A REDDIT USER POSTS, “My mom told me to unalive myself because I am gay.” The thread responds (and I paraphrase, slightly): “Your egg donor sucks and doesn’t deserve the term ‘mom.’” To unalive yourself is to allow the forces of oppression to remove you from life. Algospeak neologisms are coined to avoid AI censorship; sublimation produces a new sign. The death drive merges with the life instinct to create a new condition: unaliving. Not the opposite of “liveness,” as in the TV era’s distinction between the prerecorded and the happening-now we are way past that after two years of nonstop Zoom
Unworlding With Author N.K. Jemisin: A Reading And Discussion On Race, Utopia, And Speculative Fiction – Bwog bwog.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bwog.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
(Simon & Schuster/Saga 978-1-9821-4806-5, $27.00, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, March 2, 2021)
Science fiction thriller about artificial intelligence, sentience, and labor rights in a near future dominated by the gig economy.
There’s a great deal going on in
Machinehood, from Divya’s sophisticated critique of a post-privacy gig economy to her evident expertise in AI systems, ‘‘weak AI’’ digital assistants, nanotech, and prosthetic body modifications. Individually, none of the tech extrapolations are particularly new, and Divya on occasion lapses into clichéd dialogue (‘‘this is so much bigger than us’’), but the economy she describes is sharply imagined and convincingly detailed, and she artfully balances the cybertech thriller chapters involving Welga and the more character-oriented narrative of Nithya and her family, eventually weaving them together in a conclusion both suspenseful and ingenious, if a bit idealistic given the problems and complexities s