Reviews and Comments

An interesting anthology of Chinese Science Fiction. Some writers are already known to me, others are new. Of the stories featured, the ones I liked are by Gu Shi, Hao Jingfang, Ma Boyong, Regina Kanyu Wang and Jiang Bo. Special mention to A Que's zombie story that plays with the usual zombie tropes, throws in a romance and offers hope for a future with and for zombies.

• "The Last Save" by Gu Shi: in a future where your existence can be saved and returned to whenever you like (like save files in a game), one man is determined not to return to his past saved lives. But his resolved is tested when his wife leaves him and he has to choose whether to continue living alone or return to a time when his wife is still there.

• "Tombs of the Universe" by Han Song: a story of a tradition, grave making, that has been going on for a long time during the exploration of the universe by humans. But it suddenly ends, and we are left with speculations and the words of one of the last grave makers.

• "Qiankun and Alex" by Hao Jingfang: an AI attempts to know a child, filling much of his behaviour under 'unknown'. But then it acts on a question it never considered before, and learns to become his friend.

• "Cat's Chance in Hell" by Nian Yu: a soldier infiltrates a fortress and now has to escape, for he has the desire to be reunited with his daughter. But he will then learn what it means to be a soldier in a future when man is no longer suppose to fight in wars.

• "The Return of Adam" by Wang Jinkang: an astronaut returns to Earth hundreds of years in the future to find humans in it mentally enhanced with a Second Intelligence. Now he must decide whether to remain 'natural' or become a New Human.

• "Rendezvous: 1937" by Zhao Haihong: a time traveler goes back to Nanjing to witness and record the massacre there, while another is sent back to stop her. But the actual sight of the violence affects both and changes their objectives.

• "The Heart of the Museum" by Tang Fei: an unusual alien who can see through all time becomes the protector of a boy who will build a fascinating museum.

• "The Great Migration" by Ma Boyong: the tradition of traditionally returning home continues, even if you are on Mars. And the fight to get tickets for the trip home reaches new heights as various attempts fail.

• "Meisje met de Parel" by Anna Wu: a different painting of a girl with a pearl leads an artist on a journey to meet an unusual woman several times in the course of her life.

• "Flower of the Other Shore" by A Que: an interesting zombie story with a difference, filled with the usual zombie tropes but going down a different path that starts with a zombie that discovers love.

• "The Absolution Experiment" by Bao Shu: a prisoner is offered freedom in return for taking part in an experiment in immortality.

• "The Tide of Moon City" by Regina Kanyu Wang: set in a place where two worlds orbit each other but are tidally locked, two researchers meet and fall in love, only to be separated by politics and jealousy.

• "Starship: Library" by Jiang Bo: a library and a librarian set out on a journey through the galaxy to find knowledge. Yet, it is always ready to welcome readers to the library.

An average issue with stories that appears to be linked by featuring characters with psychological issues facing various uncertain futures.

• "Cofiwch Aberystwyth" by Val Nolan: a group of video loggers visit the site of a nuclear incident on the Welsh coast in order to fulfil a need for a missing video log in the series. But as the story proceeded, the reason for that video log being missed starts to be revealed and turns the current visit into a more dangerous adventure.

• "Rocket Man" by Louis Evans: in an alternate future when manned missiles are the only way to guide them to their target, a man who is part of a team of pilots forever waiting for the order to launch dreams or experiences alternate futures.

• "Organ of Corti" by Matt Thompson: a secretive expedition into a strange structure created by ants turns into a nightmare journey when the possible purpose of it is slowly revealed when the expedition members struggle to survive the adventure.

• "Carriers" by James Sallis: in an anarchic future, a medic struggles to find medicine to keep his patients alive until the conflict grows too violent, and he now has to escape to continue living.

A better than average issue with a long, strange, tale of travel to another world that may yet be ours by Tim Lees, Eugenia Triantafyllou and ending with a tale of a timely intervention by Val Nolan that may yet make America great again in a different way.

• "Night-Town of Mars" by Tim Lees: a strange but interesting tale of a boy who visits his eccentric uncle in the countryside. But what starts out as a simple visit turns dramatic when a plot is revealed by the local town council to take over the uncle's land. And a way to stop it may involve a dramatic strange trip through a land that looks similar to but set in a very dramatically different kind of world.

• "Those We Serve" by Eugenia Triantafyllou: on a tourist island, robots with memories of their original humans inhabitants serve the tourists while the inhabitants stay sheltered underground. One robot has developed a relationship with a tourist who always visits (and has romantic thoughts from his original). But it may all come crashing down when the inhabitants decided to return to the surface and 'retire' the robots.

• "The Transport of Bodies" (a Humboldt Station story) by John Possidente: a reporter waiting for a relative bumps into a traveller with a tale of encountering a strange object far out in space. But the story barely scratches the surface of the puzzling object before it ends.

• "Make America Great Again" by Val Nolan: a journalist goes back to the scene of a demonstration that turned violent one year after it happened. But what he's interested in is something strange that occured during the demonstration: a man who saves a girl from been shot. But the man is apparently from the past. Amidst rumours of UFOs and visitors from the past, he interviews the people involved and writes a story about bravery, the fight against violence and the possibility that America can truly overcome its violent tendencies and become great again.

