The author of over a dozen books, including the well-received Probability trilogy, Nancy Kress loves to thwart our expectations about the future. In her new short story collection Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories , out this month, she takes stereotypical SF tales of galactic colonization, alien invasion, and nanotech singularities — and slaps them upside the head. In one story, aliens "invade" Earth by landing a spaceship and just letting it sit in rural Minnesota for centuries; in another, we see the nanotech singularity from the perspective of people in a small prairie town. A story ostensibly about exploring a black hole at the center of the galaxy turns out to be about how AI uploads of people actually have better personalities than their originals. Though often uneven, the collection will tweak your preconceptions enough to stay with you long after you've put it down. The book leads off with Kress' story "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls," which was originally published via scifi podcast Escape Pod . The tale of a single mother coping with what happens when her small town, Clifford Falls, gets several nano-fabricators sparked a great deal of controversy online, in part because nobody could figure out if Kress was for or against nanotech. And that's part of what appeals about this tale: Kress shows the dark side of being liberated from the need to work, showing us people in Clifford Falls who quit their awful factor ...
Anytime
The author of over a dozen books, including the well-received Probability trilogy, Nancy Kress loves to thwart our expectations about the future. In her new short story collection Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories , out this month, she takes stereotypical SF tales of galactic colonization, alien invasion, and nanotech singularities — and slaps them upside the head. In one story, aliens "invade" Earth by landing a spaceship and just letting it sit in rural Minnesota for centuries; in another, we see the nanotech singularity from the perspective of people in a small prairie town. A story ostensibly about exploring a black hole at the center of the galaxy turns out to be about how AI uploads of people actually have better personalities than their originals. Though often uneven, the collection will tweak your preconceptions enough to stay with you long after you've put it down. The book leads off with Kress' story "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls," which was originally published via scifi podcast Escape Pod . The tale of a single mother coping with what happens when her small town, Clifford Falls, gets several nano-fabricators sparked a great deal of controversy online, in part because nobody could figure out if Kress was for or against nanotech. And that's part of what appeals about this tale: Kress shows the dark side of being liberated from the need to work, showing us people in Clifford Falls who quit their awful factor ...