The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang, $25
Ted Chiang writes brilliant stories at an infrequent pace. His newest is a short novel following a model of software development and the emotional costs when the objects of object-oriented programming are infused with life.
Ana Alvarado is making a career change from zookeeper to software tester.
She finds the perfect job testing a new program for digital pets. These digients are intelligent and able to learn the basics of language. The program is an immediate success, but the public interest doesn’t last. The digients are demanding pets, and many are abandoned as the novelty wears off.
When the changing business climate drives the digient manufacturer out of business, Ana takes her favorite mascot with her. Jax becomes the most important thing in her life. Jax is a social creature. The online community where he can interact is being left behind without the program upgrades he needs to live in new systems.
The other person at the company who cared as much as Ana was Derek, who took two digients home. When Derek’s marriage comes to a choice between his wife, Wendy, and the digients, Wendy is forced to move out.
The digients are an attempt to create artificial intelligence that falls short. The result are creatures of limited intelligence to be abandoned or exploited. Chiang has written a beautiful story of bittersweet love.
The Native Star, by M.K. Hobson, $7.99
Emily Edwards is struggling to make a living as the town witch in Lone Pine, Calif., in 1876. Customers are turning to the mail-order spells available from Baugh’s Patent Magicks. In desperation, Emily casts a love spell on the wealthiest man in town.
The town’s drunken prophet denounces Emily for using bad magic and also announces something has gone wrong at the mine. Emily goes off alone to check the mine. She is followed by Dreadlock Stanton. Stanton is an obnoxious Warlock from back East. He’s a member of a professional group of men who look down on the homespun nostrums of witches such as Emily.
The corpse switch at the mine has failed. Chinese zombie miners attack the two magicians and leave Emily with a large, blue jewel somehow embedded in her hand. This is a link to the source of magic in the Earth. Stanton will need the help of more-experienced warlocks to remove it. Emily and Stanton set out from Lone Pine to San Francisco and New York. When others learn of the jewel, they are pursued by men eager to sacrifice Emily to gain the power it represents.
A nasty byproduct of magic has been oozing to Earth’s surface. This has caused a surge in Aberrancies. Infected animals grow to enormous sizes and attack all in sight. These monsters are the stuff of pulp fiction. A young woman traveling on the train with Emily and Stanton has a bagful of such books and is able to spend countless hours retelling the stories.
Hobson calls her writing “bustlepunk.” She shows more of the culture of her fantasy version of America than the more gadget-oriented notion of steampunk. She does have gadgets and villains along with a love story in a very entertaining tale of the dangers a different kind of America faces from expansion and industrialized magic.
The Replacement, by Brenna Yovanoff, $17.99
The first novel by Denver author Brenna Yovanoff is a powerful story of teenage alienation that treads new ground between all the vampires and zombies.
In many ways, Mackie is a typical high school misfit. But for him it is more than a state of mind. He gets sick from blood or iron. A school blood drive leaves him unable to continue. Kissing a girl with a pierced tongue is out of the question.
There is a sickness in the small town of Gentry that no one will talk about. Underground creatures will steal human children and replace them with sickly rejects. Mackie is one of those replacements who has managed to survive.
His sister makes friends with an herbalist from underground who can give Mackie a treatment that lets him function. There is a price, of course, and Mackie gets drawn into this world of the living dead. This world is led by a pair of feuding sisters. The powerful one is ruthless and demands sacrifices from the humans of the town.
Mackie is attracted to the strangest girl at school. Her anti-social behavior increases when her baby sister is stolen and replaced with a dead creature from the underground. Mackie promises to do all he can to help, but he is also at the mercy of those who live under the slag heaps.
Fred Cleaver is a freelancer who writes regularly about new science fiction.
