Oh hey, you can now read my second Reference Librarian column in the July/August issue of Analog. I had such fun picking out half a dozen books, reading them, and contemplating what they have to say about humans as a species filled with curiosity, one that is drawn to explore the unknown. This batch of books takes us to West Africa, the Arctic, the Middle East, and very distant planets.
One of these novels, Sue Burke’s Dual Memory, features an AI character who wants to create art. No, I don’t mean a contemporary software program that cobbles together some incoherent nonsense using the works of real writers in a massive database. Sue Burke, always an insightful writer, envisions a genuinely autonomous cybernetic creature acting to fulfill its own artistic impulses under extraordinarily trying conditions. I am not willing to accept the existence of a genuine machine-based intelligent being, as opposed to something that skillfully mimics intelligence, until I see evidence of it using its imagination in a creative endeavor.
But I digress. Here are the books I discuss:
- Dual Memory by Sue Burke
- The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
- Meru by S.B. Divya
- The Dabare Snake Launcher by Joelle Presby
- Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne by CDR Steven R. Southard and Rev. Matthew T. Hardesty
- Neom by Lavie Tidhar