Download Your Copy Silently And Very Fast Fashioned By Catherynne M. Valente Produced In EPub
and Very Fast should be a part of our sitelinkShe Made Me Do It blog feature, because Catie practically forced me to read this novella, claiming that I would love it some begging was involved too and, what do you know, she was right.
This is not my first Valente work, but she astounded me again with her wild imagination, command of the language, and her ability to tackle, it seems, any genre.
Fairy tales, poetry, fantasy inspired by numerous cultures, and now science fiction!
In a world where something as horrid as sitelinkRobopocalypse gets all kinds of promo, praise and
monetary rewards, while offering nothing new on the subject it was written about AI, sitelinkSilently and Very Fast is a stunning revelation.
It is a scifi fairy tale about evolution of an artificial intelligence, and it is unique and beautiful and layered,
I don't think I even understood all the meaning and complexity of Valente's ideas nothing new here, this is my typical state after completing any of her works, but I surely enjoyed the ride.
What sitelinkCeridwen said in her review of Valente's Palimsest, can as well be applied to sitelinkSilently and Very Fast, this novella is more of an experience, rather than a straightforward, clear narrative.
sitelinkSilently and Very Fast is not everyone's kind of story god knows, I am not even into all of the author's works myself, many will find Valente's writing style florid, purple even, but I think she has a firm control of the words the uses to deliver her imagery and her vision, and those who are her fans and those who have an affection for vivid prose, will love it.
.stars. It is probably no coincidence that the night I finished Silently and Very Fast, I dreamed of riding a Trex and being high on exhilaration as we bounded through an empty main street of smalltown America.
Such a fantasy would be not only possible in Valente's virtual Interiors, but almost mundane in comparison to the other fantasies on offer, Inside their own spaces, people can choose to be whatever they want and experience whatever they can dream of, and perhaps even an AI can grow into consciousness,
This story, like all Valente stories, is sensual and sharpedged at the same time and steeped in mythology it both beckons further exploration and repulses with its amorality and unabashed fleshiness.
I wasn't sure where this was going for quite a ways in, but I kept reading for the sinuous language and promise of synthesis, and things began to mesh into a cohesive story.
More or less. I don't think you can expect everything to make sense with Valente,
The fluidity of reality within the Interior produces a lot of very surreal passages:
The surface of the table went slack and filled with earth, Roots slid out of it, shoots and green saplings, hard white fruits and golden lacy mushrooms and finally a great forest, reaching up out of the table to hang all the ceiling with nightleaves.
Glowworms and heavy, shadowy fruit hung down, each one glittering with a map of our coupled architecture, Ceno held up her arms, One by one, I detached leaves and sent them settling onto my girl, As they fell, they became butterflies broiling with ghostly chemical color signatures, nuzzling her face, covering her hands,
And there's plenty more where that came from, In summary: weirdest AI autobiography ever, Read if you like Catherynne Valente's writing and speculative fiction that lives up to its name, There's very little science here, by the way, and what there is serves as backdrop to explore sentience, artificial intelligence, and the line between human and machine, This is actually my second time reading this story and it's just as good this time as the first,
Let me back up, This Hugo winner for best novella a few years ago may not have taken the world by storm, but Valente herself has been taking a lot of us that way.
You know. Blown away.
She has a fantastic talent with words, always lyrical, rife with ideas, and most importantly, beautiful,
This particular story starts with a parable about Inanna and Ereshkigal and Tammuz and draws it right into a tale of raising an AI from humble house beginnings to childhood to adulthood, and far beyond.
It also seamlessly incorporates sleeping beauty, legends of many monomyths, and incorporates it into sexuality, mourning, and the nature of intelligence and how humans failed the Turing test, :
And believe it or not, Valente does this magically, It rolls off the page with such beauty and easy flow, we can hardly believe we're being riddled with myth, deep thought, and hardSF, We come away from it, FEELING something grand, :
Do I recommend this
HELL YEAH, It encapsulates everything highbrow, magical, poetical, and lovely, This is literature AS hardSF, : As I read more Speculative fiction, I'm increasingly blown away by the sheer amount of creativity and imagination on display, I knew going in, this was more on the experimental side of the genre, but I still wasn't prepared for how trippy it would be, At its core, it's the story of a machine learning, However, on the page it's layers of surreal dreamlike sequences that form a language between an A, I and humans.
I had a lot of admiration for Valente while reading this, but since I typically rate for enjoyment, my rating doesn't reflect my esteem ,
Recommendation: read this when you're craving something weird
gif artist Isabel Chiara I've been a Valente fan for a while now.
It started with a fantasy series mostly for younger readers, Since then, I've also read her take on women in refrigerators and the Eurovision Song Contest in space! and can honestly say that she is one of very few authors that can write about anything and everything and always make the stories their own.
Here, we get a program that grows to be an AI that then spends several lives being a child, lover, partner, parent, sibling, . . all facets of being human in the attempt to become human right until the tragic ending,
Some readers might get a little bit disoriented at first because we get the virtual reality a sort of dream state as well as the physical world we readers will identify with the most and they blend in the story as they do for the protagonist, but I didn't mind.
It was dreamy and a little bit psychedelic and surreal and wonderful,
The author combines mythology, science fiction, fantasy, modern spins on all kinds of fairy tales, . . all of this and more, . . plucking those elements apart and forming something unique out of them,
The story is deep and thoughtful and sad and uplifting and written in that beautiful language Valente is known for, It makes you think about so many psychological and philosophical topics, I'm flabberghasted once again, marvelling at her craft I shouldn't be because by now I know what this woman is capable of, but I am, Every time. hello gorgeous! i am amazed, such a tender story of an AI trying to grow up, such luminous prose, glowing pearls of prose, layers of myth and fable and parable and dreams and dreaming and dreamscapes and science like magic.
a tale retold in so many ways, characters like archetypes but real, so real! a child trying to grow up, parents who are brothers and sisters and lovers and children, such yearning! such emotion! such simple emotions, and such complexity, such brilliant clarity. an author perfectly in control of her talent, a weaving, a tapestry, an ancient story and a bright shiny new one, how many ways can a story be told and still feel fresh Valente seems to know all the ways, and all the words, and all the metaphors, and all the things my own robot mind wishes it could say, to put into words, to make sense of things like life and death and growing up and wanting to be more, so much more, but not knowing what that more really is, can be, could have been, can still be.
a tender and wistful dream of a story, it won the Hugo for Best Novella, welldeserved. a good recipe will taste rich and evocative of certain places, but will also be simple, it will focus on showcasing the ingredients, it will all come together in a beautiful kind of simplicity, i like to take my time with such a meal, but it's hard, so delicious! it looks so good and it is good for you too, Silently and Very Fast is an enriching and nourishing experience, warmth and kindness and sadness and a terrible wonderful ambiguity the sweet breath of life and a darker taste of the unknown, all the important things. beautiful, beautiful! the story makes me want to have AI children of my own, i sigh, a longing sigh but i'm not sure what i'm longing for, see what you do to me i can barely make my words make sense, i can't even get my sentences right, my metaphors straight, oh it doesn't matter, you are in me now,
sitelink
plus you can read it for free at:
sitelink com/valen .