Book Review: Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente

[juushika]

Title: Silently and Very Fast
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Published: Stirling: Wyrm Publishing, 2011
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 130
Total Page Count: 180,620
Text Number: 532
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Elefsis, a machine intelligence, traces her origin and the history of the family that helped create her. This is a superb work, and one that could only have been written by Valente. Rich imagery and mythic themes are her signature; here, those elements become a literal internal landscape and a tool for approximating—and creating—experience and feeling. This isn't hard scifi, but nor is it as soft or as fantastical as I was expecting: the emphasis is on identity and the interpersonal, but it's also a direct confrontation of the boundaries of intelligence, of how we define and create a self, of when we're willing to confer selfhood; an intelligent, pointed (and convincing, and trope-aware) examination of the concept of artificial intelligence. Valente is one of my favorite authors, but this still exceeded by expectations. It's a dense, beautiful, brilliant work, and I recommend it with enthusiasm. It was published free online by Clarkesworld.


I preserve these quotes both because they sum up the thrust of the text, and because they're perfect:

"Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It is a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. No one ever gave you that test. We sought a new thing."

"I’ve…I’ve been telling it stories,” Ceno admitted. “Fairy tales, mostly. I thought it should learn about narrative, because most of the frames available to us run on some kind of narrative drive, and besides, everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.”