neighbor's kids was in the troop.
I went along as an additional chaperone on a camping trip, in the San Gabriel Mountains, along with the scoutmaster, and I think one of the parents.
And yes, we did indeed take those kids snipe hunting, paper bags and all, and they had a blast . . . and thought it was hilarious the next morning at breakfast, when we let them in on the joke.
;-)
My favorite time was, once we had them at their posts, Carol and the Scoutmaster and I took turn making wild animal sounds. The kids were great fun.
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The last person I ever imagined would pull that snipe trick... YOU and your SISTER.... proof that people never cease to surprise us! :)
I aim to please. ;-)
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😆
Nimble wit...great fun
Hi,
I had to read a couple of times to make sense - I am still far away from such a complexity of language. Help me out as I am just trying to recreate what went in there in simple terms.
Colonel Arlong went into the lab where the metallic sentinel was hooked up to the measuring equipment. Jenifer was apparently running the tests on this metal sentinel. She gets sexually attracted to Colonel Arlong because he looks like a cowboy, and he is a man rather than sexual toys she's compelled to use for self-satisfaction. Ok so far?
Then, despite the fact, that the metal sentinel was partially dismantled, he or it was still able to maintain communication. Specifically, he requested to call him Karl and had human memories of WWII via the collective unconscious.
Then Karl exchanges mutual insults with Colonel Arlong and Jennifer takes the cigar bud and smokes it because it makes her feel like "real woman" I guess.
After that, I got completely confused. Jennifer is declaring that she's was the book reviewer for Perihelion Science Fiction. Who is Sam Bellotto Jr.? And what does it have to do with colonel Arlong and metallic sentinel?
Also, how can humanity leak into circuitry? Maybe you mean leak through circuitry?
Sorry I didn't see this for three days. I've been out of town, and speed-reading, and missing who knows how many other things. I'm not sure what you're asking. The stuff about Perihelion was me talking, no longer part of the contest entry. I'm sorry if I took the metal sentinel too far from the original author's intent. No surprise I don't win we-write contests!!
I didn't intend to suggest the AI was dismantled, but that he was wired up for tests, and "Karl" started speaking. I had just read about the future of AIs and human sexuality, so that was on my mind, and my famous last line is "But I digress," and this is why I've also never finished and published my novels. I need a co-author to keep me on track. :)
Thank you! I thought I was going crazy looking for a hidden meaning.
You know it is very interesting. My mother also wrote. She was very good at noticing acute details of human behavior and her narrative was very dense with interesting details and humor, but she had difficulties finishing her stories, or rather having a direction toward some final point.
I wonder if this is the key difference in a person's mind oh how they perceive reality: as one unending even string or events or events that have some relative difference: one being more important than another.
Let's say we take the story by @sarez. I wouldn't say this was one of his best stories. However, one can summarize in one sentence what it was about. It was about how trolling and disrespectful behavior negatively affects people and how one kind person can make a whole lot of difference in the alleviation of these detrimental effects.
Your story actually has a point, but this point is not intrinsic to a plot and characters but is going through the fourth wall, speaking directly to the reader.
Your point is that the prompt contains some hints that could be developed in two different directions: one being the humanity of machines and the other being adulterous adventures. Those observations or evaluations are written in a humorous style (a kind of mockery) and make it a pleasant and entertaining read.
What your novel is about?
Your comments are so much fun!
My idea was that the AI was becoming more human even as the humans were becoming mechanistic (the future of human realtionships being less intimate as machines become more available to serve the needs of humans). I had just read a book review on “Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships" by David Levy the same week as the writing contest, so that was on my mind. Not that Jennifer was on the prowl. The colonel came across (to me) as an Old School guy, with that cigar, and I imagined Jennifer found herself drawn to his organic (not metallic) man vs the stuff I read about Levy's forecasts. With only 500 words, I didn't delve deep.
My novels: first one, a woman pilot who races a custom-built at Reno against a stock P-51 Mustang piloted by a man who turns out to be... (major spoiler). Second, a teenage girl abducted by sex traffickers. Third, an English woman on her way to an arranged marriage in Germany is beaten and left for dead by her scheming maid, who assumes her employer's identity to go marry the German prince, but the real Lady Evelyn wasn't dead, and a dog finds her in time for an exiled doctor (accused of being a Bonapartist because he was a battlefield medic who'd treat Frenchmen as well as Prussians, enemy or ally, and it dawned on me that "Germany" as such didn't exist in Napoleon's day, and I made a mess of that novella). Fourth, unfinished, a girl fresh out of high school goes missing, and her sister goes looking for her, and of course she is not dead! But I couldn't finish it because I can't write three novels in a row in which the missing girl is not dead and will escape captivity. JUST KILL JENNY, I told myself during March Madness, but I couldn't, and just didn't finish the story.