An interesting and fascinating look at the element used to hold a digital sample of an image: the pixel. Often misunderstood to mean the picture elements you see on your screen, a pixel is actually an element that is a digital representation (sample) of an analogue image. The book goes through how an analogue signal (sound, images, moving images) is transformed into a digital sample and then used to recreate an analogue output, followed by the history of films and animated films, the creation of computers and the creation of digital images and finally the dream of the author and the others, to create The Movie, a fully computer generated film that would finally appear in the form of Pixar's "Toy Story".

Here's a chapter by chapter look at the book

• Fourier’s Frequencies: The Music of the World: An introduction to Fourier waves is given, along with a history of its creator, Joseph Fourier, including his interactions with Napoleon and other French scientists at the time. The author uses Fourier waves to show how to determine the frequencies that make up sound waves. Then Fourier waves are show to use to describe complex images.

• Kotelnikov’s Samples: Something from Nothing: a history of Vladimir Kotelnikov is given, asserted by the author to have invented the Sampling Theorem, along with interactions with various Soviet people like Stalin. The author shows that when the Sampling Theorem is used with Fourier waves, it can convert analogue values into discrete value samples. Then by using an appropriate 'shaping wave' the digital samples can be used to accurately recreate the analogue values. The author also gives the distinction between a pixel (samples of analogue values) and a picture element (used to display a pixel on a display). He also shows how the misuse of Sampling Theory leads to artefacts in audio and images.

• Turing’s Computations: Eleventy-Eleven Skydillion: this chapter is on Alan Turing and his idea of computing using a device that follows simple rules. This simple device is Turing's Universal computer. Based on Turing's idea, von Neumann would find a way for the universal computer to be created (a computer architecture). The author describes how to program a computer and shows that a computer does it work via the manipulation of symbols, not numbers.

• Dawn of Digital Light: The Quickening: a history of the early British and American computer efforts is covered here. As it turns out, an early use of CRTs (cathode ray tubes) is as a form of computer memory. This would lead to the CRT being used as a way to display images based on data in memory (for example, displaying a graph based on values in memory, rather than showing the values directly). Early forms of computer animation and possibly visual computer games are also shown in this chapter.

• Movies and Animation: Sampling Time: here, the author shows how the Fourier transform and sampling theorem should work for movies: this is based on the speed of movement, details of film projection and on our persistence of vision and perception of motion. A History of film projectors is given, along with the beginnings of film animation. The difference between live and animated film is given and show to be time: live films are shown in real time, while animations can compress or stretch time in films. The art of making animated characters come to live via exaggerations is also shown. Coming back to the Sampling Theorem, the author shows how current films speeds were developed before sampling theorem known, and that current films depend more on the perception of motion by us than accurate sampling to represent movement. This is a reason why sampling artefacts (like wheels spinning backwards) exists in films.

• Shapes of Things to Come: this chapter shows the beginnings of computer graphics, which are representation of lines and surfaces of pictures in computers. The 'spline' line and triangle are shown as the basic elements used to create lines and surfaces that connect discrete points. The difference between CAD and picture based graphics is shown. Next, a history of the first 'epoch' in computer graphics is given, with ideas generated to render smooth lines and surfaces between shapes, to display computer models in 2D and 3D (in perspective) and the ability of computers to interactively modify the computer model in real time. These would set the stage for computer animation.

• Shades of Meaning: Moore's law makes an appearance, leading to an explosion of the ability of computers to display better computer graphics and to animate graphics. 3D shapes are now being rendered, as lots of triangles. Ideas in how to hide 3D surfaces, adding a light source and brightness, doing texture mapping and shading appear. Ironically, the first applications of computer graphics to aid in the production of 2D animation would run into problems. Unlike 3D, 2D computer graphics had no concept of objects, making animation of items that hiding and reappear (like an arm moving back and forth and being hidden by a body) difficult for a computer to handle. At this time, initial work on rendering short 3D animations would also be done.

• The Millennium and The Movie: this chapter would become more personal as it involves the author's personal experience. The ambitions to make The Movie by him and others would being here. Moore's Law was creating computers capable of more sophisticated and better ways of creating images and animating them. Besides generating scenery images, the desire to create animated characters that look alive take root: this is Character animation. Interestingly, the ability of computers to add blurring to images would lead to the ability of computers to represent realistic movement in computer animation. But the wait now is for good enough computation, as determined by Moore's Law. In the meantime, there was the creation of various animation and graphics departments that would lead to various groups like Pixar and others. Eventually, this would lead to the production of The Movie: "Toy Story".

• Finale: The Great Digital Convergence - this closing chapter summarizes the earlier chapters of the book. It also looks to the future of computer graphics in Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. Other aspects include the manipulation of feature of actors. A section also looks at the ability of AI to modify images in ways not known then.

A great Murderbot novel that shows Murderbot continues to mature as an organism with free will and learning to deal with his emotions with his 'clients' while discovering new things about them and what they are willing to do for him.