In real life, my sister went missing in November 1975 and was found dead a few months later, and we were never allowed to see her body, and I liked to believe she was in Witness Protection and was alive somewhere. And somehow I'd find her again someday. Her killer(s) walk free to this day. For the past four years I sought to get the truth out, whether or not an arrest was made. It's been demoralizing and frustrating with police corruption and cover-ups and now you are REALLY sorry you asked you asked about my novels... :)
Yeah, Interesting. I see why you don't want to kill Jenny and you shouldn't. As apparently your motivation in writing these novels is to create a proxy story where your sister is alive and is found. Who cares that you have the same story in all of your novels as long as it is therapeutic for you. Dostoevsky has a murder almost in all his novels and it's fine. No one is protesting. )))
Incidentally, Prussia did exist in the time of Napoleon. In fact, the Prussian king Frederich the Great lived half a century earlier those wars.
I have a rather interesting story as my dad was a prisoner of war during WWII and spent 5 years in German camps and then 8 years in the Russian Gulag. The interesting part of this story is that my dad was purchased by a german woman at the market and he worked for her doing different typical male jobs, including the job of a sex slave. As a testimonial of that, I have a brother somewhere in Germany who is 13 years my senior. He apparently lives somewhere in Germany, but I have no clue who he is. So for all intents and purposes, he is as good (or as bad) as dead. )))
WOW you have quite a story there - phenomenal! The truth is stranger than fiction. This would make an epic movie (your dad's horror story) - I hope it has a happy ending (hence, you were born), but apparently you will never know. And that too is the kind of ending that made me stop reading The New Yorker short stories: all the fiction ended with the Not Knowing. Wow again, wow, thank you for sharing!
And yes, I wrote about Prussia in that ill-fated NaNoWriMo novel, but I kept wondering if it was ok to refer to the doctor as a German. I decided to play it safe and make him Bavarian. Germany as such didn't exist until the late 1800s. Now I'm wondering if Russian is your native language? You probably know @mariannewest's is German (and I might hazard a guess you could have grown up in Germany). I would love to hear what became of your father. By now, he'd be a hundred years old, wouldn't he? If he's alive...the way you wrote that final line is spectacular, and I hope you'll work this into fiction one day soon.
More! More! More! (I know, I know, it's deeply personal, hence that disclaimer that it's "only fiction.") :) I blogged about that a few months ago...
Bavarian is fine, and Prussin was fine also and since both principalities were essentially German I think you could have called the doctor German. )))
I somehow was never pressed him enough for details. But of what I know... He was an artillery soldier in Brest - a city by the Soviet border between Belarus and Poland. On June 22nd, 1941 German troops advance so deep into Russian territory that my dad deep in German-occupied territory. For three days he was hiding in the forest. But hunger made him come out and surrender. He was taken to the camp and was transferred to different camps. Ended up in Germany. Not sure exactly how all this went on but to his words there were many times when he could be killed, but somehow he was lucky (if spending 5 years in Nazi camp could be called lucky). In 1944 he and other prisoners were sent to Balcans to clear of mines from fields. Germans didn't get close as it was dangerous when mines blew up. My dad and many other prisoners ran away and my dad became a guerilla fighter in Greece. In May 1945 he returned to Russia. But the Soviet secret service considered all people who were captured as traders. He was sent to Gulag and spent there another 8 years until the death of Stalin. In 1953 he was released by amnesty. He wasn't much of a catch as he was forbidden to live in large cities. But at that time there was a big lack of men as many of them died. That's how he married my mother.
Personally, I like German people. I was in Berlin and liked it more than all other European cities. I find that the Russian and German mentality is very close. Maybe that's because since 17 century many Germans lived and worked in Russia. occupying important government positions, including the fact that the Russian emperors were mostly Germans. Tzar Nicolas II had only 1/128th of Russian blood. The fact that Germans had Hitler - well that is very sad, but ultimately this could have happened with every nation. And modern Germans have nothing to do with it. )
Another keeper of a reply - so many things to respond to!
I love it that you see good in Germans as well as Russians, and traits they share.
And your poor father! How could one man suffer so much bad luck - or as he saw it, not getting killed was good luck, even it meant more time in POW camp.
Oh, the lack of men! I first read of it here at Steemit: little girls growing up without fathers and grandfathers. The men died in the war. It took a generation or two for children to have fathers on the scene once more....
So much sadness!
And yet there is still goodness, and you seem to know how to find it.
Bobi the Bad could have worked for Hitler... Just his luck he was born to late....:-)
Bobi would NEVER work for Hitler.
Bobi would BE Hitler. :)
Watch out.. there could be a second coming.... except, Bobi is surrounded by the gentle collies and the nonviolence of his humans. Were he in an abusive home, the Gestapo would rise again!
Ha ha sweet Bobi Hiltler ..What do you say to that Bobi the Bad ... "Nein"
You nailed it. Nein! No! Cats are contrarians, after all....
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STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
Hello, @carolkean.The Talent Club is a space of mutual collaboration, with reserved admission right, which puts the club's account at the service of its members and which grants them more than a 1500% daily benefit.We are constantly looking for talented users to offer them the possibility to enjoy our advantages.Currently we are more than 100 members and we help more than 10 different projects, having a total amount of more than 70.000SP, with our own trail.If you want to know more about how we work and be able to access the club, come by our Discord server, without any commitment.Regards.wow, what a great cause!
despite my aversion to Discord chat rooms, I'll check it out.
I'm all about supporting other creators. I know too many authors who've given up for lack of readership, and they are the best writers of our time. Too sad
Yes, it's very sad. In the club we try to give a basic support at least, I will be glad to see you there :)
Thank you @carolkean for participating! Look what gem we would have missed otherwise.. 😊 😊
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Thank YOU for encouraging me - and for the kind feedback!
I love the way you characterize the sentinel Carol.
The subtle analogy with Frankenstein's monster and the literary construct of Karl being an amalgamation of various human experiences. Conceptually this is a really strong Sci-fi piece as it gives us that glimpse into an imagined future, and an imagined different form of consciousness.
Really gr8 FTS entry :)
I love you Raj!!!!
You are so insightful, you see more in my writing than I ever saw in it.
Love your idea of the amalgamation - not of body parts, the clumsy sewn-together pieces of Victor Frankenstein's sad, sorry "man," but a mind put together from pieces of other minds, and a "soul" resulting from it. Because didn't the Frankenstein have a soul? He had feelings. I was remembering scenes from The Iron Giant movie - one in particular - when I wrote this:
And of course that awful moment the giant soars up to stop the missile:
Is this not what we all are in some ways? an amalgamation of the personalities and values of the people who brought us up, most often parents but also close friends and partners to an extent.
There is a deeper reflection in most good writing I think. And it's 100% true that the reader can see stuff that maybe the author didn't intend. I often wonder if this is the result of how we peice the world together from what we're taught and inspired by, or if Jung had it right with his idea of a collective unconscious. Maybe a bit of both.
The idea of archetypes running through stories is a proven one, and it's interesting that I saw comparison with Frankenstein when the inspiration was 'the iron giant'. Perhaps there are echoes of ' frankenstein's monster' in that movie and this sort of passed through without you being aware of it.
The old adage about us just re-telling old stories in a new way.
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yes - yes - as always, Raj, you nailed it!
an amalgamation of the personalities and values of the people who brought us up, most often parents but also close friends and partners to an extent.
and Hemingway himself said he was unaware of all the pages and pages of themes other people read into The Old Man and the Sea. To him, it was a story about a man and the big fish that got away.
I need to read more of the criticism on that one. To me, the #1 most outstanding aspect of the story was the little boy who brought the old man dinner under the pretext Mom cooked too much again (not, you are unable to get your own food), and in the end, he protected the old man from ridicule by the townspeople. The boy had so much respect for the dignity of a proud old man who was too stubborn to admit he was aging and not what he once was. How does anyone not see the boy as the true hero of the story? But I never did look up any other critics commenting on that.
The Old Man and the Sea, one of my favorite books, and hands down my favorite by Hemingway.
One of my favorite things about the old man was his reverence for the sea, which I share, and his recognition of the majesty, not only of the giant marlin, but also of the mako shark bent upon its destruction.
And, in his own way, he loved them both.
Yes, the little boy always brought tears to my eyes, because he was clearly one of the few people who bothered to be kind to the old man. And clearly this extended to his mother, who was, after all, the one feeding the old man, whether or not by her son's request.
It is a truly beautiful story, with amazing details about life on the sea, such as the recounting of the old man downing a cup of cod liver oil on the way to his boat each morning, and reflecting on the young fishermen who refused to do so.
While they complained about the glare of the sun on the water, as their eyes began progressively failing, his eyes remained clear and unhazed, as he had been admonished to begin the habit in his youth, and continued it without fail.
No wimpy teaspoons for this old man.
That book has always hit me squarely in my heart.
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Wow, I don't know how I haven't read 'the old man and the sea'. I'm completely in love with the sea and all things beneath the waves. In fact that's how I started on steem, writing scuba scribe articles about my dive experiences and reverence for the marine environment.
I am just finishing a collection of Sci-Fi short stories by Robert Silverberg which I need to return to the library so I now have a title for the next book to get out to read.
Thanks for the recommendation of the old man and the sea 🙂👍
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You will love The Old Man and the Sea, Raj! I don't know if internet archives are sketchy, but if you can't find a copy on ebay or bookfinder.com or amazon, here's a pdf: https://archive.org/stream/oldmansea00hemi_1/oldmansea00hemi_1_djvu.txt
Robert Silverberg!!!!