The novel starts with Murderbot doing what it does best: protecting its clients. But this turns out to be a prelude to the start of a situation where Murderbot gets kidnapped along with his clients and ends up with a situation involving a former bot friend and possible alien technology contamination at a forgotten colony world. Of course he has to get out of it, with his clients intact.

But more than just the 'pew-pew' stuff (which Murderbot is obviously good at), this is also a detective story as he has to figure out the reason why it and his clients were kidnapped, how the alien contamination occurred, how to save his bot friend (and clients) and how to overcome his opponents. But along the way, he will discover new things about himself, and also about what his clients really think about him and what they are really willing to do for him.

One of the better issues of F&SF I've read so far under editor Sheree Renée Thomas, with a good mix of stories that make the reader think or feel for the characters. Very noteworthy is "Nana" by Carl Walmsley, with a twist at the end that will make you reread the entire story in a new light. Other noteworthy stories are by Megan Beadle, Matthew Hughes, Adriana C. Grigore, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Ethan Smestad and Tobi Ogundiran.

• "Dancing Little Marionettes" by Megan Beadle: a charming fantasy story about marionettes who appear alive. One, a girl suffers pain from the 'death' of her sister during a dance performance. The other, a boy, sees her anguish and tries to help her over the pain. What they least expect is to fall in love with each other.

• "Void" by Rajeev Prasad: set on a military hospital station over a rebellious Mars, a doctor has only one option when faced with a patient that cannot survive on the hospital or be sent back to Earth: the void of space. But he faces a medical ethical problem when his next patients are a rebel general and his son, and he has orders to void them. To add to the difficulties, an alien surgeon happens to be on the station whose sense of medical ethics may be stronger than his.

• "The Mule" by Matthew Hughes: a reluctant former discriminator (investigator) is forced to act as the conduit of a god from a higher physical plane. The nameless god wants to get back its name, stolen from it in ages past, and it needs a non-magical person to act of its behalf to avoid magical detection. In the end, the job is done, but not to the satisfaction of all involved with the god.

• "These Brilliant Forms" by Phoenix Alexander: a scavenger spaceship with an unusual crew member finds a derelict ship with a deadly secret. To escape, the crew member must do an act that would depend on the connections he has made with the crew.

• "Done in the Mire" by Adriana C. Grigore: an unusual tale of a woman stuck at the bottom of a well for a long time in a cursed bog that holds treasure, protected by a killing guardian. The latest treasure hunters meet their fate in the bog, except for one resourceful person who has a solution to get her out of the well, while keeping the treasure hidden to the satisfaction of the guardian.

• "From This Side of the Rock" by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: an emotionally disturbing story of people being naturalized as citizens of a country. But to do so, they give up something they love. For an artist, it is his eyes. But what does a storyteller have to give up?

• "Lilith" by Ethan Smestad: on a Mars slowly being terraformed, two people watch over an ark of creatures waiting for the world to be ready for them. But some won't be able to enjoy the new world.

• "Maker of Chains" by Sarah A. Macklin: In a world of magic, a jewellery shop owner is robbed of his magical jewellery. But only he can get it back from the robbing dragon, for he understands the power and temptation of magic made possible by the jewellery.

• "Where God Grows Wild" by Frank Oreto: in a land where desire comes from a pollen, one woman has to rescue his brother from a field is it before the desires drive him to his death.

• "Woven" by Amanda Dier: a boy helps an injured beast, who then proceeds to weave together a circle made of plants. But it needs one final ingredient, which only the boy provides unexpectedly after his grandmother finds him protecting it.

• "The Epic of Qu Shittu" by Tobi Ogundiran: a bard sneaks on board a boat of the killer Qu Shittu to learn his story. What he learns is the story of a man who loves his family, but then lets his desire for revenge get the better of him in the quest for knowledge.

• "Nana" by Carl Walmsley: a story about how a technological way to simulate a person who has recently died. In this case, the grandmother. It helps the mother to suppress her grief, but not for the father or their daughter. In the end, the pretence has to end, but not before a final twist in the story.

• "Spirit to Spirit, Dust to Dust" by Anna Zumbro: on a dusty farm lives a girl who can summon water from the ground. But not all are happy with her gift.

• "The Living Furniture" by Yefim Zozulya, translated by Alex Shvartsman: on the furniture of a man made from living people, and the lives they have to live.

From the start, the author states the facts: this small monster gets its body parts consumed by its mother monster at times, so if you're not comfortable with that, you may want to avoid this story or maybe try to skip the initial sections quickly.

But the small monster has agency and tries to avoid being consumed whenever it can. Then one day, it believes it has escaped, only to fall into the same trap again. The next time it happens, the monster knows what to expect and runs away when it can.

It is here that the story becomes interesting. Reaching a beach, it befriends a little hermit crab, who thinks of nothing more than creating art by decorating its shell and the hide of the small monster.

But the past has a way of reappearing, and the monsters that the small monster had to escape from eventually find it. But now, the small monster has something to fight for and will do all it can not to eaten ever again.

Some readers say the story is a metaphor for child abuse, and it could be read that way. Or it can be read a story of the way things are for the small monster until it discovers what it is willing to fight for and what it wants to do with its life.