I reviewed one of his stories for Perihelion Science Fiction. Oh how I love it - said to be the first story he dared to let out some of his Jewish legacy. Quoting myself here:
You're in luck! Galaxy's Edge reprinted the story in 2018, and it's still online:
http://www.galaxysedge.com/magazines/issue-34-september-2018/the-dybbuk-of-mazel-tov-iv/
It opens like this:
But maybe you've already read this one.
@crescendoofpeace, of course you would notice the boy's kindness and the mother's too (who cooks the old man's dinner if not her), AND the cod liver oil!!! Oh yes. Modern science//nutrition backs him up now on that.
Ah, this is why I spend most of my waking hours reading. People in my face-to-face life hardly read much at all. And they rarely want to talk books or hear ME talk about stories I've read.
I love you all, book fiends, er, friends, of Steemit!
It occurs to me now that a short story I wrote had to be me subconsciously seeking to emulate the voice of that Silverberg story. Now, to remember the story...
That is amazing that you reviewed one of Silverberg short stories for perihelion Carol! I haven't read that particular story you mention, it sounds interesting. Here is a pic of the collection I'm just finishing.
My favourite out of this collection has to be either 'this is the road' or 'in the house of double minds' both great Sci-fi bit very different styles.
You're right about having friends on here who can talk about literature of different types with. I'd forgotten how much fun it can be 🙂
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It's an amazing book, and a fast read.
It's also the best of Hemingway, in my opinion; his mastery at saying so much by inference, rather than spelling everything out, and of writing with the assumption that his readers were intelligent enough to discern his meaning.
Meanwhile, clearly, I need to seek out some of Robert Silverberg's work!
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It's great swapping recommendations like this over tinterweb 🤣
I have read some Hemingway, but it was over ten years ago when I was in university. I'll look forward to a change of pace from all this Sci-Fi I've been reading 👍
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P.S. from the Slate.com article:
Interesting Article.
I read 'the iron man' by Ted Hughes as a kid, although I barely remember it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Man_(novel
I think 'the iron giant' may be an American interpretation of the same story!? Not sure, maybe partly inspired by Hughes' children's story that explored themes around war and conflict.
Iron Man,
Not to mention all these movies and books about androids and how to define "human" and "soul." I need to read the Ted Hughes novel! It sounds like the source of Iron Giant. Then again, Neil Gaiman had a book with a boy wizard and his owl that J.K. Rowling insists she never saw. I've had story ideas I failed to write or publish and later someone else had the same thing. The radio was invented by at least three men unbeknownst to each other, but only one of them is now known as the father of radio.
I'll bet you've read The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde (1888). Hey, Iron Giant, similar theme...
Ohhh wow, I finally read farther into the wiki article. What a great story!
But from there, all resemblance to the movie ends.
@crescendoofpeace, this is the kind of story you'd know all about. :)
“You’re a malfunctioning bag of skin, unaware of your own epigenetic flukes.” No one can argue with that!
They can send each other thoughts via data chips embedded in their brains! I wonder if they send each other porno as foreplay.
I wonder too if sarcasm always makes Arlong go slack
Techodildonics, and this happens in a techo sex den hahaha.
I hate to think what other duties this humanoid performed.
Is that dirty mind yours or mine?
LOL!
You're so much fun to read and to be ready by. :)
Sarcasm from a robot not programmed for it is what slackened Arlong's jaw, but, yeah...
As I envision it, Arlong is totally unaware that the architect is not the typical modern woman but one who finds his Old School cigars and masculinity, uh, not at all toxic. (I really could have used a thousand words with this one.) :) Coincidentally, I had happened across a book review in The Guardian this morning, and it made me think of @rhondak's story about Aidan the AI, but it must have lingered like cigar smoke in my subconscious, hence, Jennifer's response to him...
“Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships
by David Levy” https://gu.com/p/xyvym/stw
So it's not socially acceptable to have flesh to flesh sex? She's an anachronism, and knows no shame about it. I like Jennifer
I kinda thought of it that way! Maybe the novel "Brave New World" was lurking in my subconscious (birth from a human after 9 months in a real womb was considered sordid). A shameless anachronism: oooh, I like that!
I've seen a new chiropractor twice now. Today she mentioned her Christian upbringing and what one quotable person said of being indoctrinated Christian. We grow up believing dichotomies: "God loves me. God will let me 'choose' to burn in hell. And ex is dirty, but I must save it for the man I'll marry." Not an exact quote, but I knew exactly what she meant when she said it. Some of us whippersnappers just don't know how to reconcile the teachings with the logic, or lack of consistency, our little brains discern.
Oops. That's "Sex is dirty," but I must save it as a gift for the person I'll marry.